It looks like Black Mass is back on the development block with Jim Sheridan set to direct the story about the notorious Boston mobster and FBI informant Whitey Bulger.
Sheridan is known for tackling rough Irish-themed true-life subjects such as In the Name of the Father and The Boxer.
Sheridan will direct a script he and partner Nye Heron are writing based on “Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob,” a book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill.
According to Variety, the story is straight out of the mobster turf where Bulger rose to prominence in Boston as a feared enforcer and built the Winter Hill Gang into an enterprise that did everything from selling drugs to procuring guns for the Irish Republican Army. His rise was helped by John Connolly, a childhood pal who became an FBI agent. Bulger disappeared 14 years ago, creating a major law enforcement scandal.
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Is JJ Abrams the new king of Hollywood? A presence around TV and film for many years, he made his name creating Alias, and then went on to make the hugely successful Lost, with its vast viral marketing campaign (its inter-season online game The Lost Experience was even more complex and sprawling than the show itself). He followed this up with Cloverfield, another success due to the marketing, and the film’s low budget (which meant large profit). And, before his revamped Star Trek comes out, his latest creation, entitled Fringe, is a mystery TV series that starts airing in the US in September. But lucky for you we’ve managed to watch the first episode of the show, and post some thoughts.
The show starts with a shock, as the passengers of a plane are infected by a chemical that rapidly melts human flesh. The FBI are called in, and we follow agent liaison officer Agent Dunham. Hot on a trail, her partner and lover gets infected, and Dunham has to solve the case before she loses her love. She eventually tracks down a mad scientist, Dr. Bishop, and uses his son to get him out of the madhouse and into the lab. Already, the story stinks of another X-Files, but is it any more?
Its big advantage over The X-Files is its confined mythology. While The X-Files had an arc that ran throughout its entire series, that of an alien invasion, about half of each series comprised of diversions, following cases such as stretchy serial killers, possessed children, Bigfoots (Bigfeet?), etc, which often proved frustrating. Fringe, however, has linked all of its abnormalities into a single thread- that of terrorism seemingly generated by some evil corporation that is above federal powers. Read the rest of this entry »
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