Sarah’s gone fishin’
Sarah Michelle Gellar will star in an arthouse film, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, based on the stories from Melissa Bank’s book. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the story follows a young New York book editor (Gellar) who always has defined herself by the type of man she can get. When she meets and ensnares the affections of an older, very powerful and extremely sophisticated man, she thinks her problems are solved when they’ve only just begun. OK, so the “hunting” and “fishing” aren’t meant to be taken literally. Gellar won’t be donning a hunter’s cap and galoshes and whipping a fly rod around. “She is really the character,” producer Deborah Del Prete told the Reporter about Gellar. “She is smart, bright and an intellectual. She really is like a New York girl: well-read, sexy and on top of her game. I also think it’s a role she hasn’t done before, and I think when actors try something new, that’s when you get the best performance.” Um, did you see Gellar in Cruel Intentions by any chance?
Lady Macbeth cometh
Every serious actress on the planet would love to say, “Out, damn spot!”–Lady Macbeth’s infamous line from William Shakespeare’s iniquitous tragedy Macbeth. I mean, the villainous woman, definitely one of Shakespeare’s best, is a dream role. She’s beautiful, dangerously manipulative and ultimately out of her ever-lovin’ mind, delivering one delicious soliloquy after another. What could be more fun? That’s probably what Oscar-winning Jennifer Connelly is thinking. She’s in negotiations to star with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the newest big-screen adaptation of the play, which revolves around a power-hungry captain who rises to power, with the help of his wife, to become the King of Scotland but gradually descends into madness. Good times. The film, however, is not being directed by the current king of Shakespeare adaptations, Kenneth Branagh. He’s busy adapting Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the moment. No, they’ve chosen actor/director Todd Louiso, who is more known for his quirky sidekick roles in films such as High Fidelity, Jerry Maguire, for the job. He made his directorial debut in 2002 with the interesting, albeit depressing, indie Love Liza, which ironically also starred Hoffman. Let’s see what Louiso can do with Macbeth.
Cuthbert goes into Captivity
After recently surviving the clutches of a madman armed with hot wax in House of Wax, Elisha Cuthbert is getting ready to be terrorized again. The Calgary-born actress has signed up with The Killing Fields director Roland Joffe to make the first Russian-American co-production, Captivity, playing a fashion model, who, along with a chauffeur, gets kidnapped and held in a tiny cellar by a serial killer. While the guy psychologically terrorizes them, the victims draw strength from their ordeal and end up falling in love. Oh, how sweet. Warms your heart right up.
Streep’s the Devil
Meryl Streep is set to sink her teeth into the fashionista comedy The Devil Wears Prada. Its based on Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling novel about a young woman who goes to New York to work for an all-powerful magazine editor named Miranda Priestly (Streep). Apparently, Weisberger wrote the book from experience after her stint as an assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Looks like a dream role for the Oscar-winning Streep, forked tongue and all. And she’ll join that prestigious list of evil on-screen bosses, which includes Sigourney Weaver‘s backstabbing boss in Working Girl and Dabney Coleman‘s chauvinistic pig in 9 to 5.
Clooney’s bright career in law
George Clooney will topline Michael Clayton, an indie legal thriller penned by and marking the helming debut of The Bourne Supremacy scribe Tony Gilroy. Clooney and Steven Soderbergh‘s Section Eight will also produce along with Samuels Media, Mirage Enterprises and Castle Rock Entertainment. In Clayton, Clooney will play an elite New York attorney known among his colleagues as “The Janitor” because for 15 years he’s worked behind the scenes to clean up his high-profile clients’ messy personal problems. The story takes place over the four worst days of his career. Hmmm, I wonder what happens.
Helen, baby, where you been?
Helen Hunt, last seen on the big screen in Woody Allen‘s 2001 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, will star in and make her feature directorial debut on Then She Found Me a drama that Hunt also adapted from an Elinor Lipman novel. Oh, so that’s what she’s been doing. Negotiations are also under way for Diane Keaton and Woody Harrelson to join her. “It is a story about betrayal and the surprising, funny and redemptive things that are borne out of that,” Hunt told Variety, who has been working on the script on and off for seven years. Hunt will play a Philadelphia schoolteacher hitting a midlife crisis. In quick succession, her husband leaves, her adoptive mother dies and her real one, an eccentric talk show host, materializes and turns her life upside down as she begins a courtship with the father (Harrelson) of one of her students. “Even though it uses the lens of betrayal as a theme, the ambition is for it to be a comedy even though the subjects are deep and fierce,” Hunt said. While screenwriting and feature directing are new to her, the Oscar and Emmy-winning actress also said that years of helping develop stories and directing episodes of the sitcom Mad About You served as “a kind of boot camp, the best possible way to go to film school.” We’ll take her word on that.
Until next week…
