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MARTIN:
Following in
Sellers’ footsteps
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SPEAKING OF BEYONCÉ, the singer (who already has a fair chunk of screen acting experience, after Austin Powers in Goldmember and The Fighting Temptations) is lined up to co-star in a revival of the Pink Panther franchise, in which Steve Martin will play the hapless Inspector Clouseau.
Peter Sellers was, of course, the actor who made the role his own: following what was to have been a one-off appearance as Clouseau in 1964, he went on to play the accident-prone detective in five further movies (including a posthumous one constructed from out-takes). Since then, there has been one other attempt to bring back the character, with Roberto Benigni in the role. This, of course, was before La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) made Benigni an international star. But the film - 1993’s Son of the Pink Panther - had about as much success at the box office as Benigni’s Life follow-up, that train wreck called Pinocchio.
The new movie, which will be written by Len Blum and directed by Sean Levy, will also star genuine Frenchman Jean Reno as Clouseau’s partner (in the police sense, I hasten to add), and is scheduled to start shooting soon for MGM.
WITH TERRY ZWIGOFF’S Bad Santa finally ho-ho-ing its way out of American cinemas (trailing a very seasonal $60 million in its wake), it’s time to get ready for another not entirely festive Christmas treat: Noel.
The film will mark the directorial debut of Chazz Palminteri, and is set among a group of jaded adults in Manhattan over the holiday season. That already indicates two big differences from the usual Christmas flick.
CHRISTMAS CRUZ:
The Spanish star recently wrapped Noel, directed by Chazz Palminteri
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One, Manhattan: most Christmas stories are set in some Saturday Evening Post-tinged Middle American small town where, however knowing the winks and nods (because even Christmas stories have to be just a tad postmodern these days), the spirit of white picket fences always wins out in the end.
Two, adult. In those rare occasions when Christmas movies are set in the Big Apple (eg. the many versions of Miracle on 34th Street), they’re about kids who think they are jaded - until a man with a big white beard shows up or something else really cute happens.
Noel stars Paul Walker (the blonde guy from the Fast and Furious movies), Susan Sarandon and Penelope Cruz - for whom, says Palminteri, this film will do what Pretty Woman did for Julia Roberts (which is certainly saying something).
But don’t expect too downbeat a movie: the Manhattanites in Palminteri’s film may not be full of Christmas cheer, but they’re all secretly looking for a miracle. And, since the director claims that Noel has a feelgood ending, it looks like they find it. After all, Palminteri himself has his own special reason for celebrating December 25: it’s his daughter’s birthday (she was two last Christmas Day).
The film was shot in Montreal (New York’s new double, with Toronto increasingly out of favour) in the run-up to this year’s festive season. No release date has yet been set. But don’t expect mid-summer.
NIGHT MOVES:
The Indian-born director is set to tackle The Life of Pi, following this summer’s scary tale, The Village, starring Joaquin Phoenix (seen below with Mel Gibson
in Shyamalan’s
earlier Signs).
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YOU’VE MADE THREE of the most successful movies of the past half-dozen years and managed to set two of them in your home town, allegedly out of gratitude to all the opportunities Philadelphia gave you in life. With Hollywood banging on your door to make another expertly crafted scary movie, what do you do? Answer: you opt to make a film out of a bestselling novel set aboard a small boat in the middle of the ocean.
This appears to have been the decision taken by M Night Shyamalan (who was born in Pondicherry but grew up in a posh middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, where his father was a doctor) Shyamalan’s next project will be to direct Fox 2000’s version of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winner, The Life of Pi. Martel’s novel is about a young Indian boy who survives a shipwreck. Shyamalan himself, of course, is of Indian parentage (his real first names are Manoj Nelliyattu). And who is going to forget that his first hit, The Sixth Sense, was about a young boy who could “see dead people”? The lad here is about twice the age Haley Joel Osment was in The Sixth Sense, and finds himself on a small lifeboat together with a large Bengal tiger, a zebra, a bad-tempered hyena and an orangutan. It helps that Pi’s father, before perishing in the shipwreck, used to run a zoo, so Pi knows his animals. But that is about all he has to help him in the voyage that ensues.
Unlike Shyamalan’s previous trio of hits (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs), there is no hidden horror and very little sense of the supernatural - not in the way we usually understand it in films, anyway. But his name (he will both direct and adapt the novel) is almost certainly what convinced Fox to go with the project, having previously turned down an approach by Shyamalan’s earlier writing partner, Dean Georgiadis (who is reportedly not happy about the subsequent turn of events).
The director, meanwhile, has one film already in the pipeline: another creepy tale in the form of The Village, which was called The Woods when it featured on these page last autumn. Actually, either title would do, since the film is a period piece (set in 1897) about a small community surrounded by woods in which a group of “mythical creatures” allegedly [sic] dwell.
The Village stars Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Howard as a young couple who fall in love - something which involves confronting the village as well as the creatures which live nearby - with William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody as older members of the community. Touchstone have it scheduled to open in the US at the end of July.
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