Variety reports 20th Century Fox is gearing up to launch production of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." With the casting of Benjamin Walker as the stake-toting 16th president, Fox hopes this pic will slay at the box office next summer. Based on a novel of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" follows the president from his early years, when his father reveals the existence of vampires, to his assasination by the vampire John Wilkes Booth. The novel received tepid reviews when released, but Fox thinks it can draw blood at the box office on the heels of an apparently insatiable appetite for all things vampire. But, really, Honest Abe turning back a Southern plot by vampires to kindle war and enslave a nation?
Peter Bogdanovich writes on his blog, Blogdanovich, that Jean Renoir's "The Southerner," one of five films the French director helmed in the United States, leaves you "miraculously healed and purified," which "only happens after a Renoir picture." Renoir is indeed one of the great directors of all time, and was Orson Welles' favorite. In the same piece, Bogdanovich recalls a conversation with Welles about John Ford and Howard Hawks, in which Welles sums it up: “Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry.” Bogdanovich continues on about the poetry of film, which Renoir offers in abundance. Read Bogdanovich's piece here.-- Mike Gillis
