Here are some bits that we missed from this past week’s news:

David Mamet is writing a screenplay about Anne Frank, based on The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1950’s play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, and Mamet’s own take on the material.

AMC has acquired the rights to Robert Kirkman’s popular and excellent zombie comic series The Walking Dead, with Frank Darabont slated to write, direct, and exec produce the potential series. Yowza, AMC could be giving HBO a run for its money in terms of quality TV programming.

The big-screen adaptation of Marvel’s The Sub-Mariner is apparently still in the works, though it hasn’t moved out of the early stages at this point. Universal owns the rights and has Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow attached to direct, who said they’re still working on getting the script right. Check out Collider for more info and the video interview with Mostow.

Warner Bros. will be making a live-action/CGI Lego movie that “centers on the subject of childlike imaginations and examines themes of creativity and teamwork in the manner of Toy Story.” Seriously, this toy-craze has got to stop.

Oh, by the way, Variety officially confirmed Bryan Singer’s attachment to the Battlestar Galactica big-screen adaptation that HitFix broke earlier this week (our report on it is here).

A bunch of character design concept images have surfaced online for I, Frankenstein, the Kevin Grevioux-scripted (based on his comic), Patrick Tatopoulos-directed re-imagining that casts Frankenstein’s monster as a hard-boiled PI and pits him against Dracula, a crime kingpin. If the Shelley-meets-Chandler mash-up gets you all sorts of excited, you’re not alone. Check out the images below via IESB.net, ShockTillYouDrop, AICN, and Bloody-Disgusting (click each one for the full image):

Also, Bloody-Disgusting has worked their tail off to confirm that Robert Downey, Jr. is in talks to take on the character of Lestat du Lioncort (previously played by Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire and Stuart Townsend in Queen of the Damned) for the reboot of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. Check out their article for all the bloody details.

Alison Pill has replaced Ellen Page in Jack & Diane, the story of two teenage girls who fall in love but struggle against the mounting tides keeping them apart, including the fact that one of them is turning into a werewolf. Olivia Thirlby remains attached. I remain intrigued. [AfterEllen via /film]

And finally, ComingSoon.net has some spy photos from the set of The Losers. The shots show Idris Elba and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Roque and Clay, respectively. Click the photo below to see the whole gallery:

THR reports that The Wire’s  Stringer Bell, Idris Elba, and Star Trek’s Uhura, Zoe Saldana, are in negotiations to join Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the big screen adaptation of the DC/Vertigo Comics title The Losers.

The comic follows a special ops group that is betrayed by their CIA handler Max and left for dead. Eager for revenge and the opportunity to remove their names from a CIA “death-list,” the rag-tag members team up to wage their own private war against the CIA and their interests.

Elba would play Roque, the ruthlessly money-driven second-in-command, easily recognizable by the long vertical scar running down his face. Saldana would play Aisha, a cold-blooded loose cannon who was raised as a child soldier fighting in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Dean Morgan would presumably play the leader of The Losers, Clay.

It’ll be fun to see Saldana take on the wild-side role of Aisha, as her characters tend to be more on the buttoned-down side. And, let’s be honest, Elba is watchable is pretty much anything. Peter Berg and Zodiac scribe James Vanderbilt worked on the script, so the only question mark here is director Sylvain White, whose most notable work to date is… Stomp the Yard? Hm, guess we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

Check out the full Hollywood Reporter article here.

Check out the trailer for Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s next film, Taking Woodstock. The film is based on the book of the same name by Elliot Tiber, and tells how Tiber played a small but pivotal role in helping 1969’s Woodstock become the legendary event it is today. Here’s a plot synopsis:

Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village during culturally and politically exciting times, Mr. Tiber felt empowered by the gay-rights movement. But he was also still staked to the family business – a Catskills motel. As its part-time manager, he had become the local town’s issuer of event permits, granting himself one annually for a small music festival. When he heard that the planned Woodstock concert had had its own permit denied by a neighboring town, he called to offer his own. Soon half a million people were on their way to Mr. Tiber’s neighbor’s farm in White Lake, New York, and Mr. Tiber found himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and American culture, forever.

It’ll be interesting to see Lee tackle some comedic material again, as he hasn’t really flirted with the genre since his earlier (and excellent) films. The movie stars Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Paul Dano, Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kelli Garner, Eugene Levy, and Imelda Staunton. It’s set to hit theaters this summer on August 14, 2009.

How do you adapt “Watchmen,” not one of, but THE most celebrated graphic novel ever written, with a small but fiercely loyal fanbase ready to tear you to bits at the slightest miscue? Cautiously, and with extreme reverence, is the answer director Zack Snyder has for us.

Watchmen is, if nothing else, faithful to its source material. Frames were lifted directly from the comic and re-composed in painstaking detail in the film. Snyder even encouraged his actors to carry copies of the graphic novel around on set, so that they could re-write dialogue on the fly to better match the source material. And it is in this act of utter devotion to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original work that Watchmen the film finds both its success and creates its weakness.

As with many a longtime fan of the graphic novel, I found myself increasingly nervous in the hours directly preceding the screening. “Please,” I thought, “don’t let them have fucked this up.” It is a notable feat in itself then, that about 30 minutes into the movie I was able to breath a sigh of relief as everything seemed to be at least on the right track, and finally just sit back and enjoy the experience.

And what an experience. So much was cut out of the final film, but so much still made it in – and for that, I am thankful. It is with deft writing and direction that the filmmakers are able to keep us on track in the tangled and complex narrative of Watchmen, and even more impressive that there is still enough violence, action, and sex (it earns its R-rating) to keep even the baser audiences entertained. Watchmen succeeds in having all the flash and panache of a summer blockbuster while still retaining its dense and foreboding plot.

I was worried that the multitude of characters would make it difficult for audiences to find someone to get behind, but they all work. Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan shine especially bright as masked heroes Rorschach and The Comedian, respectively. There is an inherently despicable side to the “heroes,” but both Haley and Morgan are able to find the sinister charm that made both characters ultimately so relatable, if not endearing, in the comic.

But Watchmen is not without its flaws. Its biggest mitigating factor is that, when all is said and done, this is about as close and good an adaptation to the original graphic novel as I could imagine in a sub-3 hour format. However, at certain points the faithfulness proves problematic. Many snippets of dialogue lifted from the text, for example, just don’t play well in the film. Certain things work when translated from a written format; a bit of Watchmen’s dialogue (particularly Rorschach’s occasionally overwrought voice-over narration) certainly does not.

And though everything’s been adapted as loyally as possible, all the visual homages and textual similarities simply can’t translate into the same richness of Moore’s original. Watchmen’s got the right look and feel, but it feels emptier and a little impotent. The themes are what suffer most, as we pretty much entirely lose the scrutiny of superhero dynamics that was the original comic’s intent. The gravity and enormity of a real-life World War III comes off a little staged in the movie version, and the social anxiety of impending doom doesn’t resonate with the same power that it did in the original text. In short, the movie feels more like the traditional comic book plotting that Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” sought to deconstruct.

Still, Watchmen succeeds in more places than it fails, and even the much-blogged about change to its climax is forgivable, as it doesn’t change the consequences. In a way, the new climax works better in this version of Watchmen, especially considering the time constraints. Things are tidied up rather suddenly and considerably neater than in the book, but again, it works for the movie.

Honestly, I have no idea how the uninitiated audience will digest this movie. I’m not sure if the film will be able to navigate them through its narrative twists and turns, or if certain developments that fans knew to expect will instead take the unread masses out of the movie. I can’t say that it will work for them the way it did for me.

But at the end of the day, they finally made Watchmen, and it doesn’t suck. Snyder has done just about as good a job as we could have expected from anybody, and unquestionably fared better than most. The film is entertaining and captivating, even if its slick and stylish facade cannot reach as deep as its literary basis. Like a particularly inspired cover song, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen can, if nothing else, serve as a wonderful but condensed introduction to the graphic novel.