Movie News

Gossip is gossip is gossip when it comes to Hollywood news, but this little snippet caught my eye this morning which looks like it could be quite exciting. Preacher is an outstanding comic book series written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Steve Dillon, it's possibly my favourite ever comic-book series, and a movie version has been threatened for a long time.

The problem is that it's far too complex, far too fucked up and far too offensive to ever truly capture on screen - it features a corrupt god, an obese Allfather, a retarded messiah, sex investigators, vampires, beastiality, a suicide-deformed teenager (see below), gay angels, the Saint of Killers, a villain with a penis-shaped head and a cameo by Bill Hicks, to name but a few elements. And that's not mentioning the enormous and very bloody body count. Like I said, favourite ever comic book. For a while it looked like Tank Girl/Freddy's Dead director Rachel Talahay was going to make it, which was a bad move, and would star serial borefucker James Marsden. This was a very bad move.

Turns out, though, that HBO are on the cusp of making a mini-series out of it, using each issue as an episode. This is a very good idea, the only way you could come close to capturing the detail and subtext of Preacher is to follow the story very closely. The bad news is that Mark Steven Johnson - the piss-poor director behind Daredevil and Ghost Rider - is the man handling it. Yhen again, right now he's making all the right sounds:

"JOHNSON: I'm just trying to finish the pilot for Preacher at the moment. It's for HBO. It's VERY faithful to the comic, nearly exact. I think if it went, it would be one of the most amazing shows ever on television."

"I gave [HBO] the comics, and I said, 'Every issue is an hour. And it's exactly the book. ... I had my meeting yesterday, and Garth Ennis is on the phone, and we're all in the room, and Garth is like, 'You don't have to be so beholden to the comic.' And I'm like, 'No, no, no. It's got to be like the comic.' So that's what's so brilliant about it. It's just like, HBO, who else would do it but them? Nobody. ... HBO is just like, 'Bring it on.'"

Should I get excited? HBO make the best TV in the world, and if they're prepared to do justice to the comic by staying faithful, it could almost work. I dare not hope.



All the gotta do is cast it right now; Johnny Depp, Robert Carlyle, Cameron Diaz, Clint Eastwood, Patrick Stewart or nothing, thank you.