.
--- Call Him Storm Man - Jai Courtney, fresh of
flashing his Nazi bits in
The Exception, has just signed on
to co-star in a remake of the 1976 Aussie classic family film
Storm Boy, which must be a classic in Australia and Australia alone because I've literally never heard of it. (And I know everything, of course.) It's about an old man (played in this remake by Geoffrey Rush) telling his grand-daughter of his youthful adventures along a remote coast where his father (Courtney) scurried them away after tragedy. Anyone seen
the original?
--- Behind The Chocolate Factory - A movie is being made about my beloved Roald Dahl, and honestly I have mixed feelings about that, because Dahl was a noted asshole, and I don't know if I need to actually see his assholery put up on screen. Especially as it relates to how horrible he was to his actress-wife Patricia Neal, which is what the movie's centering on.
Downton Abbey's
Hugh Bonneville is set to play Dahl; nobody's been cast as Neal yet. They are also casting someone to play Neal's co-star in
Hud, somebody named Paul Newman. ha good luck with that!
--- Deep In Dillahunt - This news is a little bit on the old side but we have to express our enthusiasm about it - the great hunky character actor Garett Dillahunt
joined the cast of Steve McQueen's upcoming
Widows movie! They worked together before on
12 Years a Slave. No word on who he's playing but I imagine the character will be shifty, since Garett does shifty so well.The movie stars Viola Davis and Colin Farrell and Liam Neeson and Elizabeth Debicki and oh my god give it to me right now.
--- Stranger By The Day - The sequel to
The Strangers, cleverly titled
The Strangers 2, is
set to start filming next month with nobody who had anything to do with the original film involved at all, which seems wise. I mean actor-wise I understand why, but I wish Bryan Bertino was coming back to direct. Instead directing is Johannes Roberts, whose "
Mandy Moore versus a shark" movie is out next month. The one definitely positive bit of news is the film will star the terrific and under-used Christina Hendricks; with this and that Brian De Palma thriller
we just told you about she's got a big year next year!
--- Twin Zest - I need to stop getting worked up about actors being doubled, via CG or twinned storytelling devices, because the only time anybody's ever used the technology the right way was that Funny or Die video where Dave Franco topped himself. Ewan McGregor's cannot currently be seen touching himself on
Fargo; Jake Gyllenhaal didn't bang Jake Gyllenhaal in
Enemy; Tom Hardy never sat on Tom Hardy's face in
Legend. What a waste. Anyway beautiful Boyd Holbrook
is going to star in Two/One, which is about two men who live when the other one sleeps, dreaming the life of the other, and "what would happen if they met." I doubt it will involve face fucking so who cares.
--- Black Lesbian Boo - Now this is the world I want to live in - Jason Blum, the currently very hot horror producer of Blumhouse (which has made everything from the
Paranormal Activity and
Insidious movies up through this year's big success story
Get Out)
has teamed up with dramatic indie darling director Dee Rees (she directed
Pariah and the upcoming film
Mudbound, which was a critical hit at Sundance) to make, as they describe it, a horror film "centered on the domestic lives of black lesbians in rural America." Apparently the two of them met at an event and hit it off - turns out she's a big horror fan and had this idea and he's letting her run with it. And
this is how great horror movies come to be, people. Take some chances on unexpected stories.
--- Humming For Alex - I'm always excited to see Alexander Skarsgard sign up to do a new project and willing to share the info, but the only thing grabbing me about
this new movie called The Hummingbird Project, which will star Alex and Jesse Eisenberg as "cousins who hope to make millions from a fiber-optic cable straight between Kansas and New Jersey" (sounds riveting!) is that they describe their two characters as " one the hustler, the other the brains" and GOSH I wonder who's playing which?
--- And Finally if I disappear for the next couple of hours you now know where I will be -
EW published an Oral History of John Waters' film
Serial Mom earlier this week that I am just now seeing (thx Mac) and clearly, clearly, I must go read it immediately. This is in celebration of
that blu-ray that just got released this week, which we told you about. Pussywillows!
.
