Clive Owen continues to sign on to dodgy sounding thrillers, this time it’s “Medallion,” penned by hot screenwriter and US Weekly magazine editor David Guggenheim. The film is the “story of a bank robber fresh out of prison who has six hours to pay a $50m ransom after he learns a former accomplice has kidnapped his daughter and stashed her in the boot of one of Manhattan’s 12,000 yellow cabs.” No word on a director yet, but with production slated for this fall, an announcement should be pending.
Diane Kruger, Djimon Hounsou, Denis Menochet, Benoit Magimel and Raphael Personnaz will star in the kidnapping drama “Special Forces.” Marking the directorial debut of Stephane Rybojad, the film will find Kruger playing a journalist who is kidnapped by the Taliban. The film is currently in pre-production.
Controversy! Apparently the lead single, “Love Is Your Color,” from the upcoming “Sex And The City 2” sounds very similar to Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” Sung by Leona Lewis and Jennifer Hudson, the track has hit the web so you can have a listen for yourself. Does it? Doesn’t it? We don’t know because we’re not going to waste three minutes and forty one seconds of our lives to find out.
Rob Minkoff (“Stuart Little,” “The Forbidden Kingdom”) is set to direct Patrick Dempsey in “Flypaper.” Based on a script by “The Hangover” scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the film “tells the tale of a bank that is robbed by two different groups of crooks at the same time. However, they both come under attack by a secret enemy (Dempsey), to save the bank teller whom he loves.” The film is still looking for the love interest and they better act fast; filming begins on June 7th in Louisiana.
Saved from the clutches of conman David Bergstein’s shell corporation/movie production house Capitol Films, “Love Ranch” directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Helen Mirren, Joe Pesci, Bai Ling and Gina Gershon will begin a limited rollout next month. The film, about the first legalized brothel in Nevada, now has a poster with some 70s-esque text and a vomitorium of badly photoshopped images thrown together including a car with a license plate that says LUV $EX. Is this a Ludacris video?
James Cox (“Wonderland”) is set to direct “Billionaire Boys Club” a fact-based film about “a group of wealthy young men in Los Angeles during the ’80s who resorted to murders after their social and investment club went sour.” Cox describes the film as a mix between “Wall Street” and “Alpha Dog” which has pretty much killed any interest we might have had in this. Filming is set to begin late summer/early fall.
MGM has been given yet another extension by its creditors to sort out their shit in saga that’s now rivaling the Roman Polanski legal battle for the crown of never-ending-story. Oh yeah, remember how it was rumored that Ridley and Tony Scott were once circling owning and running the embattled studio? Turns out it was true, and speaking with the NY Times, it appears Ridley wised up, saying that sitting behind the desk trying sort through MGM’s ledgers would take him away from “the best job in the world, which is making sense of the puzzle that is before me as a director every day that I am on set.”
Note to marketing departments: if you’re going to release a viral video make sure its either believable or funny. Making the rounds yesterday was a “behind the scenes clip” from “Knight & Day” where Cameron Diaz “accidentally” karate kicks Tom Cruise over a craft services table. Feeling like it was rehearsed about five hundred times, and with comedic timing that is completely off from the very first moments, we can’t figure out how this got the okay from anybody involved in the production. Get ready not to laugh by watching the below: