Meanwhile, NY Magazine is reporting that Ron Perlman (Hellboy, Sons of Anarchy, Mutant Chronicles) has stepped in to replace Rourke on Conan and will play Corin, the father of Conan.

CORIN: He’s in his 30s to 40s, Caucasian, powerfully built, intelligent, graceful, master swordsman, skilled blacksmith, de facto leader of Cimmerians and Conan’s father. He resolves to answer the terrible request of his dying wife and cuts Conan out of her so she can see him. He then shoulders the burden of raising Conan, which proves to be daunting given the boy’s savage nature. Corin teaches his son the meaning of the sword: a hot blade must be cooled and tempered. When Khalar finally corners him and tortures him to death, he shows no regret nor pain, hiding his concern for his son’s safety from the eyes of the enemy.

In addition to Jason Momoa – long since cast as Conan – and Perlman, the cast of the film includes Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang as villain Khalar Singh, Bob Sapp, Leo Howard and Said Taghmaoui.

Lionsgate starts shooting the film in Bulgaria this month.

Conan The Barbarian is slated for a 2011 release.

The first on-set photos of Ryan Reynolds at work on the first day of the Green Lantern shoot in New Orleans have gone online at DCUmoviepage and Comic Book Movie.

In the pictures, Reynolds was seen filming his part at a bar called Old Point Bar which was renamed Broome’s Bar in honor of Green Lantern creator John Broome.

Green Latern was created in 1940 by writer Bill Finger and artist Martin Nodell. Hal Jordan (Reynolds) introduced in 1959, a second-generation test pilot, is an ordinary man who was given the power ring and battery (lantern) by a dying alien named Abin Sur. When Abin Sur’s spaceship crashed on Earth, the alien used his ring to seek out an individual to take his place as Green Lantern: someone who was “utterly honest and born without fear.”

Green Lantern photos

The film is directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale), stars Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins, Mark Strong, Taika Waititi and Temuera Morrison. Morrison has been cast as Abin Sur, the alien Green Lantern Corps member responsible for Hal Jordan joining the intergalactic courage-fueled police force. Waititi will play Hal Jordan’s close friend and confidante Tom “Pieface” Kalmaku.

Green Lantern is slated to hit theaters on June 17, 2011 from Warner Bros. Pictures.

That really sounds good, and even more, because the story seems pretty interesting. The film follows the life of French feminist philosopher, writer and theorist Simone de Beauvoir and American novelist Nelson Algren.

Logically, Paradis will have an honor to play Madame de Beauvoir, and Depp will be her macho lover Nelson.

And, as you may guess, this movie is going to be based on de Beauvoir’s collection of correspondences she sent Algren in the late 1940s.

The letters center on their transatlantic affair and their travels together through Latin America in 1949. All of these letters are so rich in details, so we should not worry – this movie has no chance to be an ordinary love story.

We all know that this Madame was everything but boring, and she’s perhaps most famous for her tome, The Second Sex, which explored women’s oppression, contemporary feminism and her open relationship with famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

On the other hand, we also know that Hallstrom previously directed Depp in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Chocolat, so we don’t have any reason to be suspicious about the director’s choice to bring this couple together in this kind of story.

At the end, we can add that My American Lover shoot will probably start 2011,  considering Depp’s schedule, since he’ll also reteam with Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica for his long-gestating Pancho Villa biopic, and as you all know, at this moment he’s ocupied with the movie we all expect – The Tourist.

But still, we’re surely looking forward to see American Lover as well!

There are several reports saying Phoenix will play Edgar Allan Poe in a film adapted from Daniel Stashower’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl. Seems like Phoenix’s obscurity is over?

Phoenix would be playing the master of macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, in the literary thriller about the grisly inspiration for Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogers.”

The book tells the story about Mary Rogers, a clerk at a tobacco store frequented by popular writers. She disappeared on October 4, 1838, in New York City, but only a few days later the newspapers announced her return.

It was said she had eloped with a naval officer. Three years later, on July 25, 1841, she disappeared again. Her body was found floating in the Hudson River on July 28 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The death of this well-known girl received national attention for weeks. Although there was intense media interest, the crime remains one of the most puzzling unsolved murders.

Edgar Allan Poe used the events surrounding Rogers’ murder to write his short story, often subtitled as a sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue“

We’re sure you all know that Poe was definitely one of the world’s best writers, best known for his tales of mystery, so it’s no wonder that story like this deserves to be on a big screen.

Just for a record, this story maybe now sounds good and interesting, but is generally considered the least successful, so don’t be surprised if you somewhere see critics like this:

“As a story, it scarcely exists. It has no life-blood. The characters neither move nor speak… Only a professional student of analytics or an inveterate devotee of criminology can read it with any degree of unfeigned interest.“

So, we can only hope that Joaquin Phoenix will be the perfect detective, and that this story will find the right way to the audience. That’s exactly why we’re giving you all these information, because not much is known about the film, as no writer or director has been attached.

Actually the only thing we know is that Resul Pookutty, who won an Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing for Slumdog Millionaire, will be doing the sound for the film.

Maybe we shouldn’t get too excited about this, but still we can’t help but think that this could be the right movie to return Phoenix to the place he belongs. And, we’ll definitely be there if that happens. So stay with us!

Today we have the trailer for The Romantics, romantic comedy starring Katie Holmes, Josh Duhamel, Malin Akerman, and Elijah Wood.

The Romantics, based on a novel, of the same name, by Galt Niederhoffer, revolves around eight friends from college who reunite for a wedding. Holmes will play Laura, the maid of honor to Paquin’s Lila, the bride. Laura and Lila are best friends who both have a past with the groom (Duhamel).

The Romantics has been premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival but has yet to set U.S. release date.

The Romantics photos

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out the first clip for Death at a Funeral, starring Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan,

The movie is re-imagining of Death at a Funeral, the 2007 MGM comedy directed by Frank Oz. The plan is to make an ensemble comedy about a funeral ceremony that leads to the digging up of shocking family secrets, as well as misplaced cadavers and indecent exposure. While the original was set in Britain, the new film will take place in an urban American setting.

Hit the jump and watch the new clip

Death at a Funeral is directed by Neil LaBute (The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace), also starring Danny Glover, James Marsden, Zoe Saldana and Regina Hallafter and is scheduled to hit theaters on April 16th, 2010.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Forget what you think you know about this movie. And forget what you think you know about Robert Pattinson. This film is far more than a love story. Plus, Pattinson’s acting abilities are better than the one particular role he’s known for playing.
Go into this movie with an open mind, and what you’ll find is an engaging film that is simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. The story and actors swirl together like a perfect cup of coffee with just the right amount of cream and sugar. The subtle sweetness cuts the underlying bitterness. And, in fact, that’s exactly the word I would use to describe Remember Me – bittersweet…read more [Killer Film]

Disaffected twentysomething Tyler (Robert Pattinson) is still coping with the aftershocks of his older brother’s suicide several years earlier. His parents (Pierce Brosnan and Lena Olin) are separated and his younger sister (Ruby Jerins) is an outcast at school. Tyler spends his days bumming around New York University with obnoxious roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington, in a truly cringe inducing performance), who dares him to pick up Ally (Emilie de Ravin), a classmate and the daughter of a cop (Chris Cooper). Ally has a family tragedy of her own that has left her wounded and withdrawn, so of course she and Tyler fall into a passionate romance that changes them both…read more [MetroMix]

Robert Pattinson (Tyler), Remember Me

Remember me wants desperately to be an important film, deeper than the standard Hollywood tear-jerker. Coulter and the cast do this by making us care about the characters and invest in them emotionally. Cinematographer Jonathan Freeman shoots the film very efficiently and cleanly, allowing the acting to shine rather than camera tricks and Marcelo Zarvos’s score is evocative without being overdone. The only time these become flaws is in those final moments that threaten to destroy the entire film, as the camera pans become overly dramatic and the music swells as if to say “here it comes.” And come it certainly does, in the worst possible way. Some audiences will be offended, and others will be affected. Either way, they will get there as a result of the machinations of the story, which is very much the wrong way to do so…read more [411mania]

Pierce Brosnan (Charles) and Lena Olin (Diane Hirsch), Remember Me

There’s only one thing that loves Robert Pattinson more than his legions of hysterical teenage fans and that’s the camera. Which helps but doesn’t quite save the earnest new romantic drama “Remember Me,” whose filmmakers hang everything on those chiseled cheeks and moody eyes.
Like Tyler, the angst-ridden 21-year-old NYU student he plays, scowling between class and the coffee shop where he pours all those conflicted feelings into a battered journal, the “Twilight” star is still very much a work in progress…read more [LA Times]

Teen audiences, particularly female, are likely to fall headlong into the dour romantic drama “Remember Me” because Robert Pattinson and his fwoopy hair, taking a break from the “Twilight” franchise, are both in it. And when you’re a teen, certainly when I was a teen, confusing banality with profundity was practically a law.
Also, romances unfolding on the edge of a historic precipice hold a particular appeal to audiences, in a sick sort of way. We know what’s coming and we feel badly (if the story’s in any sort of working order) because we know so much more than the lovers do. “From Here to Eternity” had Pearl Harbor; “Titanic” had the iceberg; and “Remember Me” has a story taking place largely in New York City in the first half of 2001…read more [The Baltimore Sun]

Remember Me isn’t your typical Hollywood romantic drama. In fact, the film’s final act is diametrically opposed to the ending most studio productions would tack on this sort of film. Whether or not you embrace the twist at the end, and I’m still going back and forth with myself over whether it was a smart choice or a stupid move, the first two-thirds of Remember Me are well acted and smartly written. And even if you disapprove of just where the film goes, the story building up to the final climatic twist is moving and real. Remember Me is not a disposable romance that’s getting attention just because Pattinson’s in it. This is a solid film with minor flaws – and a highly controversial ending…read more [About.Com]

Remember Me Photo – Robert Pattinson (Tyler) and Emilie de Ravin (Ally Craig)

The last 10 to 15 minutes of Remember Me turn on such a drastic miscalculation that audiences will scarcely be able to talk about anything else. That’s too bad, because before it’s freighted with more significance than its flimsy architecture can possibly withstand, this romantic melodrama strives for something nearly as ambitious: It attempts to turn Twilight’s Robert Pattinson into the millennial James Dean. As a brooding loner gone bohemian in defiance of his cold, corporate blueblood father (Pierce Brosnan), Pattinson does his best impersonation of Dean in East Of Eden, casting rebellion as the raw byproduct of lingering daddy issues. Though his behavior is often erratic, he’s a sensitive soul (when he makes love, Sigur Rós swells in the background), quietly heroic when it counts. And he has a special talent for alarming overly protective fathers, which makes him more attractive… read more [A.V. Club]

This is, at heart, a story about how people get on with their lives after overwhelming loss and learn to live with grief without succumbing to it. Tyler and Ally bond over family tragedy — his brother committed suicide; her mother was killed in a mugging. Pattinson and de Ravin don’t make a memorable happy couple — they’re better when they’re brooding — but, although their relationship is supposed to be a haven from sadness, happiness is an emotion the film has little use for.
To call Remember Me a four-hankie weeper does not begin to describe it, and its climax almost pulls us out of the movie by incorporating a real-life event into a story that had been, until then, built purely on fiction. But Coulter wants to explore the act of mourning as a theme, and how death sometimes reminds us that every minute of life should be savored. On that level, Remember Me certainly succeeds…read more [The Miami Herald]

Directed by: Allen Coulter
Written by: Will Fetters

Starring:
Robert Pattinson - Tyler Hawkins
Emilie de Ravin – Ally Craig
Tate Ellington – Aidan Hall
Ruby Jerins – Caroline Hawkins
Pierce Brosnan – Charles Hawkins
Chris Cooper – Neil Craig
Lena Olin – Diane Hirsch
Gregory Jbara – Les Hirsch
Martha Plimpton – Helen Craig
Kate Burton – Janine
Peyton R. List – Samantha

Running time: 113 min.
Release date: March 12, 2010

Remember Me Video Review [IndyMogul]

Trailer and poster for Lbs. directed by Matthew Bonifacio from a story by Carmine Famiglietti have been released.

He is a 315-pound man obsessed with food. He lives a boring life with his parents in Brooklyn, and seems like nothing can move him.

Are you interested to hear more about the movie they already called “a very human story of self-realization” as well as “disarmingly natural, sincere and funny”? Ok, then, we’re presenting you Lbs!

Neil Perota (Carmine Famiglietti) is seriously overweight. At twenty-seven years old, he weighs over 300 pounds, and his life has no big sense but food and family. He even works for his father driving a school bus. That doesn’t sound funny at all, especially for a man of his age.

But soon, life is going to change for him. When he suffers a heart attack two days before his sister’s wedding, he is ordered to follow a strict diet. Yet – still cannot kick his habit. You probably wonder what’s next thing to happen this young man to force him change something.

So, two months later, Neil’s sister (Sharon Angela) finally has her rescheduled wedding. Fairly tale she originally planned, turns into a rain-soaked fiasco in her backyard. Disappointment leads Theresa’s drunken husband (Lou Martini), who has caught Neil cheating on his diet, to expose Neil in front of all their guests. Imagine that humiliation!

Although it sounds pretty bad, that event is exactly the thing that gives Neil the wake-up call he really needs, and he decides that he has to leave home if he wants to make a real change. So our hero moves out of the city and 300 miles north into a dilapidated trailer in the country to try and shed the excess pounds.

His childhood friend Sacco (Michael Aronov), a drug addict, soon visits Neil, and decides to stay with him in the trailer so they can battle their addictions together. After a difficult confrontation between the two, Sacco leaves Neil to face the mission of saving himself on his own, and soon the best part of the story happens.

Yeah, the word “love” is it! Over one year in isolation, Neil learns how to compromise, survive and falls in love for the first time with a local waitress (Miriam Shor).

LBS Poster

The lessons he learns are at the heart of this truly funny, touching and inspirational work. So, we guess, with this story director Matthew Bonifacio found the right kind of way to tell us that sometimes we are the only one who have a power to wake up our strong will, and that is definitely not just a phrase.

That’s why, if you like good mix of drama and comedy, you’re definitely going to like this one, especially since this problem is not so strange thing nowadays, and can happen to all of us.

Lbs. which stars Carmine Famiglietti, Miriam Shor, Michael Aronov, Sharon Angela, Susan Varon, Lou Martini, Jr. is scheduled for release March 26th, 2010. Hope you’ll enjoy it!

The Hurt Locker is easily the best of the movies which have focused on the ongoing war.
Skillfully directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Locker is both a psychological portrait and an exciting action film. It captures the complexities of the war in Iraq with visceral suspense as well as explosive battle sequences and powerful performances.
By taking a close look at a trio of courageous but also very human soldiers, it brings the conflict to life in a way that no previous movie has managed to do…read more [USA Today]

What a shame that the one movie about the Iraq war that has a chance of being viewed by a large worldwide audience should be so disappointing. According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is “apolitical.” Actually, “The Hurt Locker” is just the opposite; it’s an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others…read more [TruthDig]

The Hurt Locker probably isn’t the ‘great’ Iraq film which will finally move audiences into theatres but it does play out like fragments of one. Kathryn Bigelow holds pieces of the jigsaw in this impressionistic, tense war drama shot at street level, but commercially The Hurt Locker is facing down the public’s well-documented indifference to Iraq fare without the armour of star wattage (Fiennes, Morse and Pearce all have brief cameos).
In reality, the lack of known faces works in The Hurt Locker’s favour, but whether audiences can be persuaded to take the risk is another matter and the all-male cast and testosterone-fuelled subject matter restricts the demographic…read more [Scren Daily]

The Army bomb-disposal specialist so memorably played by Jeremy Renner in the extraordinary battlefield drama The Hurt Locker operates with the swagger of a hothead in a job that depends on cool. That cowboy attitude exasperates one combat-weary member (Anthony Mackie) of his Baghdad-based Bravo Company team and frightens another (Brian Geraghty) to furious tears. What’s the source of this grim bravado? Is this decent man’s addiction to adrenaline the cost to today’s American soldier of volunteering for such a crazy assignment, one that requires a husband with a family thousands of miles away to lie down in the road in the hot sun next to a live bomb to disarm a deadly device while locals whose language he can’t understand stare impassively?…read more [EW.com]

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq—documentary or fiction—that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines of a war fought not in jungles but in cities, where bombs rise up from the ground instead of raining down from the sky, every narrow alley portends an ambush, and every onlooker is a potential insurgent. It’s an experiential war movie—one that calls to mind the title of the 1950s docudrama series You Are There—but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier’s psyche, a diagram of what motivates the volunteers in a volunteer army…read more [Village Voice]

The film begins by introducing a very small number of characters—three members of an elite bomb-disposal squad in Iraq—then instantly plunges them into an impossibly tense situation, as a robot designed to defuse bombs malfunctions and a soldier, Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) is forced to get way too close to a ticking IED. Sgt. Thompson either gets blown to smithereens or doesn’t (you think I’m going to tell you?), and then this unbearably anxiety-provoking situation repeats itself, with slight variations in the type of bomb being approached and the person approaching it, over and over again for the next two hours. By keeping its scale miniature instead of epic (there are no combat scenes in the traditional sense), The Hurt Locker keeps its audience in a constant state of tension without risking battle fatigue. But the main advantage The Hurt Locker has over conventional war epics is the richness of its characters. The members of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team aren’t hastily sketched cannon fodder or iconically heroic bores but damaged, blustering, certifiably crazy, and admirably brave men…read more [Slate]

The Hurt Locker Posters

“The Hurt Locker” has the killer impact of the explosive devices that are the heart of its plot: It simply blows you apart and doesn’t bother putting you back together again. Overwhelmingly tense, overflowing with crackling verisimilitude, it’s both the film about the war in Iraq that we’ve been waiting for and the kind of unqualified triumph that’s been long expected from director Kathryn Bigelow.
Bigelow has been on critics’ watch lists since her hallucinatory early films “The Loveless” and “Near Dark.” But until now she’s never had a subject that so successfully utilized her gift for stylized suspense and what she calls “heightened emotional states” as this tale of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad (tautly portrayed by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) deployed in the terrifying streets of Baghdad…read more [LA Times]

The Hurt Locker Poster

In “The Hurt Locker,’’ Bigelow finds unexpected ways to express empathy and sensitivity. Rather than trace the path a bullet takes to its human target, she focuses on the dance a casing does after it’s left a rifle. The movie manages not to glorify war. It even implies that James is addicted to the role he plays in this one. But what we’re allowed so vividly to see and feel when James disarms a bomb is almost no different from watching a conductor seduce an orchestra or a chef produce a meal. It moves him. That’s a feeling both distinct from war and inextricable from it…read more [Boston.com]

“Story” is perhaps misleading, as The Hurt Locker, very little interested in character backstory or conventional plot, charts a series of missions, some more successful than others, with only the occasional interlude of drunken roughhousing. There’s a sameness to the action (if not the particulars or the consequences of) that perfectly mimics what awaits the explosive ordnance disposal squad every time the three-man team pulls up to a job in their Humvee: every day another bomb, or 10, to dismantle, and every day another chance to get blown into a million itty bits. The three-person squad is comprised of the team leader, Staff Sgt. William James (Renner), thrill-seeking and damaged in an unarticulated way; Sgt. JT Sanborn (Mackie), the sensible, upright one who simply wants to ride out this tour in one piece; and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Geraghty), just a kid, really, who is starting to crack under the strain of the ceaseless violence and the seeming randomness of who lives and who dies…read more [Austin Chronicle]

The Hurt Locker Video Review

Our Photo Gallery has been updated with eight new hi-res photos from the upcoming remake of The Karate Kid. You can check out bigger versions of each by clicking them below.

12-year-old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) could’ve been the most popular kid in Detroit, but his mother’s latest career move has landed him in China. Dre immediately falls for his classmate Mei Ying – and the feeling is mutual – but cultural differences make such a friendship impossible. Even worse, Dre’s feelings make an enemy of the class bully, and kung fu prodigy, Cheng. With no friends in a strange land, Dre has nowhere to turn but maintenance man Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), who is secretly a master of kung fu. As Han teaches Dre that kung fu is not about punches and parries, but maturity and calm, Dre realizes that facing down the bullies will be the fight of his life.

Jaden Smith (Dre) and Taraji P. Henson in The Karate Kid

The film, directed by Harald Zwart (The Pink Panther 2), stars Jackie Chan, Jaden Smith, Tess Liu and Taraji P. Henson.

The Karate Kid hits theaters this summer on June 11th.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid trailer, check it out now!

Jackie Chan stars as Mr. Han and Jaden Smith stars as Dre in The Karate Kid

Judging by the trailer and clips from the thriller this looks very interesting.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is both written and directed by J Blakeson and stars Gemma Arterton, Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston.

In the film, two masked men seize a young woman on a suburban street. They bind and gag her and take her to an abandoned, soundproofed apartment. She is Alice Creed, daughter of a millionaire.

Her kidnappers, the coldly efficient Vic and his younger accomplice Danny, have worked out a meticulous plan. But Alice is not going to play the perfect victim – she’s not giving in without a fight. In a tense power-play of greed, duplicity and survival we discover that sometimes disappearances can be deceptive…

The Disappearance of Alice Creed which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival is scheduled to be released June 11, 2010 in limited theaters.

So, new comedy is coming! And this time body-switching one!

This movie is coming from well-known writing team that stands behind The Hangover – Jon Lucas and Scott Moore and will be directed by David Dobkin that you all probably remember from Wedding Crashers.

Since we already know, those guys are going to change their bodies, what’s there to expect from the story?

It looks like they will have to find some new and original way to make us more interested in the whole thing, because (you’ll agree) this very much smells like Freaky Friday, the 2003 comedy, but there the body switching took place between the mother and her daughter.

And the new one will be a story of a family man (Bateman) who accidentally swaps bodies with his best friend, a single slacker actor played by Reynolds. Each gets a glimpse at what he missed, and an appreciation of what he had.

Since we like what Reynolds did in The Proposal, we could also mention Bateman’s previous projects Couples Retreat, The Invention of Lying, Extract.

Bateman also has the comedy Paul coming out this year and will next be seen opposite Jennifer Aniston in Disney’s The Switch.

That’s why we’re not too suspicious about this acting team, and this time they will have a lot of space and time to be our leaders throuhgh this new comedy, so why not?

The Change-Up is set to begin shooting this September. We can all only hope this comedy will bring some fresh change, since we already wrote our “miss-you-comedy-report”.

But this time it has nothing to do with Dan Brown’s book, this story will be about Da Vinci who uses his inventions (presumably including his famous flying machine designs) to defeat supernatural enemies.

Weird idea? Surprised yet? Continue reading then…

Warner Bros has picked up a treatment entitled Leonardo Da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever which will follow the adventures of this famous man through all those things we’re already used to – secret codes, lost civilizations, fallen angels, secret society…

On one hand, this could be nice thing to watch, since we all know that his 15th century designs for the helicopter, parachute, car and submarine never progressed further than the pages of his notebook, but they will be gloriously realised in the film.

So, as you see, Da Vinci was an artist, inventor, scientist and visionary, but five hundred years after his death, he became a Hollywood action hero!

Adrian Askarieh, previously involved with Hitman, will produce the movie with his company Prime Universe. He came up with the idea and wrote the treatment.

Still, he won’t be the one writing the script, and the company is currently seeking a screenwriter.

Anyway, it’s pretty much obvious that this is some new Hollywood trand, some kind of history re-writing, so it’s no wonder news like this came out after last week’s announcement by Warner Bros of a “fantasy-adventure” about the 13th century traveller Marco Polo.

They are obviously very much interested into historical figures, since we already wrote about new project of Guy Ritchie – a movie about King Arthur, and other Hollywood films in the pipeline are a reinvention of Moby Dick and an all-action biopic of Moses.

So, be prepared for Hollywood history attack! Some believe that this sounds silly but still very interesting, others hate the idea of this mix, replying that there are people without enough knowledge of history, and could be even more confused with this new ideas. As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle of the road..

Clint Eastwood will next direct a biopic of controversial first director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover in a project being developed by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment says The Hollywood Reporter.

The Academy Award-winning director recently completed work on the supernatural drama Hereafter with Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard, and he’s already circling his next project.

The script, written by Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk Dustin Lance Black, was written a year ago and still seems fit enough to remain the working copy.

J. Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the FBI of the United States. He was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Late in life, and after his death, Hoover became an increasingly controversial figure. His critics have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI.

The most recent portrayal of Hoover on film was in 2009’s Public Enemies. Billy Crudup played the FBI director who guided Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) through the hunt for Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp).

THR says the project used to be set up at Universal, however currently there’s no studio attached. It’s likely, given Eastwood’s long-standing relationship with the studio, that the Hoover film will wind up at Warner Bros.

Would you like to see Clint Eastwood direct this biopic? Who should be cast as J. Edgar Hoover?

J. Edgar Hoover bio

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, Spring has come, and now is the right time to give a little attention to this interesting project, so we’re packing our things and we’re on the road to SXSW festival!

It’s very nice, and encouraging thing that guys at SXSW say this is the internationally acclaimed, nine-day Festival that celebrates “raw innovation and emerging talent, with a truly diverse program ranging from provocative documentaries to subversive Hollywood comedies.”

Although the music events offerings get most of the attention, in the last decade the film component has emerged as a destination in its own right.

Just for a record, one of the movies that’s been shown last March on SXSW was a little war movie named The Hurt Locker. You remember that one from last week, right?

That’s why over 260 films will be screened this year, including high-profile world premieres like Kick-Ass and panels featuring the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Michel Gondry, Jeffrey Tambor and Robert Rodriguez.

While we’re still here, giving you some basic information, let’s say that Kick-Ass had a chance to open Festival night, and that was a nice move.

On the other hand, let us remind you that the SXSW panels and conversations are usually as worthwhile as the films, so as we mentioned it’s certainly good thing to hear Tarantino and Rodriguez sharing secrets of genre filmmaking at the “Directing the Dead” panel.

Really, very interesting Alphabetical List of 2010 Accepted Films can be found on their official site, so you should definitely check it out.

One of the most interesting things about the whole project is the fact that there is no special press screenings, no celeb-only showings, you just buy a pass, and you get to see the movie you want like everybody else, no discrimination!

When it comes to documentaries Subjects include troubled NBA star Allen Iverson – No Crossover: Allen Iverson, cab drivers in Beijing – Beijing Taxi – the mercurial pop and world music star David Byrne – Ride, Rise Roar – Houston’s storied Kashmere Stage Band Thunder Soul and plenty more that you should definetely watch if you’re a documentary-fan.

We’ll be here soon with more detailed informations, such as reviews from the movies that got our attention. As you see, everything is possible, and who knows, maybe we’ll have a chance to see next-Oscar movie again right here for the first time!

The Road to SXSW 2010: Brian Solis

Part 1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 3

Click here to view the embedded video.