Angry Puppy

It’s no secret that I have a minor fetish for over-exaggerated Welsh accents, from Dawn French’s Catherine Zeta Jones impersonation to Little Britain’s Myfanwy and Daffyd. Of course, now that we know there’s a rift in spacetime in Cardiff (thanks, Torchwood), I’m no longer the only gay who can’t get enough Cymric in my life. (See AfterElton’s recent interview with Gareth David-Lloyd, who plays Ianto Jones, for example.)

So, imagine my delight on reading about this low-impact, hobbitesque home in Wales. OK, so the doorways aren’t completely round, but I think this is about as close as you’re going to get to a livable Hobbit home.

The owner/architect/builder, though, draws no explicit connections to hobbits. According to the website:

“The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings”

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to get the right permits to build one of these in the East Village.

Via Popsucker

According to a recent interview, and certain lawsuits aside, there is still some uncertainty over del Toro’s participation in the film versions of The Hobbit.

“I wish it was definite, but it isn’t. It’s still in talks, there are still a lot of ‘T’s to cross and ‘I’s to dot. It’s certainly not certain yet…But, as far as I’m concerned, [if it was definite] I would be packed in ten seconds”.

He also says that he won’t be worried about the legal troubles between the Tolkien estate and New Line until he’s “on board” and that he would “absolutely” ask some of the LOTR cast to reprise their roles.

Good stuff.  So, let’s get all the paperwork signed, pay off the Tolkien estate and get this thing moving.

Via Empire Online

There are a couple of unfortunate lawsuits in the news right now.

Just as The Hobbit was headed smoothly toward two profitable (and most likely excellent) movies under the directorship of Guillermo del Toro, the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has sued New Line Cinema for over $150 million plus punitive damages, claiming that they didn’t get enough money from the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Fine.

How does this affect The Hobbit films? The estate also seeks the right to take other Tolkien works (The Hobbit included) elsewhere. I am sure the movie(s) will eventually be made, but if anyone other than New Line takes the helm, it will introduce delays and the chance that the finished product won’t have the same tone as the LOTR.

In other news, Fox has sued Warner Bros., seeking to halt plans to release a 2009 film version of Alan Moore’s (most definitely excellent) graphic novel Watchmen.

It’s the usual chain-of-ownership confusion, but in a nutshell, Fox believes that they have held the film rights since the late 80s and now want Warner Bros. to compensate them appropriately - or halt production.

Via /Film and SuperHeroHype

Lovecraft fans: The Cloverfield monster turned out to have nothing to do with Cthulhu. Of course, there’s  Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of “At the Mountains of Madness”, but that’s not until 2010, and he’s going to busy with hobbits for a while.

If you need your fix sooner, there’s another Cthulhu movie making the circuits, this one with Tori Spelling.  Snarky comments aside, she’s done a few things since 90210, and The House of Yes still excuses a lot.

Cthulhu will premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival in June and is based on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, which, incidentally, is also the basis of the Oblivion quest “Shadow over Hackdirt”. The 17-word synopsis is that “dude goes back to small town, dude discovers awful secret, dude discovers he’s part of awful secret.”

Screenwriter Grant Cogswell somehow saw something there that resonated with stories he’d heard from his gay friends, so in Cthulhu the protagonist has been turned into a gay professor at Cascadia University who has to return to his mother’s small town in Oregon to execute her will.

1. Um.  OK. Why not?
2. Has anyone else noticed that the Pacific Northwest is now the default spooky part of the country in movies? It seems like it always used to be Maine.
3. From the trailer, I can’t tell what the hell is supposed to be going on. Anyone?

Cthulhu Official Movie Site

The constellations are lining up for a couple of great hobbit movies.

In December, New Line and Peter Jackson settled their differences, and we learned that there would be not one, but two films made from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again with Jackson as producer. Yesterday we found out that Guillermo del Toro will be directing both films, to be released in 2010 and 2011.

Hold on, you say! Hellboy II: The Golden Army will be released in July. Shouldn’t del Toro be working on Hellboy III sometime in the next few years?

As recently as December, he is quoted as saying:

“The way Mike [Mignola] and I did approach this was, when we were told, ‘Think about something, if you want, for a sequel,’ we went away and said, ‘Let’s talk about it. Do we want to continue the story?’ We did the first one saying, ‘That’s it. It’s a self-concluding story.’ And I said, ‘Let’s come up with an arc that makes sense for us for the second and third movie.’”

However, earlier this month, i09 reported a rumor that del Toro was “definitely not doing Hellboy III“, leading some to speculate that he would be brought in for The Hobbit.

Sorry, Hellboy fans. It looks like Anung Un Rama’s loss will be Bilbo’s gain.