BOP Daily News
October 24, 2003
The spirit of BOP News lives on in
This is So Last Week,
our pop culture week-in-review,
presented in a pleasing quiz form.
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We know people have called Mel Gibson’s upcoming epic The Passion of Christ a lightning rod for controversy, but we never realized they meant it literally. Reports have surfaced that the actor playing Jesus in the film was struck by lightning while filming a scene. Jim Caviezel and the film’s assistant director, Jan Michelini, were both struck by the bolt from the blue while on location in a remote section of Italy. It was the second close encounter with lightning for the AD, who had previously been struck during filming in Matera, Italy. Neither man was hurt in either of the strikes. When your set gets two lightning strikes during filming, it’s got to make you wonder if maybe Someone up there wants to see some rewrites.
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Ouch. Just four weeks shy of production start, Disney has killed the Ben Affleck comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. The project would have had Affleck as a confirmed bachelor who is haunted by the ghosts of his past girlfriends (hence the clever title) while attending his younger brother's wedding. Although expected high production costs were the main reason cited for Disney pulling the plug, another contributing factor is reportedly Affleck’s increasingly tarnished star, a result of all the tabloid attention to his affair with J-Lo and the bodacious bomb that was Gigli. You know your career is in some serious trouble when a studio would rather risk the pay option in your pay-or-play deal than proceed with the film. This report comes on the heels of earlier rumblings that Paramount was considering dropping Affleck from its next Jack Ryan film. We’re thinking the backlash has become a cat-o’-nine-tails.
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Bringing to light a wrong that seriously needs to be redressed is a report that Michael Caine has never seen the abomination that was Jaws IV: The Revenge. The fourth film in the Jaws franchise, in which Caine starred, was considered at the time to be the worst film ever made. And although time has provided many, many another candidate for that title (see the item above, for instance), Jaws IV still remains solidly in the running. Regarding this gap in his viewing experience, Caine quipped, "I hear that it's awful. However, I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific." The actor also goes on to explain that he was making the transition from leading man to character actor, and “the scripts were getting crappy. I made the mistake of making a couple of them." And we made the mistake of watching them, so we think we’re at least entitled to a tour of the house they purchased.
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And in other Passion of Christ news - because it seems there’s always more Passion of Christ news - the film has finally found a US distributor. New Market Films has agreed to release the movie in America (Gibson’s Icon Productions has its own distribution networks in the UK and Australia), and the controversial epic is scheduled to debut on February 25, 2004, which by no coincidence is Ash Wednesday, the start of the Catholic religious observance of Lent. For our part, we can’t wait for the film to hit theatres. Not because we’re looking forward to seeing it; it’s just once it’s released, we know the time is nigh when we never have to hear about the film again.
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Few things strike terror in the hearts of spook-movie fans like the words “horror film” and “comic elements” in the same sentence. So it is with trepidation that we report on the upcoming MGM film Succubus, to be helmed by Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson. The film would center on a cult of the legendary female demons who have sex with men as they sleep. The succubi in this film would be supermodels who use their physical beauty to attract their victims and then use sex to steal the men's souls. Because nothing says comedy like supermodels stealing men’s souls.
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"Leave it to the Catholics to destroy existence."
Box Office Prophets offers quality, reliable news about the entertainment industry. BOP is also entertaining. To that end, please be advised that some content in this column is intended to be humorous and should not be considered factual.
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