Film News for Film Nerds

Not a whole lot too exciting currently. I caught a press screening of Synedoche, New York, the directorial debut by acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. It's great, it's insanely weird, and I'll be catching it again as soon as it opens here. Check a few posts down for a nice trailer for the film.

Next Friday, Nov. 7, sees the San Diego release of the Swedish film Let the Right One In (also see below), a film that has been garnering nothing but ecstatic reviews over the last few months as it's played various festivals. I'll be going up to LA tomorrow to catch it...

Clint Eastwood has a couple of films coming out in time for Oscar season, and they both look like total duds. The first is The Changeling, set in the late '20s and starring Angelina Jolie as a mother whose son disappears and is eventually found. The catch is that Jolie doesn't believe the boy to be her son, and nobody is willing to look into it.



The other Eastwood film is Gran Turino, in which Eastwood stars as a grumpy old tough guy who ends up helping the bullied teenage neighbor next door.



It appears that the great Crispin Glover has a role in Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp.

Steven Soderbergh is following up his two-part Che film with a musical about Cleopatra, set in the 1920s, with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Queen and Hugh Jackman as somebody else. Music by Guided by Voices.

The great little French thriller 13 Tzameti is being remade for an American audience by the original film's director, with Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, and 50 Cent.

Citizen favorite Todd Field, director of In the Bedroom and Little Children, is signed on to direct Buried for Paramount Vantage before he takes on Cormac McCarthy's epic Blood Meridian.

Another Citizen favorite, David Gordon Green, is putting off his remake of the Dario Argento classic Suspiria to film an adaptation of Freaks in the Heartland, the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Greg Ruth.

That's it for now. Try not to pee your pants on Halloween.