Jolie, Damon take up Shepherding
Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon are set to star in The Good Shepherd, the Robert De Niro-directed drama for Universal Pictures. The film is a sort of history of the CIA as seen through the eyes of a career agent (Damon) whose marriage is destroyed by the stress and difficulties of the job. Sounds a tad Bourne-ish to me, but Damon can certainly play a part like that. Could be interesting. Jolie has been tapped to play the wife. That is, after she finishes making A Moment in the World, a documentary she financed in which she sent 38 teams of cameramen and narrators to locations in the U.S. and throughout the world to capture events that occurred during the same random four-minute span. She is cutting the footage into an educational film for children about cultural diversity. I just really like how this woman thinks.
Douglas romances India
Michael Douglas is teaming up with Indian film producers to shoot a sequel his hit romantic-action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile. Douglas, 61, will produce and star in Racing the Monsoon, which will revolve around a diamond robbery in India. Aishwarya Rai, a successful Bollywood actress who is now trying to crack Hollywood, is likely to play the female lead. “This will be a Hollywood film, inspired by India, which will be shot here with a mostly Indian cast,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director of Percept, which will co-produce the film with privately owned Sahara One Motion Pictures. I think the same thing I said about Dennis Quaid could apply here. Why?
Whose Lucky now?
That would be Australian actor Eric Bana, who gets to star with Drew Barrymore in Lucky You, a comedy-drama set in the world of high-stakes professional poker. Barrymore is set to play a struggling singer who meets a professional poker player (Bana) as he deals with his estranged father (get it? “Deals?”) . Curtis Hanson (8 Mile) is directing the Warner Bros. project. While it is very cool to play poker these days, making a whole movie around the game may prove to be a bit dull. Anyone remember Rounders? My point exactly.
Latifah, Thompson, Ferrell are indeed Strangers
Now, this is an odd one. Queen Latifah and Emma Thompson are joining Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction, directed by Finding Neverland‘s Marc Forster. The premise, as it is, has Ferrell playing an obsessive/compulsive IRS auditor who begins to hear a voice that turns out to be an author who is writing a novel in which Ferrell is the ill-fated protagonist. Stay with me here. The auditor then heeds the narrator’s advice and turns his life around. But it turns out the author, who Thompson is in final negotiations to play, suffers from writer’s block, while Latifah would play the book-company employee whose job is to unblock writers. O.K., I’m a little confused. To top it off, indie gal Maggie Gyllenhaal also signed on this week to play Ferrell‘s unlikely love interest, a baker with anarchist leanings. Producer Lindsay Doran described it to the Hollywood Reporter as a “funny romantic drama.” “It has genres stacked up like airplanes over Chicago,” Doran said. “It’s fun to watch people’s reactions when the cast is coming together. When you get Will Ferrell, then you add Emma Thompson, then Queen Latifah on top of that and Maggie Gyllenhaal on top of that … you can see even from the cast how diverse the elements are in this movie…” Boy, she isn’t kidding.
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Quaid’s got Yours, Mine and Ours
Dennis Quaid, star of the recent Flight of the Phoenix remake, has signed on for another update. He will star in the family comedy Yours, Mine and Ours, which originally starred Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball in 1968. The story follows two single parents, one with 10 children and one with eight, who fall in love and elope but have to contend with the kids’ attempts to sabotage their union. It seems odd Quaid would want to remake such a silly movie, since he seems to be back on track with good films, such as In Good Company. But hey, could be the surprise hit comedy of the year. You never know.
Smith is in Pursuit of Happyness
Will Smith‘s originally untitled project based on the true-life rags-to-riches tale of an investment banker now has a title–Pursuit of Happyness. The Columbia Pictures project centers around Chris Gardner, who found himself homeless and jobless, living with his baby son in a bathroom at a San Francisco train station. Despite this rather major drawback, Gardner continues to fight toward his goal of becoming a broker, eventually landing a job as a trainee and rising up the ranks to become a partner in a Chicago-based minority brokerage. It’s the whole “baby son, living in a bathroom” part that’s really getting to me. Kleenex, please!
Tautou figures out the Code
French actress Audrey Tautou of Amelie fame has been chosen to play Tom Hanks‘ partner in cracking The Da Vinci Code in the film adaptation of the best-selling novel, the newspaper Le Parisien reported Saturday. Tautou is to play the role of Sophie Neveu, the investigator who helps Robert Langdon (Hanks), a symbologist, solve the murder of an elderly member of an ancient society that has protected dark secrets since the early years of Christianity. Oscar-winning director Ron Howard chose Tautou over several other celebrity actresses, including Sophie Marceau. The famed Louvre Museum has also agreed in principal to allow scenes to be shot there, Louvre director Henri Loyrette told the French newspaper. It is the murder of a Louvre curator that triggers the search for the so-called Da Vinci code, after all. Exciting stuff.
Until next week…
