Are we the only ones a bit confused by which Weitz brother is which? While Paul is the official director of “American Pie,” most considered that to be a joint effort with Chris, which led to confusion when they ventured into different directions after “About A Boy,” with Chris flopping with “The Golden Compass” and Paul moving to the social satire with “In Good Company” and “American Dreamz.” With Chris moving on to the “Twilight” series and Paul working on kids film “Cirque du Freak,” the line has been blurred even further, as they seem to have fully graduated to the big budget mainstream field, despite no one really being able to illustrate any of their strong suits behind the camera.
If there’s any competition amongst the two, Paul’s about to fire back at Chris’ “Twilight” gig with a one-two punch. Paul has just signed on for the thankless gig helming “Little Fockers,” where he’d be directing Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Blythe Danner, Owen Wilson and others in a film far beneath any of them. Afterwards, he’d segue into his long-on-the-table adaptation of “Another Bullshit Night In Suck City.” Amazon.com’s description…
“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.” Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he’d received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.
Paul Weitz has adapted the Nicolas Flynn novel, and Variety reports that Casey Affleck and Robert DeNiro are set to star, presumably as the father and son. We’re not sure if Affleck is also still the lead in Ridley Scott’s planned “The Kind One,” nor are we sure what exactly they’re going to do with Flynn’s title, which as a film has remained in development for years with that very same title. Look for “Another Not-Great Night In Discomfort City” in 2011.