Mike Fleming

French newspaper Le Figaro reported Marion Cotillard is set for Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. We’ll get some clarity today, but the move makes sense given that most everyone in that cast but Anne Hathaway (Catwoman) worked with Nolan on a previous film, including Christian Bale (The Prestige), and Cotillard’s Inception cohorts Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt…

While industry attention on the weekend was mostly on the BAFTA wins by Colin Firth and The King’s Speech, Javier Bardem won Best Actor for his Biutiful performance at the Goya Awards, Spain’s version of the Oscars. The King’s Speech won Best European Film but the big winner was Agusti Villaronga’s Black Bread, which won Best Picture and eight other awards. Bardem seems like a dark horse in this race, but it sure does seem like it’s Firth’s year…

Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Headhunters, the Morten Tyldum-directed adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s novel. Magnolia is likening it to another The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That is easy hype because of the geographical proximity to Sweden. But nobody in the movie business cared much about fiction that came from this region until Larsson, and it’s possible nobody will care about any of the work written by anyone but Larsson…

The New York State Department of Labor finally caught up to the critically vilified Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark over the weekend with two safety violations from past accidents, per The New York Times. Those had to do with well-reported and horrifying mishaps including a fall by Christopher Tierney that resulted in multiple fractures. The fact there have been no recent injury reports gives hope that all the scrutiny has been worth it. Spider-Man also couldn’t outrun its past on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live broadcast, which featured a commercial for an ambulance-chasing lawyer whose business is making claims for audience members and the cast of the musical. Cases ranged from the 6th actor to play Spider-Man who was catapulted out an open window and hit by a Broadway bus, to someone who “fall asleep so suddenly I hit my head on the seat in front of me,” to an artist who looked suspiciously like Bono, whose reputation has been “irreparably damaged by the show.” While the musical continues to get pounded (especially by the New York Post), imagine how boring and uneventful the Broadway season would be without Spidey?…

Below is the SNL parody commercial: