
Jodie Foster
Image by: Myles Aronowitz
The next time you see Jodie
Foster in front of the camera it’ll be in District 9 director Neill
Blomkamp’s 2013 sci-fi epic Elysium with Matt Damon. And though her own
directorial career has hit its share of potholes lately with the disastrously
received (and, frankly, fairly underrated) The Beaver, Foster has a new
direction: television. She will executive produce and direct a female-fronted
mafia drama for Showtime titled Angie’s Body. Written by Rob Fresco
(Heroes, Jericho), all the available information indicates that this is
The Sopranos if they were run by Carmela instead of Tony. Now, that may sound
gimmicky, but in a post-Sopranos world, we need something entertainingly
mafia-based and right now the best we’ve got is Mob Wives. Now if Foster will just tell us for sure if
she’s the star of the show and we’ll be all in.
Hugh Jackman joins Lee
Daniels MLK drama
Precious director Lee
Daniels had a couple of period Civil Rights Movement dramas in the hopper,
Selma and The Butler, as his follow-up to the Oscar-winning film. But then
he made The Paperboy with Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman instead. (The one
where, yes, really, she urinates on him and apparently it’s completely unhinged
and they hated it at Cannes – coming soon to a theater near you.) So now it’s
back to the drawing board of the 1960s, this time with a different story called
Orders to Kill, starring Hugh Jackman as controversial attorney William
Pepper, a man who argued for decades that James Earl Ray, the convicted
assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t the man behind the crime (his
belief: the United States government did it). Hopefully it’ll all come together
and be received enthusiastically in the wake of The Paperboy’s eventual
success. Lee Daniels did not just pay us to say that. Promise.
Finally, a David Sedaris
movie
David Sedaris has, over the
past 20 years, turned into one of America’s most beloved humorists (though he’s
spent most of that time living in Europe – look, the food really is a lot
better in France). So you’d think that in all that time somebody somewhere could
have gotten one of the author’s hilarious, first-person stories shaped into a
decent script with some funding. This, however, has not taken place, mostly
because the author himself is legendary for saying no. Until now. C.O.G.,
based on a story from Sedaris’s best-selling collection Naked (about his time
working as an apple-picker in Oregon), will begin production in October with
young filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez behind the camera. Alvarez already won the
"Someone To Watch" Independent Spirit Award for his 2009 film Easier With
Practice and his dogged determination to win over the reluctant author paid
off with Sedaris’s blessing and cooperation. Now, who’ll play his sister Amy?
Such Good People casts such
a lot of gay people
This might sound more like
the casting of the latest round of Hollywood Squares, the all-homosexual
version, but it’s not. It’s something a little more mysterious than that. It’s
a film called Such Good People and it’s being billed as "a gay screwball
comedy." It has its own Facebook page and Twitter account, both of which just
went up this month. And it has a cast of almost exclusively lesbian and gay
names: Michael Urie (Ugly Betty), Lance Bass, Sandra Bernhard, Bree Turner
(Grimm), stand-up comic Alec Mapa, Jon Polito (The Big Lebowski), Drew
Droege (aka the internet’s own "Chloe Sevigny"), Mitch Silpa ("Flight Attendant
Steve" from Bridesmaids) and Randy Harrison (Queer as Folk). What else is
it about? Nobody knows; that’s why it’s kind of mysterious. So if you want to
pretend you’re the Sherlock Holmes of film production and spy on the process
unfolding in real time, just go link up to the movie on social media. You’ll
know everything before the official press releases get underway.