With the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in full swing, it’s a nutty, nutty week on the news front, but it seems like its signaling a very healthy film industry of late, perhaps one that is saying the economic crisis and its fall will not deter us. Here’s some stuff that’s out there, that’s frankly not really worth its own write up, but well, interesting enough to note for potential future reference.
English actor Matthew Goode (“Watchmen,” “A Single Man”) has joined Jonathan Teplitzky’s “Burning Man” which already stars Bojana Novakovic (“Edge Of Darkness”), Rachel Griffiths (“Six Feet Under”), Essie Davis, Kerry Fox, Kate Beahan and Gia Carides. Thank Christ it’s not a picture about dirty hippies out in the desert at a terrible music festival. Instead it’s about an English chef attempting to repair the relationship with his son while surrounded by women in his chic restaurant. Wait, we actually wish it was about Burning Man the festival now.[THR]
Gabriele Muccino’s( “The Pursuit of Happyness”) next picture, “Passengers” which already has Keanu Reeves attached as the lead will shoot next January. A futuristic high-concept film (naturally, these days), the picture is about “a mechanic on a 120-year journey to a distant colonized planet in another galaxy, who becomes the first traveler to experience pod hibernation failure. Having woken up 100 years too soon, he is stranded in the world of an interstellar spaceship with only robots and androids for companionship.” So it’s kinda like “Moon” with a sentimentalist filmmaker and a surfer dude. Bummer.[THR]
Roman Polanski’s a two-time offender? While filmmakers in Cannes are signing more petitions to have the auteur freed, his legal woes just got worse. A British woman now in her ’40s claims Polanski sexually abused her when she was a teenager. She appeared in his 1986 film, “Pirates.” [LAT]
