Odds: "Donnie Darko" Sequel Star Threatens to Retroactively Ruin the First Film

By Alison Willmore on 06/05/2008

Larry Carroll at MTV talks with Briana Evigan, one of the stars of the non Richard Kelly-approved "Donnie Darko" sequel "S. Darko": "Calling the script 'very twisted,' the 21-year-old actress also said that 'S. Darko' will interact with the events of the original film, à la the 'Back to the Future' sequels. 'We just come back [in time] and change what happened in the first one.' "

Anne Thompson at Variety gets "the real dope" on the Paramount Vantage fold-in:

TRUE: So far, only three Paramount Vantage films have made any money: An Inconvenient Truth, which cost nothing to acquire, which was released in partnership with Participant Productions and won the doc Oscar; this year's best picture Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, a 50/50 worldwide co-production with Miramax Films, which took over its domestic release, and Son of Rambow, a worldwide acquisition which earned $8 million in the UK and $2 million here, for which Vantage did not wind up paying $7 million. Moore and Lesher insist that the other films, at the end of the accounting process, will either make a little, or lose a little. "The movie business is tough," says Lesher.

FALSE: There Will Be Blood lost tons of money. Let's call it, after a lengthy Oscar campaign, breakeven.

At Slate, Troy Patterson writes that "I Spy [the '60s TV series, not the recent film] represented pop culture's first (or, at the very least, boldest) attempt at entertaining a notion of racial equality on screen."

"Atonement" director Joe Wright talks David Lean with Louise Cohen at the Telegraph:

Lean was, as Andrei Tarkovsky put it, a "sculptor of time". He totally understood the use of time in relation to image and drama and sound. The moment that stands out is in Lawrence of Arabia when the match is blown out against the rising sun. It is a classic lesson in the dramatic potential of cutting from something very close up, to something extremely wide - juxtaposing the macro and the micro to tell a story.

The three-year-old Rome Film Festival's fate has been up in the air since the May election of right wing mayor Gianni Alemanno, who swore he'd downsize (or shut down) the festival, change the focus from Hollywood premieres to homegrown films and oust head Goffredo Bettini. The last he can now check off his list — Bettini's replacement is Gian Luigi Rondi, a critic and one-time acting director of the Venice Film Festival. Fun fact: Rondi's an old friend of Giulio Andreotti, the politician who's the subject of Paolo Sorrentino's not-so-flattering satirical portrait "Il Divo," which screened in competition at Cannes this year and won the jury award. [Via Variety]

[Photo: "Donnie Darko," Newmarket Films, 2001]

+ 'S. Darko' Star Briana Evigan Defends 'Donnie Darko' Sequel, Which Has Fans, Writer Of Original Flick Up In Arms (MTV)
+ Paramount Vantage Fallout (Variety)
+ I Spy a Progressive Racial Fantasy... (Slate)
+ David Lean, with his glamorous, beautiful worlds, is my hero (Telegraph)
+ Rondi to head Rome Film Festival (Variety)