"The Road" and "Blood Meridian" Coming to Movie Theaters

First, some interesting movie news. Variety is reporting that Charlize Theron is joining the cast of "The Road," an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel. Those who've read the novel may be surprised by this news, as I was, because McCarthy's novel follows a father and his young son as they trek across a post-apocalyptic landscape. There are hardly any other characters, and most of these are male. So where does Charlize fit in? In the book, there's one scene of flashback between the father and the mother that's very powerful. Charlize will play the absent mother. Though I haven't yet read the adaptation, the screenwriter has apparently expanded her role by creating multiple scenes of flashback. As of now, Viggo Mortensen will play the father, which sounds like very good casting to me. Looking behind the camera, the guy who directed the almost unbearably heavy "The Proposition" will direct. Hmm. I wonder if the people at Dimension (who's producing "The Road") happened to read this bit from a certain blog:

"The director [of "The Proposition"], John Hillcoat, allowed time for scenes of bad men contemplating sunsets and saying ponderous things about them. I saw shades of Terrence Malick (and by extension DDG) in this, but I also saw quite a bit of Cormac McCarthy, specifically his novel, "Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West". In that novel, McCarthy describes a band of killers engaging in a kind of genocide as they murder whole settlements of native peoples. These scenes of horror are punctuated with scenes around the campfire depicting the uniquely psychotic leader of the crew, Judge Holden, having Socratic dialogues with his awed and blood-stained compatriots. There is a bit of "the Judge" in Charlie Burns's older brother, Arthur, who quotes high-falutin' poetry and seems possessed of a sensitive soul even though he's buried it long since under the weight of his crimes, and I liked that Cave and Hillcoat made the effort here."

So then they up and give the dude "The Road" to direct. The influence of the Inanities is not to be underestimated.

Which actually brings me quite succinctly to this: i09, the new science-fiction blog from the people that brought us Gawker and Kotaku, reports (in this blog post) that Ridley Scott is all set to make Cormac McCarthy's aforementioned classic Western/horror novel "Blood Meridian." So Judge Holden himself will be coming to a theater near you. Who will they cast? Where will Ridley find a muscular seven-foot tall actor willing to shave or pluck every last bit of body hair? Barring the discovery of some beautiful freak wowing audiences at a dinner theater somewhere in the midwest, I guess they'll just have to cast someone we've all heard of and cheat him the way Darabont did with Michael Clark Duncan in "Green Mile." Should be interesting, and the fact that Ridley Scott will direct the film certainly ups its chances of being excellent by factors of ten.