Movie Cricket

When someone suggested a remake of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" a while back, it seemed like a bad idea. After all, why would you want to mess with one of the best Westerns ever made?

Casting John Travolta and Tom Cruise in the lead roles is an even worse idea.

That idea is making the rounds today, after Travolta made a comment (quoted on ContactMusic) that he and Cruise may be up for it.

"There was a rumor that we were gonna do that, and I said to Tom, 'It's not a terrible rumor, it's not a bad idea,' " Travolta said.

No, it's a very bad idea — not the least of which because the actors are too old. Paul Newman was 44 when "Butch Cassidy" was released, and Robert Redford was 33. Travolta is 55, Cruise is 47. 'Nuff said.

Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival is a great honor — but it may not pay back the costs of making your movie.

IndieWire's Peter Knegt crunched the box-office numbers of the narrative films that have won Sundance's top prize in the last decade. His list reveals that winning isn't everything.

The top jury winner of the last decade, Kenneth Lonergan's 2000 drama "You Can Count on Me," made just under $9.2 million in ticket sales. Coming in second: "American Splendor" (2003), at just over $6 million.

None of the other Grand Jury Prize winners made more than $3 million — and only three more ("Frozen River" in 2008, "Quinceañera" in 2006 , and "Girlfight," which tied for the prize in 2000) made more than $1 million.

Actually, make that four. "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" — which won the jury and audience honors at Sundance this year, then the audience award at Toronto — made $1.88 million on its opening weekend, according to Movie City News' Len Klady.

More amazingly, it did so on only 18 screens, for a per-screen average of over $104,000. That's essentially selling out every screening for all three days.

And "Precious," a prime contender for this year's Oscars, still hasn't opened in most of the country. (It opens Nov. 20 in Salt Lake City.)

"Precious" could eventually top the biggest moneymaker among Sundance U.S. Dramatic competition entries: Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite," which made $44.5 million.

It's not uncommon for a movie studio to delay or alter a film before release because of tragic news events — just think of the films, like "Zoolander," that removed images of the World Trade Center just after 9/11.

But what happens when a tragic event happens — as did Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas, as a gunman shot dozens of people, killing 13 — the day before a movie is set to be released that has an eerily similar scene?

SPOILER ALERT!

In "The Men Who Stare at Goats," opening today nationwide, there is a scene where a soldier in a secret unit is dosed with LSD — and then walks naked through the base's parade ground, shooting randomly.

In the scene, which is darkly comic in context, nobody is killed until the gunman shoots himself in the head. But the parallels to Thursday's tragedy at Fort Hood will make it impossible to laugh at that part of the movie.

Had "The Men Who Stare at Goats" been released next week, the distributor, Overture Films, might have rushed to edit out the scene and strike new copies for theaters. But the prints were already shipped, sitting in projection booths across America waiting to be threaded up for today's first matinees.

Overture might opt to cut the scene and send new prints later in the film's run (though that's an expensive proposition). Either way, a pretty funny movie, through a horrific coincidence of timing, just got a lot less funny.

Eight movies - count 'em, eight - opening in Salt Lake City today.

The big news is "Gentlemen Broncos," the latest from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-and-wife team from Salt Lake City who brought "Napoleon Dynamite" onto an unsuspecting world. This one's nearly as demented, and just as funny (for those of us who thought "Napoleon Dynamite" was funny). It stars Michael Angarano ("Sky High") as a home-schooled teen whose science-fiction novel is hijacked both by low-budget student filmmakers (Halley Feiffer and Hector Jimenez) and by a famous author (Jemaine Clement, from "Flight of the Conchords"). Clement is hilarious, but the scene-stealer is Sam Rockwell, playing two versions of the science-fiction story's hero in some deliciously cheesy re-enactments. (Read the Cricket's interview with the Hesses.)

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is nearly as funny, and has the benefit of being at least partly true. It centers on a naive reporter (Ewan McGregor) who meets a defense contractor (George Clooney) who claims to be a "supersoldier" — and proceeds to tell the reporter about a secret U.S. Army program involving psychic research, led by a wigged-out officer (Jeff Bridges). Comparisons to the Coen brothers are inevitable, thanks to Clooney's deadpan performance and Bridges' Lebowski-like character. The director here is Grant Heslov, an actor turned producer and screenwriter (usually working with Clooney, on "Good Night, And Good Luck," "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Leatherheads").

"The Fourth Kind" purports to be true, with its "based on the actual case studies" tagline and the mixture of actors' re-enactment and supposedly "real" video and audio. It's all a lot of hooey, and an irritating way for director-writer Olatunde Osunsanmi to dress up a standard alien-abduction story. Milla Jovovich stars.

There's yet another version of "A Christmas Carol" in theaters, this one backed by Disney's marketing muscle and directed by Robert Zemeckis — using the motion-capture computer animation that he's been enamored with lately (see "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf"). Jim Carrey provides the voices and motions of Ebenezer Scrooge at various ages, and of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. The Tribune's Vince Horiuchi was less than impressed.

The best of the art-house slate is "Coco Before Chanel," French director Anne Fontaine's biography of the early life of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, who went from saloon singer to kept woman to legendary fashion designer. Audrey Tautou ("Amelie," "The Da Vinci Code") captures Coco's flinty personality with a carefully modulated performance, which has a sense of minimalism that the "less is more" Chanel might have appreciated.

"Ong Bak 2: The Beginning" brings Thai martial-arts star Tony Jaa back to the screen — though the link to the first "Ong Bak" is tenuous at best. This time, Jaa portrays a young man, born to nobility but trained to fight by thieves, battling a warlord in 15th-century Thailand. (The first movie was set at the turn of the 20th century.) Plot and story don't matter much here, anyway, as Jaa (who co-directs and choreographed the action sequences) just piles on one outlandish fight scene after another.

Two more movies opening today weren't screened for critics: "The Box," directed by Richard Kelly ("Donnie Darko") and adapted from a Richard Matheson "Twilight Zone" story about a couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, pictured) who are offered $1 million if they press a button that will kill someone; and "Motherhood," a comedy (which played at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival) about a working mom (Uma Thurman) on a very stressful day.

Filmmaker Danny Boyle is going to follow up his Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire" by spending some time in Utah.

To be exact, 127 hours.

Daily Variety reports that Boyle and Fox Searchlight (which released "Slumdog") have announced plans to team up again, for "127 Hours," a movie depicting the harrowing ordeal of mountain climber Aron Ralston (pictured). The rest of the "Slumdog" team will also be involved: Producer Christian Colson is back, and writer Simon Beaufoy is in talks to write the screenplay.

For those who don't recall, Ralston was the mountaineer who was on a climb in Utah in May 2003, when his right forearm was pinned by a boulder for five days. He only survived — SPOILER ALERT! — by cutting his arm off and climbing a 65-foot sheer wall before finding help.

No word yet on who would play Ralston — a role that, like Tom Hanks in "Cast Away," require acting alone for most of the movie.