NEWS

This is one of those stories where you have to wonder whether there’s something more going on than first meets the eye. Moviefone has managed to uncover a legal complaint by a Michigan woman who is suing the distributor of the acclaimed movie Drive for false advertising.

Sarah Deming filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict (as well as the cinema where she saw the movie), claiming the trailer misled her into thinking it was an action movie along the lines of Fast & Furious. The fact a very brief bit of research would have told exactly what Drive was – as well that the trailer doesn’t make it look much like Fast & Furious – doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind. And even if it did, is it worth a lawsuit? Indeed her real problem seems to be that she’s so dim that she decided a film called Drive had to be like like Fast & Furious, and when it wasn’t she was upset. Her lawsuit says, “[The studio] promoted the film Drive as very similar to the Fast & Furious, or similar series of movies. Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film…having very little driving in the motion picture.”

However while mismarketing is the main substance of her suit, it appears it may be a pretext Deming has used to make a statement against what she perceives as anti-semitism in the movie. Another part of her companint says, “Drive was a motion picture that substantially contained extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against members of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith.” However seeing as it’s difficult to class the film as even vaguely anti-semitic (beyond Ron Perlman’s gangster being Jewish), God know what she was thinking here.

Sarah Deming is not only seeking to be reimbursed for the cost of her Drive ticket, but she is also seeking a ban on misleading movie trailers, and there’s also talk of turning it into a class action lawsuit. Maybe this one woman did just get to the end of her tether and launch a lawsuit that makes her look like an idiot, but I still can’t escape the feeling there’s more to this than meets the eye.

General movie news courtesy of Movie Muser

Hollywood is not renowned for leaving a respectful amount of time before jumping on the bones of a tragedy – indeed they seem to view it the opposite way to normal people. To most people the announcement a couple of days after Steve Jobs’ death that Sony is buying a biography of him so they can make a movie biopic seems like profiteering out of tragedy, however in the world of Hollywood it is seen as a compliment.

To execs it’s a mark of respect that someone is seen as noteworthy enough that it’s worth trying to be the first to make a movie about them (and there’s also the fact things get a lot easier after someone dies, as you can’t libel a dead person, so legally a death makes creating a biopic a lot easier).

Variety reports that Sony has puchased the upcoming biopic, Steven Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson, the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time Magazine. Mark Gordon will produce the adaptation, although it doesn’t seem that Sony has a writer attached to adapt the book at the moment.

Simon & Schuster will publish the book later this month, which was written based on two years worth of interviews with Steve Jobs. Aside from being Apple’s co-founder, Jobs also served as the CEO of Pixar Animation Studios and was a part owner of Walt Disney Studios.

General movie news courtesy of Movie Muser