The movie industry can be a forgiving one. SlashFilm is reporting (via Variety) that Roger Avary will be making his post-jail directorial debut with Airspace, a mile-high thriller in which John Cusack plays a charter pilot whose plane comes under attack from a heavily armed MiG fighter jet after he finds a mysterious briefcase in his aircraft. The movie is being described as “Duel in the sky,” a reference to Steven Spielberg’s nailbiter of a 1971 TV movie about a guy in a car being menaced by an insane dude in a semi. Avary’s other project is a film adaptation of the Castle Wolfenstein video games that Avary, who won an Oscar in 1994 for co-writing the Pulp Fiction screenplay with Quentin Tarantino, was slated to do before he ended up spending eight months in jail stemming from a 2008 DUI-related vehicular manslaughter conviction. Panorama Media and Samuel Hadida, who produced the 2006 Silent Hill film, which Avary wrote, will produce the Wolfenstein film.
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Legendary auteurs, they’re just like us! When iconic filmmaker Ingmar Bergman passed away in 2007, he left behind one of the greatest bodies of work known to cinema — and a vast, meticulously catalogued VHS collection, the subject of the upcoming Swedish documentary Bergman’s Video. Among his tapes, somewhere between the Bunuel and the Tarkovsky: Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, and The Blues Brothers, which at least partially explains the ghosts and Jake/Elwood-esque sibling dynamic in Fanny and Alexander. The dinosaurs, not so much. [Cineuropa via Movie City News]
The last time we saw John Cusack onscreen, he was turning back time in a hot tub. Now, Cusack returns to the multiplex to travel much deeper into the past — far beyond embarrassing ’80s ski suits and Rick Springfield singles and into the 1800s, where as Edgar Allan Poe, he helps search for a serial killer who uses Poe’s own gothic stories as inspiration for his murders. Take a look at the first eerie trailer for The Raven below.
Alice Eve (She’s Out of My League) joins Cusack as Poe’s first cousin and wife (!) Virginia Clemm Poe, who it appears, is buried alive as bait in this murder mystery from V for Vendetta director James McTeigue. It doesn’t look like Cusack will disappear in this role as the macabre American author but I would gladly watch John Cusack star as Cusack in any genre, even a period thriller which requires him to cry-scream things like “I’ll send you to hell!” while wearing a silk ascot.
VERDICT: Bring on the ravens, pendulums, pocket watches and premature burials.
To view the trailer in HD, head over to Apple.
[via Vulture]
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· Good news, Pushing Daisies fans: Lee Pace has scored an HBO drama project that you could be watching within the next year. The pilot, which will be directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, centers on a “New York family as seen through the eyes of a charismatic, self-destructive Broadway composer (played by Tony winner Eddie Redmayne).” Pace and Redmayne will star opposite Hope Davis, Frank Langella, Patti LuPone and as of yesterday, Law & Order alum Linus Roache. [EW]
Starz hits Party Down while it’s, um, canceled, NBC gives the gays some Today love, and more TV Bites after the jump.
· Starz is yanking Party Down off Netflix so that the series is no longer available to stream. (Fans can still rent the DVD’s via mail-order though.) [Clicker]
· After receiving hundreds of complaints, NBC has changed the rules of the Today show wedding contest so that gay couples are now eligible to compete. [THR]
· Congratulations to Emmy nomination record breakers Saturday Night Live and camera operator Hector Ramirez. SNL passed up ER’s previous record of 124 total nominations with 126 and Ramirez became the most Emmy-nominated individual with 60 total nods. [Deadline]
The cottage industry of quirky Bill Murray stories — the ones that have him attending a Halloween party in Williamsburg or sneaking up behind an unsuspecting man in Union Square and covering his eyes — seem almost too perfect to be true. It’s like Murray and Wes Anderson sat around on the set of Rushmore and decided to carefully curate the “Bill Murray” that exists today, forever flummoxing publicists, journalists and fans alike. But then, every once in a while, Murray says something in the press that makes you think that he is as legitimate as they come — that all the stories are probably true. For instance: Remember that time when Bill Murray completely blew off Josh Hartnett?
The latest issue of BlackBook contains a profile on Murray that recounts his past adventures — of the Union Square blindfolding, which was always rumored to end with Murray saying to his victim, “No one will ever believe you,” the actor suspiciously says, “Who would ever believe him?” — but it’s his celebrity encounters that provide much of the juice. Of Hartnett:
“This guy shakes my hand and says, ‘You worked on Lost in Translation with my [then] girlfriend. Was she as much trouble for you as she was for me?’ But Scarlett [Johansson] was 17 when I worked with her, so no, she wasn’t,” he says. “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I don’t know who the f*ck anyone is. I go through US Weekly, and it’s filled with reality stars I’ve never heard of. I don’t recognize anyone. People? Forget it.”
Bill Murray: He’s just like us. He also regales readers with a story about famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle — whose name he could not recall — which makes
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Megan Fox Finds a New Dictator in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Comedy
By admin on June 21, 2011
The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Fox and John C. Reilly will be making cameos in The Dictator, a comedy from Larry Charles. The film tells “the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”
Both Fox and Reilly’s roles are being kept under wraps by Paramount for now. The film, which also stars Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley and Jason Mantzoukas, is scheduled to hit theaters May 11, 2012.
· Megan Fox Joins Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘The Dictator’ (Exclusive) [THR]
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