Maguire is being very, very Quiet
Spider-Man quits talking! Well, not exactly. The guy who plays Spidey, Tobey Maguire, is in negotiations to star in Quiet Type, a romantic comedy about an unassuming mute from a small town who moves to New York to pursue his dreams of conducting an orchestra. How sweet. Boring but sweet. Maguire would also produce the New Line project with Sideways producer Michael London. “It’s a light, magical fable about a man able to get along without speaking because he doesn’t need to, and what happens when he goes to the noisiest city on Earth, where everyone communicates by yelling and screaming,” London told the Hollywood Reporter. “Metaphorically, it’s about what it means to get by in a world with no voice when everyone has one; everyone feels at times like they don’t have a voice.” The special draw for Maguire is that the character remains mute throughout the film. Now, come on, it’s probably a lot harder than it looks for an actor to, you know, not talk. But that’s not all Maguire is doing. The actor is also set to star in Steven Soderbergh-helmed The Good German in which he plays a seemingly innocent soldier drawn into a murder mystery, filming in the fall. And of course, Spider-Man 3, scheduled for a summer 2007 release. Busy boy.
Lock and load!
Clive Owen is loading his guns for his next project, Shoot ‘Em Up, a hard-core action film. OK, that’s a really dumb title, isn’t it? What are we, 12-years-old? Ah, but then you get into what the film is about and it all changes. The story begins with a woman having a baby during a shootout. That’ll be intense, I’m sure. Then the man who delivers the baby, called simply Mr. Smith, is entrusted with protecting it from an army of gunmen. Why? I don’t know. That’s all the information that was given. But even with a lame title, it sounds intriguing. Guess Clive wants to distance himself from his Golden Globe-winning turn in the romantic drama Closer.
Robbins is Hot Stuff
Tim Robbins is in final negotiations to play a policeman serving in South Africa’s brutal apartheid era in Hot Stuff, a political thriller from director Phillip Noyce. What is with these titles? A story about South Africa’s apartheid called Hot Stuff? I hear “hot stuff” and I think about disco dancing in my velour pantsuit. But no, this is a fact-based drama about an ordinary man forced to resort to terror. Derek Luke (Antoine Fisher) plays Patrick Chamusso, the real life saboteur who was sentenced to 24 years imprisonment for his daring solo attacks against the apartheid regime. The screenplay was written by Shawn Slovo–the daughter of murdered anti-apartheid activist Ruth First and leading African National Congress figure, Joe Slovo–and is set to begin filming in August on location in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Mozambique, Swaziland and in the industrial zone and coal fields around Secunda, where the actual story took place. The writer’s relationship with her mother was the inspiration for her first screenplay, the exquisite A World Apart, starring Barbara Hershey. Dudes, this is some serious stuff. You have got to come up with a better title. Please.
And more on titles…
Here’s another weird one: Goat. It’s a film adaptation of Brad Land’s memoir of fraternity hazing, executive produced by wunderkind producer Scott Rudin and starring Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch. Initially published by Random House and excerpted in GQ magazine, the film chronicles Land’s experience as a psychologically shattered 19-year-old struggling to bounce back from a brutal attack. Yikes. This sure doesn’t sound like happy, Animal House playtime. OK, I’ll get behind Goat as a title. Fits the imagery.
Here, boy!
For all those zombie lovers out there, this one’s for you. Scottish comedian Billy Connolly is set to star in Fido, a horror comedy about a little boy (K’ Sun Ray) whose best friend is a 6-foot-tall domesticated zombie named Fido (Connolly). But when Fido eats the next-door neighbor, Mom and Dad hit the roof, and Timmy has to go to the ends of the earth to keep Fido a part of the family. Oh, now that’s just plain fun. The story is set in a quaint town, frozen in an idyllic world reminiscent of the 1950s. Carrie-Anne Moss plays the boy’s mother, while Dylan Baker plays his father. Tim Blake Nelson and Henry Czerny also star.
Faison is your Homie
Scrubs‘ Donald Faison is joining The Sopranos‘ Jamie-Lynn DiScala, ‘N Sync-er Joey Fatone and Whoopi Goldberg in the indie comedy Homie Spumoni. The story centers on Renato, a black man (Faison) raised as an Italian-American goombah and unaware that he is black. When his birth parents show up, he spurns his Italian family as well as his Jewish American Princess girlfriend and goes to his birth family’s home. There, he realizes he must learn to be comfortable in his own skin. Goldberg plays the birth mom, DiScala plays the girlfriend and Fatone is the Italian best friend. One word: Ugh.
Fast gets a new Furious director
Universal Pictures has tagged Taiwan-born Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) to direct The Fast and The Furious 3, a vehicle that has been modified in both cast and continent. The story focuses on an American drummed out of the U.S. because of his passion for street racing. He moves to Tokyo and soon learns about “drift racing,” where cars accelerate into turns and then spin out of them, leading to hairpin, hair-raising races around city blocks. The youth runs afoul of the top drift racer. Well, of course he does. None of the stars of the original two films, including Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, will return, however, making this a rare third installment of a hit franchise in which the only gross player is the producer, Neal Moritz. The studio is betting that the cars and the concept drive the franchise, not star power. Hmmm. We’ll see.
Until next week…
