– It’s a few days old, but we missed this story completely, and it’s a glacially slow news day — Peter Sarsgaard has announced he’s going to be appearing in the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz spy movie “Wichita.” At the end of a lengthy and excellent interview at Movieline, the actor said, “I’m going to Boston in about a week to do ‘Wichita.’ It’s a great script; I’m the foil to Tom Cruise’s character. It’s really fun and it’s got action movie stuff in it, obviously, but it’s funny.” Does ‘foil’ mean villain, or straight man? If we were betting men (and women), we’d put our money on the former.
– We really dug Nicholas Winding Refn’s “Valhalla Rising” when we saw it at Toronto, and described it as “Terrence Malick directing a horror movie.” The Danish director’s given an interview to Screen Crave, and called it “Escape From New York” meets [Andrei] Tarkovsky” which is equally apt (though they actually don’t seem to know who the latter Russian filmmaker is calling him Tartovsky). It’s a good piece otherwise, with a ton of information on “Bronson,” which hits very shortly (full review coming later today), and definitely worth a read.
– Comics2Film have uncovered that Brad Anderson is set to direct an adaptation of the graphic novel “The Living and the Dead,” about “a monstrous character who engages in the nineteenth-century version of snuff theater, luring innocent people in a Grand Guignol of flesh and blood.” We like Anderson a lot, and this sounds really exciting, although it’s probably a way off yet — he’s currently directing Hayden Christensen in “Vanishing on 7th Street.”
– Empire has the exclusive trailer for the offbeat British rom-com “Dogging: A Love Story,” which stars rising star Luke Treadaway (“Clash of the Titans”) as a young journalist who becomes embroiled in the weird sexual subculture of dogging, which involves having sex in cars in front of strangers. The movie’s now available in the States on IFC on demand, and is released in the U.K. on December 28th.
– The first picture of Shia LaBeouf’s character with his mentor Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” have hit over at MTV. The movie also stars Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and Frank Langella.
– There’s a really great piece over at Vanity Fair on a century’s worth of Coen Brothers movies — from “Miller’s Crossing” in the 1920s and “O Brother Where Art Thou” in the 1930s” to “Intolerable Cruelty” and “Burn After Reading” in the present day. The only gap? The 1970s…
– Finally a beverage offer you can’t refuse. Paramount Pictures is launching ‘The Godfather Italian Organic Vodka’ in April next year. The CEO of Iconic Brands, the company teaming with the studio on the product, told The Hollywood Reporter “The celebrity niche in the drink sector these days is somewhat in vogue and lots of people are trying to do it. I think Paramount is realizing what powerful brand ‘The Godfather’ is.” The only thing stopping Francis Ford Coppola from rolling in his grave is the fact that he’s still alive.