OpeningShots - film news

Film Comment, March, 2001

POLYGLOTTING

On the transnational front, Thomas Vinterberg is ditching DV for 35mm with the English-language It's All About Love. Though the story is principally set in New York, shooting will take place in Sweden and Denmark. Set to star genuine Young Hollywood types Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix, the apocalyptic/futuristic story is about a world-famous ice skater and her husband on the brink of a divorce. Armageddon ... on ice!

Perhaps moving things in the wrong direction, Ang Lee is in talks to direct a live-action version of The Incredible Hulk. Meanwhile, Wong Kar-wai's Aquaman project is languishing in development.

BRINGING MORE

Director of Bring It On, one of last year's most welcome surprises, Peyton Reed is quite busy following the film's unexpected success. "When people showed up to the theater I had to readjust. I think we benefited from low expectations." He's currently working on a TV pilot, Bad Haircut, written by Election novelist Tom Perrotta, and has a number of other film projects in development. Down With Love, written by newcomers Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, is described as a Sixties-set Doris Day/Rock Hudson--style romance, while East Bound and Down, originally written by American Pie's Adam Herz, is a modern take on the "redneck chase movie" a la Smokey and the Bandit. Does Reed mind people thinking of his film as a Guilty Pleasure? "The fact that people like it in spite of themselves - I love that."

A WEDDING, PART 2?

Robert Ahman is preparing to begin his next film, Gosford Park. Starring Jude Law, Emily Watson, and Kristin Scott Thomas, pic is described as a Rules of the Game-ish look at class relations in Thirties Britain, revolving around a hunting party.

GETTING TO WORK

Playwright Arthur Miller will make his acting debut opposite Samantha Morton in Plain Jane, an adaptation of his short story "Homely Girl: A Life." Miller co-wrote the screenplay for director Amos Gitai.

Blaine Thurier, writer and director of Low Self Esteem Girl, is currently assembling financing and a production team for his next film, I Love You Game. But he's putting the project on hold so he can tour this spring with his band, the New Pornographers.

Emir Kusturica's next film will be an adaptation of The Nose, a play by Dusan Kovacevic, whose earlier play inspired Underground ... Catherine Breillat's new project will be based on the classic Barbey d'Aurevilly novel Une vieille Maitresse ... Elliott Gould has joined the ever-expanding Ocean's 11 cast. Just about the only people not in that movie are you and me ... Roman Polanski is gearing up to restart the famously abandoned The Double, with Isabelle Adjani, Jean Reno, and, again, John Travolta ... Joining the cast of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake in the role of "a female ape" is (surprise) girlfriend Lisa Marie.

FRAME-UPS names to know KERRY WASHINGTON

Having danced with the New York Negro Ballet as a child, Kerry Washington loves musical theater and counts among her favorite people Barbra Streisand and Rita Moreno, whom she calls "people who've been able to have careers in film, television, and theater, people who act, sing, and dance, just do it all." At 23, Washington wants nothing less than the same for herself. As she's currently at work establishing the Post Colonial Theater Company in New York City, and most recently appearing in multiplexes nationwide in Save the Last Dance, all signs suggest her name will loom in marquee lights before long. Evincing her versatility, she stars as a 15-year-old in Jim McKay's Our Song (to be released in May) and as a 24-year-old in the exhilarating Sundance standout Lift. In DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter's film, her character works at an upscale department store but sidelines as one of Boston's most accomplished "boosters," expertly stealing thousands of dollars' worth of brand-name clothing, much of it stolen-to-order for her emotionally distant mother. "Having grown up in the Bronx and gone to the Spence School, I really understand Niecy's need to negotiate all kinds of socio-economic environments and her ability to do so with grace and fluidity." And it's grace more than anything that distinguishes Washington's performances so far, playing characters who each in a different way attempt to balance the demands of friends, family, and children.

OFF THE SHELF Notable forthcoming publications

Most great film books possess the following attributes: meticulous historical research; original and insightful analysis of individual films; and lucid fleshing out of the cultural and political contexts within which the films emerged. Tom Gunning, one of our finest historians of silent film and the author of a groundbreaking monograph on D.W. Griffith, pulls off this rare triple play in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (BFI/Indiana University Press, 539 pp., $24.95). There have been numerous studies of Lang, but they usually focus on either his emblematic and often titillating personal journey, or the insanely different industrial contexts in which he worked. Gunning deftly interweaves these narrative strands, offering a rich intellectual scaffolding of themes and ideas connecting Lang to such essential issues of modernity as urban crime, communication technologies, the accelerating regimentation of social life, and the slippages of personal identity. His overarching concept of the "Destiny-machine," far more complex than the standard reading of Langian "Fate," carries an explanatory punch that is nothing short of breathtaking. At over 500 pages of densely packed, occasionally plodding yet never obscurantist argument, this is a superabundant meal to which you will want to return for extra helpings in the afterglow of late-night screenings. -- Paul Arthur