CASTING COUCH
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Russell Crowe will join Leonardo DiCaprio in "Body of Lies," the William Monahan-scripted adaptation of the David Ignatius novel that Ridley Scott will direct for Warner Bros. Donald De Line and Scott are producing; pic shoots in the fall.
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Media Rights Capital has set Cameron Diaz to star in "The Box," a PG-13 horror film that will be directed by "Donnie Darko" helmer Richard Kelly. Kelly wrote the script based on a Richard Matheson short story. Production will begin in the fall.
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Ryan Gosling is set to star opposite Rachel Weisz in Peter Jackson's feature adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel "The Lovely Bones" for DreamWorks.
Jackson will begin lensing in October in Pennsylvania and New Zealand. Film will be distributed worldwide by Paramount. -
Dark Castle Entertainment has set Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and Idris Elba to star in "RocknRolla," the crime tale Guy Ritchie wrote and is directing. Production began June 19 in London. Joel Silver is producing with Ritchie, Steve Clark-Hall and Susan Downey. Warner Bros. will distribute.
Newsweek picks 5 breakthrough male stars of the summer
The summer movie season is hardly over but Newsweek has picked its 5 breakthrough male stars of the summer. The list is interesting for its lack of brawny male stars and some will debate its merit. At least it is amusing.
New Tom Cruise film stirs Nazi controversy
Two hot-button issues in Germany — the Nazi era and Scientology — are being pushed simultaneously by a new film in which Tom Cruise plays the country's most-famous anti-Hitler plotter, sparking controversy in Berlin.
Cruise, one of Scientology's best-known adherents, is to play Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg — the aristocratic army officer executed after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944 — in director Bryan Singer's new film "Valkyrie." The film's German co-producers say they were given permission to use the former German general staff headquarters in Berlin, where Stauffenberg worked and where he was executed, and that they plan a detailed, historically accurate treatment.
But word that a Scientologist would play Stauffenberg has rubbed some the wrong way. Germany's government considers Scientology a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people, and critics maintain that one of its adherents should not be playing one of the Nazi-era's few heroes.
(Source: Associated Press)
Bollywood fails to turn in 2007 profits
Star appeal, big budgets and swanky foreign locations have all failed to bring cheer to Bollywood, as the world's biggest film industry struggled to make a profit in the first half of 2007.
Most entertainment analysts agreed it was almost impossible for Bollywood to repeat the success of 2006 -- its best year ever -- but the failure to deliver even one blockbuster so far in 2007 has surprised all. While some films aimed at niche audiences made profits and a few others won only acclaim, the big-ticket Hindi-language films with top stars failed to set the cashbox jingling.
Analysts blamed weak scripts for the failures.
(Source: CNN)
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Director Brett Ratner to direct biopic of Hugh Hefner
Brett Ratner is set to direct "Playboy," the Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment film about the life of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. Brian Grazer is producing, and John Hoffman is writing the screenplay. Grazer optioned Hefner's life rights several years ago.
The producer's "8 Mile" scribe Scott Silver tried it as a musical, and Oliver Stone developed several drafts. Making a film of Hefner's long life as icon of the sexual revolution has proven difficult, but Ratner and Hoffman found a way to do it that pleased Grazer and the 81-year-old Hefner, who approved the take late last week in a meeting at the Playboy Mansion.
Ratner, who completed "Rush Hour 3" for an Aug. 10 release through New Line and has a rep as a playboy himself, knows much about the mag's history, though his mansion visit was his first. When Grazer made his original deal with Hefner, Ratner sent the producer his Playboy pinball machine, which sits outside Grazer's office at Imagine.
(Source: Variety)
Time Magazine’s film critic Richard Corliss salutes Roger Ebert on his birthday
We tend to take for granted any pleasure, however acute, that is offered to us regularly; the gift becomes routine. Only when it's removed do we realize how precious it was. And if, in some real-life Hollywood ending, the gift is restored, we can again savor the privilege, this time more acutely. Roger Ebert, who's 65 this week, began writing on movies 40 years ago, mainly as a critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but syndicated to some 200 newspapers. He's created a body of work — virtually all of it available on his handsome, helpful website — that is as broad, deep, reliable and rewarding as it is insanely prolific. I'll take a blind stab and say Roger has written more than 10,000 individual movie reviews, plus another 3,000 or so essays.
Many of these have been collected into his 40-plus books on film. But on this five-foot shelf there are also an Ebert novel, Behind the Phantom's Mask (begun as a weekly newspaper serial); a travel book, Perfect London Walk, written with Daniel Curley; The Computer Insectiary: A Field Guide to Viruses, Bugs, Worms, Trojan Horses, and Other Stuff That Will Eat Your Programs and Rot Your Brain, co-authored with John Kratz; and at least five other books to which Roger has penned introductions. There's no writer's block for this perpetual scribe; he's never missed a deadline. I'll bet that if Roger had written this tribute, he would have finished it in time for his actual birthday, which was Monday.
(Source: Time)
A thousand films to see before you die
Well over a century has passed since the Lumière brothers frightened the life out of Parisians with The Arrival of a Train at a Station, and well over a million titles have since been recorded - if the Internet Movie Database is anything to go by. Out of these million-plus movies, our team of experts has picked what we believe is the essential 1,000 movies - those that best sum up the dazzling achievement and variety of the movies. Over the next five days we are publishing the full 1,000, in alphabetical order.
(Source: The Guardian)
ACTOR PROFILE: Dennis Farina is still the toughest guy in the room
IT'S hard to imagine a better place to meet Dennis Farina than in New York's Friars Club. Its borscht belt clientele and social-club ambience is old school, like Farina himself. "A lot of them are in show business in one way or another," says Farina, surveying the wood-paneled room and its lunchtime customers, some of whom stop to say hello. "A lot of them are retired. Some guys run casinos in Vegas."
Farina fits right in, though he's wearing an orange shirt, which is at odds with the conservative suits and ties all around him. But he's nothing if not slick: He's got a pinkie ring, polished nails, a trim gray mustache, a full head of gray hair and a rough, ruddy complexion. He's the most colorful guy in a room full of colorful guys.
For years Hollywood has used Farina's off-screen qualities for on-screen duty as gangsters, cops and other assorted tough guys in such films as "Get Shorty" (1995) and "Out of Sight" (1998) and on television shows such as "Law & Order" (2004-06).
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
Director speaks about Robert Altman’s influence
"His influence is huge today," says Ryan Fleck, whose own mightily impressive debut feature, Half Nelson (released in April), bears the unmistakable Altman imprint. "Everyone I know loves his work." Of all Altman's films, Fleck picks out McCabe & Mrs Miller as his favourite. "It's perfect for me: perfect in its imperfections," he says.
McCabe, played by Warren Beatty, is a handsome, none-too-bright gambler who arrives in a frontier town and sets up a brothel with the help of Julie Christie's shrewd Cockney madame. A brace of slick city types turn up wanting to buy him out. When McCabe arrogantly turns them down, they are replaced by a band of heavies. As in all Altman's films, though, the story is not the main thing: McCabe & Mrs Miller is about the characters, the place - the remote American north-west as it sinks inexorably into winter - and the potent, oneiric atmosphere.
(Source: UK Telegraph)