MOUTHSWIDE OPEN

If The Phantom Menace has been this year’s most hyped movie, noted one recent commentator, then the most eagerly awaited one is probably still Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Well, one star from each of those two films is due to link up in the new music-drenched movie from Australian director Baz Luhrmann, who made an especially striking US debut a couple of year’s back with William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman (who, like Luhrmann, is Australian) will star in Moulin Rouge, a movie set in turn-of-the-(19th)-century Paris. But it is not, Luhrmann insists, a remake of John Huston’s 1952 movie, nor will it be a Toulouse Lautrec biopic (which Huston’s was). The screenplay - currently being written by Luhrmann and regular collaborator Craig Pearce - is about a young poet who comes to Paris in 1899 and falls into a doomed love affair with a night-club star. Lautrec will feature in the movie (played by John Leguizamo) but will not be its main focus.

Moulin Rouge will also have songs in it (McGregor and Kidman have already done some workshop sessions on that with Luhrmann), and it will really be about moving from one century into the next, says the director, using music more suited to 2000 than to 1900.

Production is tentatively set to start at Fox Studios in Sydney in October, and is slated to run through until early next year, with a release pencilled in for the latter half of 2000.

X -FILED

Say what you like about Bryan Singer: he’s clearly no quitter. The director of festival favourite Public Access and cult crime thriller The Usual Suspects saw the curve of his directorial career take a steep dip with last year’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it release of Apt Pupil. But Springer is about to bounce back with one of the most intriguingly cast superhero movies of recent time.

I refer, of course, to Fox’s X-Men, which is due to go in front of the cameras next month (August) in Toronto. The X-Men, for those whose knowledge of superheroes stops at Superman, are a group of mutants with superhuman powers who band together to protect mankind from another group of mutants, also with superhuman powers but less nice.

To complicate things further, mankind is not always grateful to The X-Men, often seeing them as little more than a bunch of freaks. The X-Men just want to be regular guys, while the bad mutants know in their twisted hearts that this is impossible, so take special pleasure in their badness.

Much more Usual Suspects territory, in other words, than Apt Pupil, especially given some of the actors Singer has already lined up for the roles. Oscar nominee Ian McKellen (who worked with Singer on Pupil) will play Magneto, the Master of Magnetism and the baddest of the baddies, who can create force fields and who is the way he is because of how he was treated by Nazis of the sort played by McKellen in Singer’s last film.

Leading the good guys will be Patrick Stewart, who plays Professor Charles Xavier, the man with the telepathic powers.Also along for the ride is Dougray Scott, who seems to be specialising in this kind of role, having recently played the equivalent of Prince Charming in Ever After. Scott (who is featured on page 36 of this issue in the article on This Year’s Love) will play superhero Wolverine, who wields his razor-like claws in the interest of truth, justice and the human way.

New Zealander Anna Paquin - who won an Oscar for The Piano and has since starred in the seriously underrated Fly Away Home - will take the part of Rogue, the high-school student with psychic powers. And the seven-foot-two Sabretooth will be played by professional wrestler Tyler Mane, who isn’t quite that tall but looks it.