• Michael Douglas will portray Liberace in a biopic written by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) and directed by Steven Soderbergh, which is only slightly less bizarre than the news two years ago that Nicolas Cage was to produce and star in a Liberace film written by the partners in parody Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (Disaster Movie). Soderbergh’s project will also involve his Ocean’s series producer, Jerry Weintraub, and Matt Damon, who will portray Liberace’s purported lover, Scott Thorson.
• The second deal announced this week regarding a sci-fi version of The Fugitive: this one is titled Karma Coalition, and it’s different from the Tuesday-announced project, in that it involves the end of the world rather than time travel, and it’s written by the lead singer of an indie rock band (Shawn Christensen of stellastarr*).
• Please tell me the Bugaloos are next! Just as Kevin reported from Comic-Con, the Sid and Marty Krofft show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters will indeed be made into a feature film from Universal, which also recently adapted the Kroffts’ Land of the Lost.
• By rereleasing The Dark Knight in January, Warner Bros. plans to make sure Academy voters don’t forget about Heath Ledger’s posthumous Oscar nomination.

From its crash and burn debut at the Venice Film Festival to its slightly more positive but still definitively mixed reception here at the Toronto Film Festival, people who like to spend a lot of time bitching have spent a lot of time bitching that the Coen Brothers‘ Burn After Reading is at the very least a “disappointment” as a follow-up to No Country For Old Men, and is maybe even Exhibit A to the charge that this is a disastrous year for American pseudo-indie film. The former might be true, if one was of the mind that No Country as a masterpiece … which I was not. The latter might be true, if one was of the mind that a star-studded festival entry with little to no chance of impressing the stodgy middlebrow fetishists of the obvious of the Academy is synonymous with failure…which I am not. Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country––it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here––but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion.

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• Wes Anderson has been hired out by Universal/Imagine to script a remake of Patrice Leconte’s Mon Meilleur Ami (My Best Friend), about a cabby hired out to pose as Daniel Auteuil’s pal. If Anderson also directs the film, I can see Bill Murray as either role, but let me suggest that the other be played by Richard Dreyfuss for a perfect What About Bob? reunion.
• Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are apparently going the way of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, but better, for a computer-animated film titled Rango, which will feature motion-capture technology unlike anything we’ve seen before in an animated feature.
• After sparking my interest again with Black Book, Paul Verhoeven is disappointingly returning to the genre of erotic thriller, according to Variety. He’s in talks to direct a movie about an intern who’s doing his boss’ wife, which is of course described as Risky Business meets Fatal Attraction.
• At the midway point of the Toronto Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter notes the fest’s lack of Oscar buzz, except for the awards talk surrounding The Wrestler, Martin Landau (Lovely, Still), Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) and even Dakota Fanning (The Secret Life of Bees).

“I have to say, up until this moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this,” said TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers in his introduction of Paris, Not France, undoubtedly referencing the hullabaloo that sprung up over the past few weeks when the film’s four planned festival screenings were reduced to one amidst rumors of possible legal action from the Hilton camp. But if Paris Hilton (or anyone on her payroll) is suing Adria Petty (or anyone on her payroll) because of this film, she is a) insane, and b) so fiercely committed to putting on a pretty face for the camera that she’ll actually a walk a red carpet in support of a film which she allegedly doesn’t want you to see.

Yes, Paris was in the building tonight. As soon as the emergency exit door at stage left popped open, someone in the audience cried, “Paris!” and a hush fell over the crowd. The 800 or so ticket holders at the Ryerson watched in virtual silence as Paris––head down, face blank––allowed herself to be led by boyfriend Benji Madden to their reserved seats. And then the snapping started. Cellphones, point and clicks, professional cameras—it seemed like everyone had one, and everyone stood up to train it on the rail-thin blonde, panopticon-style. The snapping just went on and on until Powers took the stage and cracked, “Don’t you want to take a picture of me?” (As I write this, an hour after the screening let out, images of Paris on tonight’s red carpet have already hit the wires.)

In the lobby after the screening, a gang of journalists clustered together, and somebody threw out a phrase that seemed to float above the room and immediately etch itself larger-than-life in granite as the shortcut to Paris, Not France’s dismissal: “It’s a love letter.” That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another, is that if this is a film about Paris Hilton at all, whether loving or otherwise, then it’s a failure, because it so convinces that there is no Paris Hilton, only “Paris Hilton”––a brand designed to sell watches and perfume who has assumed the now-empty shell of the once-vivacious party girl. Though the director tries to sell the idea that her subject is a self-marketing whiz who calculatingly hides her real self behind a cover that is deliberately without content in order to make for smoother mass consumption, neither the film nor its star ever convinces that there’s a significantly more substantial real self to hide. But! If Paris is merely using the heiress as an in to talk about the cold, mechanical efficiency of today’s celebrity culture, to give the consumers of surface-as-depth media (that means you, and you, and of course, me) a demystified glimpse at the way our US Weekly is made, at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like process by which human beings are used as vessels to fill an unquenchable thirst on the part of the masses for yet more media about we which we just don’t have to think…well, that would really be something.

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• I’m skeptical about James Franco portraying Allen Ginsberg in the courtroom-set biopic Howl (can anyone but David Cross be cast after I’m Not There?), but now that Paul Rudd, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Alan Alda and David Straithairn are also aboard, it could at least be a decent ensemble piece.
• Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, U2 and now … Blue Man Group? The painted trio is the latest group to be given a 3-D concert film. I wonder if David Cross just blue himself in the hopes of getting a part in it.
• New Line has acquired an upcoming novel from Richard Doetsch about a man accused of killing his wife and his trip back in time — in one-hour increments — to save her. Titled The Thirteenth Hour, Variety says it’s being described as The Bourne Identity meets The Time Traveler’s Wife, but obviously it’s more like The Fugitive meets Memento (meets — hopefully — David Cross).
• New Line is also making a romantic comedy that’s an obvious cross between Slap Shot and The Devil Wears Prada. And, not obviously, it’s based on a true story.

With the first weekend of the 2008 Toronto International Fim Festival now in the dustbin of history, here are a few notes from the ground:

• Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler premiered here last night, fresh off its Golden Bear win in Venice, and nary a negative word has so far been heard. In the interest of time management, I’m going to wait until NYFF to catch it, but a reliable source told me after the screening that the film “is fucking awesome.” Apparently Fox Searchlight agrees––this morning they locked a deal to domestically distribute the film and finance a major Oscar push for star Mickey Rourke.
• A film at the polar opposite end of the buzz spectrum is Spike Lee’s The Miracle at St. Anna, which even admirers of Spike’s provacations are calling a waste of time. Our own Kevin Kelly was at the film’s junket, which he says devolved into “The Elect Barack Obama Show” when neither journalists nor the filmmaker could keep the conversation focused on the movie. Kevin will have a report from the junket coming soon.
• Somewhere in between in terms of audience reaction: Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s my favorite film in Toronto this far, and a small contingent of journalists are also all about it. Still, some are (bafflingly, to my mind) pejoratively comparing it to Margot at the Wedding (the titles share a word, so apparently such comparisons are fair game), and rumor has it that the NYFF selection comittee unanimously rejected it for inclusion.
• Magnolia hasn’t officially announced it yet, but everyone is saying that they’ve settled on a deal to distribute Che. The NY Post says Mark Cuban’s distribution arm is “already booking theaters.”

As a bitchy, comic/melodramatic woman’s picture on the order of All About Eve or The Women, Rod Lurie’s Nothing But The Truth is wildly entertaining. Unfortunatley for Lurie, I think it’s probably supposed to be a serious political parable about This Fix We Find Ourselves in Now…although the inclusion of Alan Alda as a fashion-obsessed high-powered defense attorney does make one wonder. Inspired by the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby CIA leak affair, the film begins with a disclaimer informing us that we’re about to watch a work of total fiction inspired by real events, and this is more than just a token protection against libel. In fact, the way Lurie distorts and embroiders on top of the framework of an actual political scandal is stunning. Drastically rewriting very recent history in order to transform the CIA agent into a dirty-mouthed martyr, the journalist into a 1st Amendment saint who sacrifices her family and freedom in order to protect a source, and the vice president’s chief of staff into a boozy Judas who merely confirms what the reporter already learned from an even more untouchable source, Truth is jaw-droppingly over-the-top in ways that are all good for a laugh, but don’t amount to much in the way of serious critique. Lurie’s shocking liberties might need to be seen to believe, but I’ll spoil them anyway, because they’re just too much fun. If you don’t want to know, don’t click through the link.

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• Bangkok Dangerous opened with only $7.8 million over the weekend, but on the upside it still topped the box office chart and it was still better than Nic Cage’s last non-National Treasure movie, Next. Far more embarrassing is Babylon A.D.’s 58% drop and College’s 55% drop in their second week, as well as Hamlet 2’s 52% drop in its second week in an already disappointing attempt at wide release.
• Perhaps the Bard will have better luck with Paramount’s announced adaptation of the young-adult novel Spanking Shakespeare, which actually has even less to do with the playwright than Hamlet 2 does.
• The obvious pitch: Braveheart in Egypt. Will Smith is playing Taharqa, a pharaoh who led battles against the eventually successful Assyrian invaders, in The Last Pharaoh. Randall Wallace is currently writing a new draft of the project, and hopefully Smith is hard at work on the “Walk Like an Egyptian”-sampling plot song.
• Another soundtrack moment waiting to happen: “Hot for Teacher” playing as Jessica Alba becomes a second-grade math teacher in Marilyn Agrelo’s An Invisible Sign of My Own.
• Just as the latest Coen brothers film is about to open, the previous is back in the news. Unfortunately, it’s because Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for more than $10 million, which he claims he’s owed for No Country for Old Men.

Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.

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• Or is it technically Ghostbusters IV? Columbia Pictures has hired writers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, both of TV’s The Office, to script a new installment of the Ghostbusters series, which was previously thought to be hitting a final note with an upcoming video game (which Dan Aykroyd led us to believe was pretty much “Ghostbusters III”). The Hollywood Reporter claims that while the new sequel may involve the original cast, the main focus will be with a rookie cast of Ghostbusters.
• Paul Bettany, who played a kind of precursor to Charles Darwin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, will actually portray the famous evolution theorist in the biopic Creation (formerly titled Origin), scripted by Master and Commander’s John Collee and to be directed by Jon Amiel (The Core). Bettany’s real wife, Jennifer Connelly, will play Darwin’s wife/first cousin, Emma.
• Albert and Allen Hughes will finally follow-up their 2001 period-set From Hell with the post-apocalypse-set Book of Eli, which will star Denzel Washington as a man “who must fight across America to bring society the knowledge that could be the key to its redemption.”
• Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards script is pissing off the Germans.
• According to Variety, as long as male audiences aren’t too busy with the new football season or summer leftovers, Nic Cage and his latest crapfest, Bangkok Dangerous, should top the box office this weekend.

• Following his five-year commitment to the two-part Hobbit movies, Guillermo Del Toro already has enough projects lined up to keep him busy and us entertained through the end of the next decade. In his pipeline are new, more faithful versions of “Frankenstein,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” as well as an adaptation of Dan Simmons’ upcoming novel “Drood,” about Charles Dickens. Oh, and there’s always that chance of him making another Hellboy sequel, too. Apparently he’ll be able to keep all productions alive simultaneously by maintaining a split personality and an uncontrollable ability to become unstuck in time.
• Remember that TV series that involved five individuals who came together to make one bigger superpower? I mean Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, but if you were thinking of Voltron, you were kinda close. Mark Makowski, whose biggest credit is for directing episodes of Queer Eye, is in talks to helm the bigscreen, live-action version of Voltron: Defender of the Universe.
• Unsurprisingly, Disney’s direct-to-video Little Mermaid prequel, Ariel’s Beginning, sold like hotcakes last week. Now I can still hope for DTV spin-offs and sequels like Caterpillar’s Hookah-Induced Adventures and Song of the South II: Intolerance.

Documentaries and socially-relevant foreign films are sexy, too! Here are my picks for five international hotties who, no matter the plot, create a private porn of their own.

Sociopolitical Drama: Lior Ashkenazi, Walk On Water

Who is Lior Ashkenazi?  I have no idea.  What I do know is that finally getting around to watching American-born Israeli director Eytan Fox’s 2004 Walk On Water, starring the incredible Israeli hunk Ashkenazi as a Mossad agent who finds himself intertwined in the lives of the grandson and granddaughter of a fugitive Nazi he’s assigned to capture, I realized I haven’t wanted to lay a movie star this bad since I first laid eyes on Daniel Craig’s 007.  The sturdy-bodied, raven-haired Marlboro Man with magnetic eyes and a chin both chiseled and Travolta dimpled is so mesmerizing I can’t get his image out of my head – like a catchy techno tune stuck on endless repeat.  The film itself is a fascinating character study for the first hour – until the characters leave the Holy Land for Berlin, wherein the plot descends into ludicrous soap opera melodrama complete with Deutsche drag queens and Jean-Claude Van Damme damage (and Bruce
Springsteen’s annoying “Tunnel of Love” stuck on endless repeat).  But none of this really matters because it’s also got – Lior Ashkenazi!  (And just to make me more hot and bothered he even gets naked, the camera caressing his hirsute chest – before he soaps up another man.  And the character is straight.  Continue reading while I take a cold shower.)

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• As if I really needed a reason to see my favorite film of 2008, Man on Wire, again: beginning this Friday, the Landmark cinemas showing the documentary in L.A. and NYC will include with the film an animated short from 2005 titled The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, which features narration by Jake Gyllenhaal. Although not as appealing as a sing-a-long version (I can’t help but annoyingly hum along to Eric Satie as it is), Magnolia Pictures is hoping for a bump in family attendance.
• The Fox vs. Warner Bros. trial over the rights to Watchmen has been set for January 6, and here’s hoping it’s well-covered by the appropriate stations. I’d like to be able to flip back and forth between the actual trial — on truTV — and footage of the expected comic geek protesters outside — on G4.
• Get ready for unnecessarily computer-generated gorillas and African tribesmen: Stephen Sommers (The Mummy; Van Helsing) is in negotiations to direct Warner Bros.’ new Tarzan movie, from a script by Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) expected to be “an entirely new approach” to the character.
• The latest children’s book series hoping for a Spielberg-directed first film is called “The 39 Clues,” and it may happen with Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can; The Terminal) adapting the initial book, called “The Maze of Bones,” for DreamWorks.

• Earning $14.3 million in its third weekend, Tropic Thunder retained its top placement on the box office chart over the holiday, yet it’s total gross still hasn’t reached the movie’s reported $90 million budget. Meanwhile, five new wide releases (Babylon A.D., Traitor, Disaster Movie, College and Hamlet 2, which expanded this week) performed badly enough to place this year’s Labor Day total at 17% below last year’s. In the end, the slow four-day weekend may have contributed to Summer 2008’s inability to top the box office of Summer 2007, despite The Dark Knight’s now more than $500 mill. take.
• The most interesting box office news from the weekend is Mamma Mia!’s 34% increase over its previous weekend take — despite having lost more than 350 screens — due to Universal’s releasing a special sing-a-long version of the musical to 299 locations. I’d say something about the film being on its way to Rocky Horror-like cult hit status, but at $132.9 million and climbing, it’s already earned more than Rocky Horror has in 35 years and should anyway be considered an actual hit.
• As for limited releases, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter failed to mention that Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django earned $13,106 on a single screen in NYC this past weekend. Meanwhile, one of my favorite films of the year, Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England, earned a terrific per-screen average of $8,488 to gross almost $68,000.
• I’ve always thought Nastassja Kinski was one of the most boring actresses in the world, but at least she would have given Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards that usual casting from the ’70s cred. Unfortunately, Diane Kruger, who’s just plain boring, has instead been cast in the part originally offered to Kinski.