It’s come to this: Hugh Jackman has found his Rollerball remake:

Despite the 2002 version of Rollerball‘s epic stupidity, I actually rather like it. It’s am amusing test of Jean Reno’s established reputation, and Naveen Andrews, Rebecca Romjin, and LL Cool J’s abilities to recover and continue with their careers; a sort of weird look at an emerging reality show culture (people in 2002 really thought 2005 was going to be bad); and it helped Chris Klein go away for a while:

I think it might be good for Hugh Jackman to take a break, induced by a hit in his marketability. He’s been in a fairly remarkable number of dreadful movies in recent years, and he works at a rapid clip, inflicting a lot of junk on all of us. He was marvelous in The Prestige, but that role doesn’t seem to have inspired him to anything better. It’s time he got punished for making stupid trash. He could use a failure, of the kind that makes people stop making excuses for him.

District 9 was one of my favorite movies of 2009, so I’m certainly excited to hear that Sharlto Copley and Neil Blomkamp are working together again on another science-fiction movie. Nobody knows anything about the plot, except that the movie is supposed to be set a long time in the future on a planet far, far away, and that Matt Damon might get involved which raises two questions for me. First, how will Blomkamp do at drawing historical parallels when he’s not working off a familiar, but fractured, backdrop like that of apartheid? And second, how will he do working with a major star, and how will Copley stand up against Damon? I thought Copley was remarkable in District 9, and I trust Blomkamp to write something good for him, but I have no sense of how he was against a more established cast in The A-Team.

If we’re working just from the title, though, I’m intrigued. Presumably Elysium is meant to be allusive. I’d be very curious to see a science-fiction take on the underworld of heroes, even if I have no idea what it would look like. We live in an age where heroes are just men, rather than something of a different ilk entirely, and when they die, like us, they stay dead. I’ll be curious to see if Blomkamp reaches back to past conceptions, or whether he comes up with an entirely different understanding of heroism entirely.

James Brooks spent $120 million on How Do You Know. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. That is a lot of money. No question the salaries involved are pricey, but let’s take a look at this trailer again:

These are pretty average-looking clothes and sets, with the exception of Nationals Park, which I have to imagine the Lerners let Brooks use nearly for free for the sheer, giddy fact of the dreadful Washington Nationals being in a major motion picture. To put this in perspective, you could have paid the estimated $50 million in major star salaries it took to make this picture and still have almost enough money left over to make The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you’d had the full $120 million, you could’ve make LXG with slightly more decent CGI and maybe even turned it into a plausible project. In other words, this is just absurdly excessive. I understand that movies are art, and I’m willing to accept that directors should get some latitude to put their art together if they can raise the money. But this ain’t Avatar, where James Cameron’s developing new technology that will move the genre forward even if the movie itself is a bit of a mess, or a huge ensemble picture. It’s just an apparently self-indulgent romantic comedy. And spending $120 million on that in a recession feels more than a little ridiculous.

I realized I forgot to set the next benchmark for Friday’s book club. Let’s get up to the section entitled “Lizard.” And if you didn’t check in on the first week’s discussion, I highly recommend reading your fellow readers’ contributions! There are dudes doing awesome feminist analysis of the characters! Discussions of technology and society! Comparisons to Pynchon and Gibson! Seriously, y’all rule!