Movie Minesweeper - The Smoking Ban Edition

- Christian Bale is hyping the next Batman film, and somewhat preemptively, the following one.

- Flooding has wrecked a location being used in the shoot of Baz Luhrmann's Australia and the schedule has needed some rapid rejigging as a result.

- Richard Roundtree has been cast in Speed Racer as Ben Burns, racing legend turned commentator.
- Joe Carnahan has posted a photoshopped LA picture to his blog, suggesting the look of White Jazz as well as how easy the retrostyling is going to be. Apparently. There's a special star cameo from Gorgeous George in the picture too.

- Rob Schmidt is to direct a feature film adapted from Stephen King's novel Insomnia. I like Schmidt a lot and I hope he can do a great job, something that can stand comparison to, say, Dark City.

- This infamous Cloverfield film - or whatever it ends up being called - is reportedly being directed by Matt Reeves. We already knew Drew Goddard is writing and J J Abrams producing - which gives us a 1-out-of-3 score, by my reckoning. I bet it isn't as good as Diary of the Dead.

- George Wolfe is directing Blood on the Leaves, while Jamie Foxx is to star and co-produce. The film is an adaptation of Jeffrey Stetson's novel about a conflicyed young attorney. He faces off with a black history professor accused of murderous vengeance against white men who were accused of committing racially motivated attrocities during the civil rights conflicts.

- The SciFi Channel's Tin Man has had it's first preview, and several details have been reported.

- Semi Chellas has been recruited to adapt Michelle Redmond's novel The Year of Fog into a screenplay. I'll place an early bet on Sarah Polley directing.

- Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael is directing From Within, a horror yarn about murderous mystery in a small Christian community. Yep - another one of those.

- TV vet Kevin Dowling has signed to (apparently) direct K-Ville, a New Orleans drama about which I know (or at least recall) little else.

- Jeffrey Wells has posted an audio recording of the entire Shock and Awe: New Wave Exploitation panel discussion from the LA Film Festival. Eli Roth, Jack Hill and Craig Brewer? How can you resist.

- As you probably suspected from the Sid Haig story last week, Rob Zombie's Halloween rehash has undergone some reshoots. What surprised me, a little at least, is how extensive these reshoots are: six new kills and an entirely remodelled finale.

- Latino Review are shamelessly hawking The Losers in the guise of a script review. They certainly seem to have some incredible contacts at Latino Review, but their script reviews make me feel ill. They seem to lap up anything as long as it is puerile, juvenile or adolescent and then forego any kind fo meaningful commentary or insight heap nauseating hyperbole all over the script instead. Every crappy comic book adaptation and toy tie-in is labelled 'dope', or 'the bomb'? Shameless.

- Jaime Lee Curtis is to play a human being in South of the Border.

- There's a Star Wars themed burlesque show coming to Dallas in which the performer dresses as Princess Leia in her metal bikini thing. I saw the link at TheForceDotNet.

- Hamas have killed off their Mickey Mouse lookalike. He died 'as a martyr' while 'protecting' his land from and Israeli 'terrorist'.

- The Simpsons' Jay Kogen is in talks to direct a straight-to-TV teen comedy film for MTV. The idea is to create modern equivalents to John Hughes' output, premiere them on the box and then push them to DVD - with even a theatrical release mentioned as a possibility. An incredibly remote possibilty, I imagine.