Ron Howard to explore dark side of Mormon history, and more cheery stuff

I'm usually not one to get too excited for simple movie posters, but the movie fall is getting so close (at least in my sun-fried mind) that I can already envision it, and "Let the Right One In" director Tomas Alfredson's take on "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" is certainly one of the movies I'm most looking forward to for the rest of this year, so just wanted to share this. As you can see from the poster above, these will be some rather star-packed spy games when this opens hopefully wide enough to reach my little corner of the world Nov. 18.

And in the closest thing to fresh movie news in this post, Ron Howard, having lost his multi-layered production of "The Dark Tower," has now set his sights on Mormons, but not the cute, cuddly kind that won "South Park" masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone the top Tony.

Instead, Howard will team up with scribe Dustin Lance Black ("Milk" and Clint Eastwood's upcoming J. Edgar Hoover biopic) for a movie based on Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven." As many probably know, Krakauer is also the author of "Into the Wild," which Sean Penn turned into easily one of my favorite movies of the last five years or so.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" tells the story of a double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer continues on for an investigation of the Mormon faith as a whole. Heady stuff that, and should it happen to drop just as we might have a Mormon running for president? Stay tuned ...

And speaking of unsavory characters (behold the power of the segue!), Kevin Costner has already made it easy to hate him through the years, but it seems he'll take this to a whole new level with Quentin Tarantino's next movie, "Django Unchained."

Having read the script for this (which is uniformly excellent), I can confirm that the character he'll play, Ace Woody, stands out as the most vile person in a cast packed with them. Woody trains the mandingos who fight for the pleasure of Candyland ranch owner Calvin Candie, to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Which makes the only missing piece in Tarantino's sprawling "Southern" finding an actress to play Broomhilda, and with the truly great Kerry Washington up for this, things are rounding into shape in very good, if truly odd form (by the way, I've said it here many a time before, but "Night Catches Us," a '70s period piece of sorts set in Philly and starring Washington and Anthony Mackie, is a can't-miss video rental.)

But getting back to "Django Unchained," if you can get past the racial language that permeated the script and I have to assume will make it on screen, it's as witty as anything Tarantino has written and truly epic in scope too. The movie will tell the story of a German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) who teams up with a freed slave, Django (Jamie Foxx, bizarre), to take out slave owners and eventually work to free Django's wife, Broomhilda, who works at Candyland. Just picture how wild all that could be, and I think you'll agree that if he somehow pulls all this off, QT should deliver quite the movie present on Christmas day of 2012.

And all I have left after that today are a couple of videos that caught my eye this morning. Having just finished the U.K. run of "Torchwood" and watched the first Starz-produced installment of "Torchwood: Miracle Day," I just have a hankering for more witty and smart sci-fi. In recent memory, very few TV shows delivered that combo better than Joss Whedon's way-too-short-lived "Firefly," so here, courtesy of Sci Fi Wire, is a clip compiling their 25 best quotes from the series. Enjoy



And what better way to wrap things up on a Wednesday morning than with zombies being bludgeoned back to death? Like the zombies themselves, this wordless promo for the second season of "The Walking Dead" is probably a bit ripe by now, having premiered during Sunday's return of AMC's "Breaking Bad," but I like it, so enjoy, and keep an eye out for the show returning in October. Peace out.

When, if ever, will we get more "Mad Men"?

Not having heard any "Mad Men" news for a while, I just assumed that that was a good thing and that everyone had worked things out and the show would return for its fifth season by late summer as usual. Silly me ...

It seems that not even has production not started yet, as it usually does this time of year or very soon after, but creator Matthew Weiner is still negotiating a lucrative new contract with Lionsgate. Assuming that that will get done, and the two sides are apparently now very close, that still means production won't get going for a few weeks or so after that, meaning no "Mad Men" until at least the fall.

Nards. In the meantime, AMC will have a few potentially great things to fill the void. I'm really looking forward to the new series "The Killing," which has its two-hour premiere April 3. The show, based on a popular Danish TV show, will focus on the murder of a teenage girl in Seattle in its first season, and the widening net of possible suspects. It's been ages since I found a good police procedural, so here's hoping this is it.

And fans of "Breaking Bad" (of which I'm not one simply because even I can only watch so much television and, well, I just never got around to it) can look forward to new episodes in July or so, and then there's the return of "The Walking Dead" (of which I certainly am a big, big fan) for season two this fall. Still, no firm date yet for the return of "Mad Men"? Bring it on already!

The other thing that caught my eye this morning is that there will hopefully be another "Narnia" movie, though not the one many people may have been expecting.

I've always wondered why it's been such a difficult proposition for Walden Media and Fox to keep making these flicks. I know there's an innocence about them that's genuinely out of place in our often crass world (but that I love), but the movies consistently make money: "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" was made for $155 million and made $403 million worldwide, while No. 2, "Prince Caspian," was made for $225 million and brought in $419 million worldwide. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is still the most lucrative in the series, with a budget of $180 million and a worldwide take of $745 million.

Besides all that, there just good, really fun movies. "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" had the most problems of the three, but they've just gotten better, and I flat out adored "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader." And now, in a case of me burying the lead behind my own blathering on, comes word that the next movie in the series, assuming Walden gets Fox to sign, will be "The Magician's Nephew." Here's what Walden's Michael Flaherty had to say about it to The Christian Post:

"We are starting to talk to Fox and talk to the C.S. Lewis estate now about the Magician's Nephew being our next film. If we can all agree to move forward, then what we would do is find someone to write the script. So, it could still be a couple of years."

Here's hoping they work out the plans soon, because though I can't claim to remember all the details about all these books, I read them all as a kid, and loved them all. Here, for those of you like me who might need a refresher course on just what "The Magician's Nephew," an origins story for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," is all about, is the synopsis from Amazon:

When Digory and Polly are tricked by Digory’s peculiar Uncle Andrew into becoming part of an experiment, they set off on the adventure of a lifetime. What happens to the children when they touch Uncle Andrew’s magic rings is far beyond anything even the old magician could have imagined. Hurtled into the Wood between the Worlds, the children soon find that they can enter many worlds through the mysterious pools there. In one world they encounter the evil Queen Jadis, who wreaks havoc in the streets of London when she is accidentally brought back with them. When they finally manage to pull her out of London, unintentionally taking along Uncle Andrew and a coachman with his horse, they find themselves in what will come to be known as the land of Narnia.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the world needs more "Narnia" movies, but I certainly like it when they're around, so good news there. And with that, I'm off to the job that somehow still plays my bills. Peace out.