20 Century claws onto hot director for ‘Wolverine’

Despite the Academy being smitten by it, I thought that Tsotsi (best foreign film of 06’) was a badly packaged, button-pushing, and a less impressive knock-off of the stunningly more powerful City of God. I’ll be a better judge of Oscar-winning director Gavin Hood’s talent once I get to see his upcoming thriller Rendition. New Line Cinema releases the film in October with a red carpet splash at the Toronto Film Festival – apparently it was one of the better scripts floating around before New Line got involved. Variety reports that Hood’s success streak has continued – some folks got to see his latest film a bit earlier, and 20th Century Fox have set the director has the helmer for the “part 4” of the X-Men franchise.  

Hood has two items working for him that might make this a comic-book movie worth seeing. One, Wolverine easily wins the popular vote for fav X-Men – and I’d take great pleasure in getting more Hugh Jackman screen time. The determining factor might be the script – David Benioff who might get some critical acclaim for the upcoming adaptation of The Kite Runner, and he definitely knew how to handle the complexities of Ed Norton’s character in The 25th Hour.   

Production officially begins in November for a most likely a late 2008 release scenario. The storyline for this new adventure in the X-Men family will see Wolverine’s origin – about how Logan emerged from a barbaric experiment as an indestructible mutant with retractable razor-sharp claws.