Saturday, July 18, 2009

50 Cent Discusses New Jekyll & Hyde...

Not long ago, we got wind of one of the more head-scratching new projects of late--a "reimagining" of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, to star Forrest Whitaker and 50 Cent. But since May when the project was announced, it's been pretty much kept under wraps, until now.

On Friday, 50 Cent--a.k.a. the world's worst actor--finally broke the silence, talking to MTV about the movie and his role in it:

"It's gonna be intense. [Abel Ferrara] is an excellent director, so his creative ideas will definitely be an injective into what it's actually gonna turn out to be."

A free Vault of Horror T-shirt to anyone who can explain to me what that even means... Anyway, Ferrara, some of you may know, was the director of the controversial and acclaimed 1992 Harvel Keitel film Bad Lieutenant, and of course Whitaker is one of the finest actors of our time (if you haven't seen The Last King of Scotland yet, do so immediately). Mr. Cent, however, is just another rapper wannabe-actor littering our beloved genre with his presence. Sigh...

Fitty even acknowledged the running gag of no one being sure which actor was going to play which role. For the record, according the MC, he will be playing Mr. Hyde, and Whitaker will be Dr. Jekyll. Also, the film will be modernized to take place in the present day. Shooting is set to begin at the end of the summer.

John Barrymore. Fredric March. Spencer Tracy. Jack Palance. Michael Caine. John Malkovich. 50 Cent. "One of these things is not like the other..."

The sad thing is, this would have the potential to be quite excellent with Whitaker playing both Jekyll and Hyde, as every actor who has ever previously tackled the role has done. But with the stone-faced and marble-mouthed rapper stepping into the juicy part, its much more likely that this film will be an embarrassment than anything else. As someone who has been anxiously awaiting a new adaptation of Stevenson's novel, color me frustrated.

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In the grand tradition of Day of the Woman's "This Just In" posts, I had two random images I wanted to share with you tonight. They're from the fifth birthday party of my son Skeleton Jack (a.k.a. Wee-Sol). As most of you may have gathered from our vlog yesterday, Wee-Sol is a rabid Godzilla-phile like his old man, so it was no wonder that he chose Big G as the theme for his party!

Check out the boss cake, made using a high-res jpeg I snagged off the internet. Stop-n-Shop was able to scan the image and slap it on the cake in the form of delicious sugary goodness! What will they think of next?


Later on, it was Godzilla vs. A bunch of kids, as we strung up the pinata effigy of the radioactive monster in the backyard... OK, so Godzilla isn't blue. Yeah, it's just a random T-Rex pinata. Look, we did the best we could. They couldn't tell the diff anyway, the clueless little partygoers. Anyway, here's a shot of the lynched lizard, moments before I had to step in and decapitate him with a Swiffer handle...