Screenhead

George Clooney has taken on another project that made news at Cannes. Focus Features has set Clooney to star in A Very Private Gentleman, an adaptation of the Martin Booth novel to be directed by Anton Corbijn.

Rowan Joffe is scripting the film that begins shooting in Italy this fall.

Variety reports that story focuses on Clooney who plays an assassin who hides out in an idyllic Italian town before carrying out a final assignment. He resists his usual aversion to human interaction, and his friendships and romantic entanglements complicate his mission.

With maverick director Terry Gilliam parading around the Cannes Film Festival in order to shop around his apparently madcap film The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus (containing Heath Ledger’s last performance), there’s great news about his next project. It appears Gilliam has managed to buy back the rights of his script, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and is set to make it next year.

Anyone who has seen the documentary Lost in La Mancha will no doubt be whooping with joy. The documentary followed Gilliam’s first attempt to adapt the sprawling novel Don Quixote, and ended up capturing the series of misfortunes that eventually forced the producers to close down production. From the few moments of footage we’re treated to in the documentary, the film could have been Gilliam’s return to form.

Variety are reporting that Gilliam has teamed up with producer Jeremey Thomas (The Dreamers, Sexy Beast) and Hanway Films will deal with international distribution. Also, Gilliam has updated the plot and the film now follows a modern day film-maker who travels back to 17th Century Spain and becomes the sidekick of a delusional self-proclaimed knight. Gilliam is looking to cast Johnny Depp as the lead.  Fingers are crossed that the production will stay afloat this time.

Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, starring Song Kang-ho, is officially in competition at the 2009 Cannes International Film Festival.

Looking at these production stills, gives me a chill. It will be interesting to see how the film does at Cannes.

The story is about Sang-hyun, a priest who believes that life is precious, volunteers for a secret vaccine development project to help save lives from a deadly virus. But during the experiment, he is infected by the virus and dies. When some unidentified blood is transfused into him, he miraculously comes back to life, but the blood has turned him into a vampire. Sang-hyun is now conflicted between the carnal desire for blood and his faith, which forbids him to kill. But if he cannot survive without feasting on human blood, how can he get it without resorting to murder?

Returning home alive, Sang-hyun meets a childhood friend, Kang-woo, and his wife, Tae-ju, among a crowd of people asking for his blessing. Tae-ju’s mysterious appeal arouses yearnings in Sang-hyun he has never felt before, and she in turn is drawn to Sang-hyun and the desires previously oppressed by her weakly husband and hysterical mother-in-law. Sang-hyun falls in love with Tae-ju, enough to give up everything he is. He eventually throws off his priest’s robes and steps into her world, thirsting for all the sensual pleasures it has to offer.

Sang-hyun and Tae-ju’s love becomes more and more brazen and fearless. When Tae-ju finds out that Sang-hyun is a vampire, she backs away-but not for long. Eventually, Tae-ju seduces Sang-hyun into using his power to kill her husband. Although Sang-hyun wants desperately to avoid committing the sin, he ends up compromising his own principles and accepts Tae-ju’s request to kill Kang-woo…

Recognize these actors?  You bet.  That’s what will make this movie fun. Is that Johnny Cash in the soundtrack?

Vampire movies are all the bloody rage. Having seen a slumber for the past few years (possibly due to the awful Queen of the Damned, or Buffy and Angel overdosing us), the genre of sunlight-intolerant bloodsuckers is seeing a resurgence in the last year or so. The key player is Twilight, which transposes notions of abstainance upon a figure that traditionally represented a fear of sexuality, and its sequels are already confirmed. A remake of the Manga film Blood: The Last Vampire is in production. HBO series True Blood got great reviews and a commendable portion of the audience. Outside of the US the Norwegian film Let the Right One In received much acclaim and is already set to see a Hollywood remake. And now Korea is in on the resurgence.

Park Chan Wook is best known for the inventive and excellent thriller Old Boy, not to mention the other two parts of his Vengeance Trilogy. After making the minor I’m A Cyborg… the director is back on track with Thirst. It’s the atmospheric tale of a priest who gets turned into some sort of vampire creature as part of a botched experiment. The best vampire films are the ones who use it as a metaphor for some social or personal malaise. And this film seems to use the vampire figure to represent repressed religious feelings or a sense of doubt. The trailer is in Korean, but the visuals are strong enough to make Thirst seem like an intriguing tale. Thirst will appear in this month’s Cannes Film Festival, and should see a worldwide release later in the year.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro will open 41st edition of Directors’ Fortnight (May 14-24). Tetro is a drama of an Argentina-set family. The self-financed production stars Vincent Gallo as an exiled writer who’s visited in Buenos Aires by his estranged younger brother. Coppola plans to self-distribute the movie in the U.S. through his own American Zoetrope Releasing.

Vanity Fair spellchecks Inglourious Basterds, premiering at Cannes. You could call Quentin Tarantino’s latest film one of his best as he defies Hollywood. The story is set in Nazi-occupied France. Brigitte Lacombe of Vanity occupies the set of the film, starring Brad Pitt. In the May issue you will find a n exclusive scene from Tarantino’s script. Click on the picture of Pitt to view Lacombe pictures from the set. 

The Cannes Film Festival has selected Disney and Pixar’s Up as the first animated feature to ever open the six-decade strong film festival. It will also be the first 3D feature at the event.

Screening out of competition, the movie follows an old man who embarks on an adventure after tying thousands of balloons to his house and flying off to South America.

Up will premiere on May 13, two weeks ahead of its theatrical release on May 29.

Gomorrah won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has won other awards as well. It’s based on a true account of the mafia in Naples, Italy.

Just when you thought the tension had eased after the war of words between George Clooney and Charlton Heston, or Uwe Boll and everyone, the stage has been set for the battle between legendary actor/director Clint Eastwood, and legendary director Spike Lee.

It all started in Cannes this year, in which Spike Lee (who directed classics such as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X) was promoting the forthcoming WWII movie Miracle at St. Anna, concerning four African-American soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in Italy. On the subject, Lee criticised Eastwood’s two war film Letters from Iwo Jima, and Flags of Our Fathers, for not representing any of the African-American soldiers who fought in the battle of Iwo Jima. “It was a conscious decision [by Eastwood] not to have any black people”.

Eastwood responded in an interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, and he was not a happy camper. Eastwood said that Flags of Our Fathers was about the men who raised the flag for that iconic picture and that ” [the African-American contingent] didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.” Eastwood’s last words on the subject were “A guy like him should shut his face”.

Them’s fighting words, and Lee promptly responded to ABC News: “the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation [.....] come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there”. Lee denied that he suggested that the true story of Flags of our Fathers should be rewritten to feature an African-American character, and “It’s just that there’s not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that’s why I made that observation.”

Personally, I think the situation has been blown out of porportion. Lee has a certain point in that there are no black actors to be seen in Flags (Letters from Iwo Jima is told from the Japanese side), but would their inclusion as essentially extras in the background have made much of a difference? Lee was really making a statement on Hollywood’s depictions of WWII as inaccurate, but to be honest, what does he expect? You can’t get much further from the truth than Hollywood films. Which is why it will be very interesting to see how Miracle at St. Anna fares when it is released in September.