Movie Minesweeper - The Variety And Hollywood Reporter Edition
Here's a run down of some stories that have popped in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter over the last day or so:
- Shane Ri... sorry, Guy Ritchie is doing it again. RocknRolla is an ensemble comedy set in London, hinging up a crooked land deal and some no-doubt silly gangster shenanigans. Joel Silver sense a quick buck and will produce the relatively cheap film under the Dark Castle umbrella.
- Maria Bello is to play Rachel Weisz's role in the next Mummy film. Clearly she wasn't as troubled by the criminally awful script.
- ThinkFilm are to release Paul Schrader's The Walker in North America. I bet they fudge the DVD release. So careless, rude and selfish - I think we should all boycott their every DVD from now until they replace all of their screwed-up titles for free.
- Five years after Kissing Jessica Stein made me roll my eyes back so far they almost ran down my throat, Jessica Westfeldt is returning with Ira and Abby. It played at the LA Film Fetsival last year and took this long to strike a distribution deal: either it's really original and hard to market or just not any good at all. Ahem.
- Psycho/Analysis is to film in Hungary later this year. Guess what? It's about the making of Pyscho. Groan.
- Tarantino is running a Spaghetti Western sidebar at this year's Venice Film Festival.
- Palm Pictures have picked up Marcelo Pineyro's The Method for US release. It was written by Mateo Gil, who previously scribbled for Alejandro Amenebar, co-writing Tesis, Open Your Eyes and The Sea Inside.
- Jane Bussmann's one woman show Bussmann's Holiday is to be a film, produced by Nira Park.
- Dan Mazer is to make a comedy about the Eurovision song contest. Will Wogan be in it?
- Mary Elizabeth Winstead is to dance in Make it Happen.
- Michael Scott's The Alchemyst is being adapted for the movies. It's no more the next Harry Potter than those Unfortunate Events were.
- Jan Cvitkovik's Gravehopping won the Critics Award at the LA South East European Film Festival. I wonder what would win South East Europe's LA Film Festival?
- Gary Cole, Jennifer Coolidge and Agnes Bruckner are all pretty darn good. They're also all in David Moreton's Say Hello to Stan Talmadge. Promising - but the film does sound a little too like Little Miss Sunshine for comfort.
