Holding Out For a Hero? Here's one for the End of Ideas Hall of Fame: The '80s TV comedy The Greatest American Hero is being talked up for a feature-length film revival. Writer-producer Stephen Cannell and star William Katt tell the LAT it's just a matter of time before their series about a schoolteacher-turned-bumbling crimefighter returns for a new generation. "We have a script," Cannell warned. "We have a director. I'm in the middle of making the deal now for distribution. We have a bite now. It will happen. [...] I want all the 7-year-olds to be able to go and their parents will remember the show and want to share it with them." It it OK if we just point them to the DVD set and call it good? Please? [LAT]

Can we expect a film version of the life of Emperor Nasi Goreng to hit the big screen soon? Not quite. But Telstra have decided to approach funding bodies in order to get enough money to bring the tale of Daniel and Patrick, the father and son who appear in Telstra'a BigPond commercials, to cinemas everywhere.

No, really.

Telstra, one of the nation's biggest advertisers, plans to seek millions from taxpayers to make a film featuring the father-and-son characters from its BigPond "Rabbits" commercials.

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It would be too easy to say that Harrison Ford hit the Crystal Head Vodka a little hard before today's interview at the LA Times; how else to explain his eagerness to jump aboard Indiana Jones 5 so soon after the franchise's fourth installment? He's 66! George Lucas can't settle on a script! And Shia still has months of recovery ahead for his pinkie and balls. All signs but the dollar say "stop," but that's all the actor apparently needed to wax fantastic about the potential pouring forth everywhere from the box office to cereal aisles:

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I was reading the letters published in yesterday's Green Guide in The Age, and there seemed to be an overwhelming sense of disappointment over the Australian remake of the popular British program Top Gear. Having not seen much of the original show and not seeing any of Top Gear Australia, I'm in no position to judge (but hey, you are! Did you like it? Hate it? Let us know!), but I am fairly certain that bringing havoc to Melbourne's roads probably isn't the best way to win over potential viewers.

The boys from Top Gear Australia took to the swank streets of Melbourne yesterday morning for a spin in a tractor. Hosts Steve Pizzati and Warren Brown trundled along Chapel Street and Toorak Road to a chorus of honking horns from angry motorists banked up behind their $200,000 slow-moving farm machine.

Again, I don't watch either version of the program, so I cannot be sure if it is typical motoring show behaviour to hammer home the important concept that farm machines do not go as fast as normal automobiles and have no place on public roads.

And hey, what do Green Guide letter writers know anyway, other than how to sook? Because the ratings for the launch of Top Gear Australia were top gear indeed.

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Lost in Time, Like Tears in Rain: Yesterday, we brought you the news that the writing duo behind Eagle Eye had set their sights on Blade Runner 2 — and now, one half of that team is washing his hands of the project. Said screenwriter John Glenn to Slashfilm: "Travis [Wright] and I actually broke off as writing partners years ago - after the first draft of Eagle Eye. Due to previous commitments, I couldn't make the screening/Q&A last week -- so to be honest, I have no idea what Travis was talking about or why he brought up a project we were tooling with years ago, when we still wrote together...It never got too far off the ground because the movie is so perfect, so the more we thought about it, the more uneasy we became with the idea...My apologies to you and your readers for the confusion Travis created." [Slashfilm]

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The trades are alight with hellfire today as the End of Ideas train has derailed once again, exploding and settling a fine, acrid dust on the surfaces of morning lattes all over town. And as you sip yours, know that you're not hallucinating, despite what you've read: Sony really does plan a sequel to the late Chris Farley's non-essential Beverly Hills Ninja, summoning a script from the original film's screenwriter and conceiving it as the first mainstream American film to be shot entirely in South Korea. We're sure the nation is thrilled — more excited, anyhow, than it would be if it faced the prospect of a contemporary Snow White revision tentatively titled Georgia and the Seven Associates. Right. As in "lawyers":

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Lawsuits Waiting to Happen, Vol. MCXVIII: Now that it's been rid of Bob Shaye and his 500-thread-count sheets, New Line's bed these days seems a friendlier habitat for Mike De Luca. The studio's ex-production boss reportedly plans to exercise its genre mandate with The Thirteenth Room, a novel adaptation whose rights NL acquired Monday and which De Luca is looking to produce. Stop us if you've heard the logline before, though: "[The book] follows a man accused of brutally murdering his wife who is given a chance to save her by going back in time, in one-hour increments. He puts together clues to figure out not only who killed her but why." De Luca thinks the whole thing's pretty crafty. "It has a great cinematic structure that unfolds in reverse," he told Variety. Meanwhile, we're waiting for word on whether Christopher Nolan's lawyers plan to follow the hot new Watchmen/Disturbia model of suing De Luca after he's shot his unofficial Memento revision. It's not a trend we're fond of, but neither are remakes. Call it even. [Variety]

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We've been telling you about The End of Ideas for a while now, but generally in the context where otherwise upstanding individuals knowingly attach their names to remakes, rehashes, reimaginings and revisions whose very existence could threaten even a VMA attendee's faith in a benevolent God. (His close neighbours are starting to have their doubts, anyway.) But to think that a Dane Cook movie that even he has found reason to second-guess could in fact be a poorly rendered rip-off of a straight-to-video David Boreanaz exercise from a decade ago? Really, now — that's just unholy. Judge for yourself after the jump as we bring you the special-needs trailer for Cook's forthcoming My Best Friend's Girl and its 1997 counterpart for the forgotten rom-com Mr. Fix It. As an added bonus, find a dormant IMDB comment thread parsing the films' respective plots: "What a rip-off! I predict this movie will never be released..." Alas.

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Whatever your impressions of would-be bank robber and generally overrated fantasy maven Guillermo del Toro, his new long-term pact with Universal can't be the kind of thing that rouses too much confidence in his growth and versatility — even among fans. After his five-year commitment to The Hobbit, the filmmaker will reportedly return back to his Hellboy backers for four films in as many years. And if/when we ever write our book on the End of Ideas epidemic sweeping Hollywood, his unique stretch from this year's sequel Hellboy II to one of three remake possibilities in 2017 may be worth an entire chapter's worth of consideration:

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Poltergeist Enemy No. 1: After a forcefully (and surprisingly) angry appeal to God himself, late child star Heather O'Rourke is perched on the edge of her cloud bank today with an eye on Vadim Perelman, the director of self-serious melodrama including House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes who'll next helm MGM's planned remake of the 1982 horror/sci-fi classic Poltergeist. Production EVP Cale Boyter hours ago confirmed rumours that had been circulating since the weekend, issuing a statement saying: "We are excited to have Vadim direct Poltergeist, a title which already has a built-in movie-going audience. With his established track record, we look forward to having him lead the creative direction on this new character-based horror project that will utilise the original film as a jumping-off point." We, too, have contemplated higher, more fatal jumping-off points of our own at the thought of a remake. Still, our faith in young O'Rourke — who immortalised the original with her catchphrase "They're heeeere" before tragically passing away in 1988 — should, must win out in the end. Watch your arse, Perelman. [MGM]

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