Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Monsters Calling

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I wasn't nearly as bowled over by Juan Antonio Bayona's 2007 ghost movie The Orphanage as everybody else seemed to be - it was a fine little thing with a few fine scares but you'd have thought it reinvented the scare-wheel the way some people behaved. Much to my surprise I much preferred Bayona's next film, the tsunami drama The Impossible, which to my mind managed ten times the harrowing horror that his lil' bag-head did. 

Anyway Bayona's got some cool stuff on his plate - I didn't know he was directing episodes of Sam Mendes' upcoming horror show The Extraordinary League of Gentlemen Penny Dreadful, which I'm super excited about in the wake of its most recent very effective trailer. And I must have also missed the news that Bayona was hired to film the second World War Z movie; Marc Forster directed the first one, which shocked everybody by not completely sucking. I like that Bayona's got the sequel though; as I said he proved himself with mass destruction once already. This time plus zombies!

That's all my rambling lead-up to the new news, which is the World War Z sequel is still a ways off from happening so before he gets to that Bayona's just signed on to make something called A Monster Calls. What's A Monster Calls? It's an adaptation of a kid's book by writer Patrick Ness. Who's Patrick Ness? Patrick Ness is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, which rules. We've written about Chaos Walking a few times here before because no less than Charlie fucking Kaufman has supposedly been working on adapting those books into a series of films; we haven't heard anything about the status of that though since September, when Robert Zemeckis was talking about making them. Zemeckis isn't do that anytime soon though since he's now working on turning the doc Man On Wire into a fiction film with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. So who knows.

Anyway I have not read A Monster Calls yet, but it's on my list. Any of y'all read it? Like I said it is a kid's book, but it sounds like pretty creepy in its synopsis on Amazon. Ness himself apparently wrote the script that Bayona's signed on to direct; a script that got placed on The Black List last year. So fingers crossed for spooky stuff!
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