• Anne Hathaway will play Wizard of Oz star Judy Garland in a movie version of Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, a biography by Gerald Clarke. A few years ago, I would have said, “Well, she’s no Judy Davis” (who played the role sublimely in a recent TV movie about Garland, Me and My Shadows). But Hathaway is really impressing me with her choice of roles and obvious talent — and her recent turn at the Oscars where she sang the role of “Richard Nixon” proves she has the chops for the role.

• Robert Zemekis’ ImageMovers (and Disney) are negotiating for the film rights to The Stoneheart Trilogy, a series of young adult fantasy book by Charlie Fletcher. The books tell the story of a boy who enters a magical realm where statues come to life, inhabited by the souls of their sculptors. The film(s) will be CGI performance-catpure, like The Polar Express and Beowulf. Zemekis also has a CGI version of A Christmas Carol in the works starring Jim Carrey as Scrooge (and a bunch of other roles). The Back to the Future and Forrest Gump director’s commitment to performance-capture technology is interesting (and the reason why he founded ImageMovers), but he still has yet to make a movie using it that actually works as a film, IMHO; The Polar Express creeps me out (and not in a good or intended way).

• A man spent three years making Hogwart’s out of 600,000 matchsticks.

• An interesting interview with Narnia’s White Witch, Tilda Swilton, an actor who definitely marches to her own wonderful beat. “I’m probably a woman,” she says at one point. “I don’t know if I could ever really say that I was a girl — I was kind of a boy for a long time. I don’t know, who knows? It changes.” Later, she says, “I never choose roles. I always choose the people. This has to do with the habit that I formed very early in my career. It all begins with a conversation, the actual project comes out of it, and then we discuss what am I going to do in it. The role is always the least important.”

• Vanessa Redgrave joins Ridley’s Scott’s new Robin Hood film as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of King John. The movie also stars Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett.

• The Los Angeles Times has a weird piece about the collaboration between Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg on their highly anticipated 3-D motion capture film The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, coming in 2011. What makes the article so weird? Neither director is talking, so basically the Los Angeles Times is left with a lot more questions than answers.

• Ellen Degeneres will play Mother Nature in an upcoming untitled comedy from Walden Media, the creators of The Chronicles of Narnia films, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Nim’s Island, City of Ember, and The Dark is Rising. No details on the Mother Nature project, but what’s interesting is the whole slate of fantasy films that Walden currently has in the works, including The Lotus Caves, City of the Beasts, The Screwtape Letters, The White Giraffe, the next Narnia film, and many others. If they’re looking to corner the fantasy market, they may succeed!

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