Emily Mortimer, Tim Allen, Ricky Jay, David Paymer, Rebecca Pidgeon, Alice Braga, Joe Mantegna, Rodrigo Santoro and Jose Pablo Cantillo have all joined the cast of David Mamet's Redbelt. Yep - that Tim Allen. Good move, Tim.
Is anybody even the slightest bit surprised to see Jay, Pidgeon and Mantegna on the list?
A number of real fighters are also to appear: Randy Couture, John Machado, Danny Inosanto, Enson Inoue and Ray Mancini.
As detailed by InsertCredit, the Japanese advertising campaign for the latest Gyakuten Saiban game - Phoenix Wright to you and me - is really pretty nifty. They have made a ten minute courtroom drama for TV, ending on a cliff hanger. All of the clues will be given in the show, however, and viewers who think they've unravelled the case can log onto the game's official website and see how correct they were. I'm jealous - I love this kind of thing.
Not quite changing the subject, I saw Fracture and was actually really quite pleased. The script is really not half bad at all, and the cast are fun, fun, fun. The central twist that holds the plot together was quite predictable - what isn't after a lifetime wasted on David Mamet, Jonathan Creek and The Twilight Zone? - but one shot quite near the end of the film, of a cell phone being tossed onto a desk, alongside another cell phone (if you saw the film, you'll know what I mean) made me burst into a short but spontaneous round of applause. That two second shot was a tremendously elegant and lucid piece of storytelling and easily the best thing in the film. Superb.
Variety have spliied the beans regarding David Mamet's Redbelt, and it sounds delicious. Here's the summary as they posted it:
Redbelt stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a Jiu-Jitsu master who has eschewed prizefighting to operate a self-defense studio. When he is conned by a cabal of movie stars and fight promoters, he must enter the ring to fight in order to regain his honor.
David Mamet and 'conned by a cabal of movie stars' go together like cussing peas and tautly plotted carrots.
Variety assume Ricky Jay and Rebecca Pidgeon will be in the cast somehwere. Don't we all.
David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla is a book length extension of a rather brilliant piece he wrote for Harpers. Some of the more obviously quotable bits are being quoted, quite obviously, in the Daily Dish and Gossip column of the New York Daily News today. A quick, amusing trailer for what will be considerably less glib and superficial sounding should you read the entire book.
