Breaking Up The Backlog

Every week the Hollywood machine spits out a steady stream of gossip, rumors and revelations. We at FlickSided would love to report them all, but a few will inevitably slip by our radar. In an effort to remedy these oversights, here are a handful of stories we placed on the back burner until now.

• Viacom was shot down by a federal judge in its billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube. Leaving the legalize to the lawyers, the ruling basically states that service providers like YouTube must adhere to requests by copyright holders to remove copyrighted material. If the copyright holders don’t make a formal request, service providers are not responsible for pulling content from their sites. It’s a huge victory for the Internet community, but you gotta think media conglomerates such as Viacom and others will begin aggressively pursuing service providers to remove copyrighted works since it’s their only recourse. If so, it might be a lot tougher to watch those favorite scenes from your favorite movies.

• Turns out shiny mopey vampire Robert Pattinson might actually be related to Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula. Are we supposed to believe this hokum? Why don’t the brains behind The Twilight Saga just admit they trumped up this foolish little anecdote to drum up extra buzz for Eclipse, which opens next Friday, in case you hadn’t heard.

• Breck Eisner, who directed the surprisingly good Crazies remake, spent a lot of time this week talking about his planned Escape From New York retread. He thinks Timothy Olyphant would make a great Snake Plissken and is toying with the notion of not making New York City a walled-in prison as it was in the original flick. I have no real issue with Olyphant. He happens to be on my list of underrated actors and he’s certainly capable of kicking ass (see Deadwood, Justified). Although Eric Bana or Alexander Skarsgård might be better fits. As for not making the Big Apple a prison, WTF! The prison aspect is what made Escape unique. Removing it from the equation, even if it’s done for logical reasons, would be a huge mistake, in my humble opinion.

• I had a whole lotta fun last week lampooning Hugh Jackman’s robot boxing movie Real Steel. Comparing it to the classic kids game “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots” was too easy. Well, as stupid as it may sound, director Wolfgang Peterson (Troy) could be bringing the actual “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots” to the big screen. I’d like to say I’m surprised, but nothing in regard to remakes, adaptations and sequels surprises me anymore. After all, they’re making a movie based on “Battleship” for Pete’s sake.