There are all sorts of good reasons for remembering True Lies. It had one of the best action climaxes of the first half of the nineties: well it would, wouldn’t it, being a big-budget James Cameron movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger? But then it was funny, too - an element Cameron rather lost sight of in his next outing, Titanic (not that that seems to have done the film any harm at the box office).

What made it funny - and remember, Cameron wrote it as well as directing - was the central plot idea: that Arnie’s wife (played in a series of ever shorter skirts by Jamie Lee Curtis) didn’t know her hubby was a top secret-service man and took him for a really dull, nine-to-five computer salesman - the kind of guy who’d only say “I’ll be back” when there was an order to follow up on. Then there was that bit on Seven Mile Bridge: no one making the long drive to Key West is ever going to feel quite the same about crossing that again.

But enough with the memories already: all the key elements are now reportedly in place for a sequel, the key elements being of course Arnie, Jamie Lee, Cap’n Jim and Tom Arnold, who played the big guy’s partner in the original (which was the cover story of our May/June issue back in 1994). The sequel, like the original, will be made at Fox, but no start date has yet been set, although it will presumably follow Arnie’s Doc Savage, Man of Bronze outing discussed on these pages last time out.

Kevin and Catherine Get Stoned

With Oliver Stone’s football epic, Any Given Sunday, due to open in North America a couple of days before Christmas (and featured on page 40), the director is busy finalising plans for his next movie: Mandalay’s Beyond Borders.

This one also apparently has an ‘epic’ tag attached to it, but is a love story rather than a sporting drama (or political saga, or war story, or any of the other genres Stone has steered into epic territory). Indeed, if memory serves, it will be Stone’s first movie to have a romantic pairing at its heart, unless you count Natural Born Killers, which I suppose you might if you had a mind to.

Beyond Borders is about an American doctor falling in love with a British nurse during a UN relief mission to some as yet unspecified violent corner of the world. And Stone has lost none of his flair for casting - or maybe that should be: for attracting - a striking combination of leads in his films. The doctor will be played by Kevin Costner, who last worked with the director on JFK in 1991, while the nurse will be played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who hasn’t committed to a major role since her summer ’98/summer ’99 double whammy of The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment (although she has done a cameo in Stephen Frears’ movie version of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity).

Love That Wave

The closest she ever got to surfing in the movies before was on board the boat in the climactic scenes of I Know What You Did Last Summer. But teen scream queen Jennifer Love Hewitt is reportedly polishing her board for Girl in the Curl, the story of a young woman who gets into hanging ten while trying to come to terms with her brother’s death. The movie is expected to go into production next spring, when Hewitt gets time off from her day job in the US TV series Time of Your Life.

However, the only training she has done so far for the part, according to producer Seth Jaret, was winning a pair of surf boards at the Fox Teen Choice Awards earlier this year.