Soderburgh to make a rock-n-roll musical about Cleopatra??

Pass me the smelling salts:

Every generation gets the “Xanadu” it deserves, apparently. The director Steven Soderbergh, - whose body of work includes such coherence-challenging films as “Schizopolis,” “Kafka,” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” is planning to make a rock ‘n’ roll musical about Cleopatra, Variety reported. Mr. Soderbergh is believed to be courting Catherine Zeta-Jones to play the Egyptian queen, and Hugh Jackman to play her lover, the doomed Roman statesman Marc Antony. Oh, and did we mention he wants to make it in 3-D?

Comments

[Seth Christenfeld]

It's so wrong that it wraps all the way back around to right again.

[RVCBard]

*shrug* Angelina Jolie's played a Black woman before.

[/quip]

[RVCBard]

I can't believe I read Catherine Zeta-Jones as Angelina Jolie.

I'll go say 500 Hail Oprahs for the error of my ways.

[David]

Why this doesn't surprise me: Soderbergh is considered a genius in Hollywood, and whatever crap idea he has, they're ready to lap it up, at least as long as people keep going to see those "Ocean's" movies.

[isaac]

David,

A lot of directors have ridden the "one for them, one for me" train (that's called being good at business), and that Soderburgh is in the unique position of being a director under fifty with a restless imagination and literally nothing to prove. He can whip up a well made box office smash without even trying, he's won the Oscar for best director, he's the youngest winner of the top prize at Cannes, "Sex, Lies and Videotape" basically created the new indie movement, he's proven that he can take populist fare like "Out of Sight" and invest it with such artistry that it gains a kind of remarkable beauty and depth.

He can do great big postmodern cult film semiotic messes like Schizopolis and he can direct a perfect taut thriller like The Limey.

It's really kind of shocking how good he is given his protean nature. But he does have a restless streak within him that renders his body of work somewhat uneven. A remarkable thing about him though is that even when falls on his face (As he did critically and commercially with the criminally misunderstood and underrated The Good German) he just keeps going.

So yes, this project sounds like several terrible ideas put into one, but you never really know with Soderburgh. Oh, also, the NYTimes blogger gets one important point wrong: Ocean's 13 is relentlessly conherent, it's Ocean's 12 that's the postmodern lark.

[David]

Sorry Issac, but most of his films, even the "one's for him" don't do it for me. I did like The Limey, but that had more to do with Terence Stamp than Soderburgh.