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CATHERINE GETS COOKING
It’s almost a little genre unto itself - the food movie. Think of Danish Oscar-winner Babette’s Feast, or Stanley Tucci in Big Night. It’s not enough for the film merely to be set in a restaurant, though: the movie has really to be about the food. And there have been few better examples recently than the 2001 German film, Mostly Martha (original title: Bella Martha), about an obsessive female chef in an Italian restaurant in Munich who is struggling to balance work against the demands of having to look after her eight-year-old niece who comes to live with her after her sister is killed in an accident.
Then, when she hires a new sous-chef (a real Italian, played with gusto by Sergio Castellitto), she is gradually brought to realise that there are some things in life more important than work - and that food has a habit of turning out better when it is cooked with relaxed affection rather than rigid perfectionism.
CARDIFF’S CHEF DE CUISINE
Catherine Zeta-Jones (top left) is to star in the Hollywood remake of German film Bella Martha (left). Australian Scott Hicks (above) will direct. |
The uptight-woman-
thaws-when-faced-with
-Latin-male theme is a bit clichéd, but the film itself - directed by Sandra Nettelbeck - was rescued from the commonplace by focusing as much on the food as on the defrosting of Martha. The movie was a hit in Germany, but did even better in the US, where it stayed in theatres for six months during the second half of 2002, notching up $4.2 million in the process.
Inevitably, there has been a remake in the works for quite a while, with a script by Carol Fuchs (previously a producer) in development at Castle Rock. Well, that just moved on to the fast track with the announcement that Catherine Zeta-Jones will take the role of Martha.
The Welsh-born actress hasn’t been seen on the screen since the end of last year, when she starred in Ocean’s Twelve. But The Legend of Zorro - a sequel to the film which cemented her Hollywood stardom - will be out around the world when this issue of Preview hits your doorstep.
The director of the Martha remake (as yet untitled) will be Australian Scott Hicks, who got an Academy Award nomination for Shine (which won its star, Geoffrey Rush, an Oscar)
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FLUSHED WITH SUCCESS Poker used to be the domain of men in shirtsleeves with cigars, facing up to and bluffing each other in such classic movies as The Cincinnati Kid or California Split. Then along came the online game; big bucks were to be made; and, all of a sudden, there was a whole raft of Hollywood stars like Ben Affleck and James Woods (you can ‘play’ against him on www.hollywoodpoker.com) getting round the felt and raking in the chips.
The latest star recruit, however, comes as something of a surprise: Jennifer Tilly (right), who recently turned in a memorable performance before dying spectacularly in the opening reel of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland. In mid-September, Tilly emerged as the winner of the World Poker Tour Ladies Night III tournament in Los Angeles.
She only took up the game a year ago, when she was invited to a Hollywood pro-am tournament and met up with poker professional Phil Laak. Laak didn’t just win the tournament: he began to date Tilly as well, teaching her the finer points of the game, to the extent that she can now beat him and win tournaments in her own right.
The actress - whose other recent roles have ranged from a second dose of the devil doll in Seed of Chucky (she originally got involved as Chucky’s ‘bride’) and as a memorable bimbo in one of the courtroom scenes in Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar - claims that poker gives her a chance to get away from the sweetness instilled in her by her hippie parents. “I get to be mean and crush people in a socially acceptable way,” she says. “I can lie, steal and be generally deceptive. Poker lets me indulge my inner bad girl.”
But Tilly reverted to type when it came to the $10,000 prize: it went straight to Breast Cancer Research. Winning the Tournament, however, also guaranteed the actress a place at the $25,000-a-seat WPT Championship next spring in Las Vegas. I’ll tell you in our Cannes 2006 issue how she gets on.
Scouts Honoured
Any journalist who encountered Dakota Fanning (right) on the promo trail for War of the Worlds - in which the 11-year-old actress played Tom Cruise’s daughter - will (I hope) be pleased to know, that under that staggering professionalism lies just another little kid from Conyers, Georgia (where Fanning was born on February 23, 1994).
How do we know this? Well, on September 22 of this year, Fanning and her younger sister, Elle, were inducted into the Girl Scouts of the USA (San Fernando branch). Dakota became a girl scout, while Elle (who is seven) became a brownie.
Dakota isn’t the only actress in the family: Elle has already made eight films, starting when she played the two-year-old version of her sister in I Am Sam, but going on to bigger roles in Because of Winn-Dixie and a major part in Babel, the new film from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores perros, 21 Grams) and writer Guillermo Arriaga (who also wrote Tommy Lee Jones’ wonderful The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).
Having a famous fellow guide obviously helped the girls of the San Fernando branch because, after welcoming the new members, they were shown a preview of DreamWorks’ Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, in which Dakota plays the daughter of a trainer (Kurt Russell) who helps her dad nurse an injured horse back to health and, of course, see it go on to glory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
Dakota has made one other film since then - a new version of Charlotte’s Web, in which she plays Fern - and is attached to another: The Secret Life of Bees, the new film by indie whizz kid David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Young Girls, Undertow). That should happen some time next year.
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