Loaded Couch Potatoes

According to Fangoria.com, Stephen King’s Cell – once in development as a feature film by director Eli Roth — is now in the hands of producer/writer/director John Harrison, who intends to turn the property into a miniseries and pitch it to the networks.

Harrison has prior King-verse associations: he was the assistant director and composer for Creepshow, and directed that film’s sequel.  He also directed Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, which featured King’s “The Cat from Hell” in one segment.

Harrison’s other credits include writing and directing Dune for the Sci-Fi Channel, as well as writing its sequel, Children of Dune.

No deals for production or airing have been struck as yet.  Still, for fans of Cell, this is what I’d at least tentatively call good news.

Two new teaser posters for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds have been released.

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Talking to MTV Movies, director Eli Roth spoke recently about the short film he directed for Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming WW2 flick Inglourious Basterds.

Roth directed a short film called “Stolz der Nation (The Nation’s Pride)” that will appear during Basterds as a Nazi propaganda film.  The short apparently features quite a bit of over-the-top Reich-style shenanigans, which made even Roth think he might have gone too far.

The director quipped that the Nazi party is “going to make me their Sarah Palin,” joking that skinheads may be confused by how such a great movie could have been directed by a Jew.  “It’s going to throw off all the neo-Nazi’s,” he continued, speaking to a reporter who apparently doesn’t know that when you want to use the written word to indicate a plural form of the word “Nazi,” you don’t put an apostrophe between the “i” and “s.”  That actually indicates a possessive, which is clearly not what Roth was saying.

Maybe MTV Movies was just playing along with Tarantino’s intentional misspellings in the movie’s title.  Yeah.  Yeah, I’m sure that’s what they were doing.

In an exclusive at the MTV Movies blog, Eli Roth talked a bit about what audiences can expect from his next couple of films as a director.

Once finished with his co-starring role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Roth plans to direct two films: one a big-budget sci-fi film along the lines of Transformers and Cloverfield, the other a feature version of his “Thanksgiving” short (which was one of the fake trailers in Grindhouse).

While I’ve found Roth to be a frustrating, inconsistent director so far, I am THRILLED to hear about a feature version of “Thanksgiving.”  The short is absolutely inspired, and while it’s no safe bet that Roth could sustain that tone for an entire feature, I think it’s an experiment well worth undertaking.

As for the “big-budget” sci-fi film, I wonder if it could possibly be an adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell?  Roth was attached to that project a couple of years ago, but it fell apart around the time Hostel 2 opened.  It’s possible this could be a re-energizing of that project; the apocalyptic nature of King’s novel could certainly lend itself to a Cloverfieldesque flick.

Vanity Fair has a lovely set of pohots by Brigitte Lacombe from the set of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.  Head over to their site to check out the photos.

The highly-anticipated film is scheduled to be released this August.