Time for another round-up.
1. The Hollywood Reporter says Mexican director Luis Mandoki has been hired to make a family film called The Winged Boy: “The story centers on a young boy in a contemporary Irish village who begins to grow wings and then starts to fly.” The script will be written by former Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills and based on an unpublished story by his grandmother Mary Hayley Bell, widow of the late great Sir John Mills. Could be interesting, since Bell also wrote Whistle Down the Wind, a 1961 film starring her daughter (and Crispian’s mother) Hayley Mills as a girl who meets an escaped convict and thinks he’s Jesus. I note also that the last time a Mexican directed a story written by a British woman, the result was the best of the Harry Potter films to date.
2. The Hollywood Reporter and FilmStew.com note that Batman Begins star Christian Bale and director Christopher Nolan will reunite for The Prestige, an adaptation of Christopher Priest’s novel. Bale and X-Men star Hugh Jackman — oooh, a DC-versus-Marvel showdown! — will play rival magicians in Victorian London “who battle each other for trade secrets. The rivalry is so intense that it turns them into murderers. The title refers to the residue left after a magician’s successful trick.”
3. Leave it to Roberto Benigni, writer-director-star of the Holocaust comedy Life Is Beautiful (1998; my review), to make a romantic comedy about the current war in Iraq. It’s called La Tigre e la Neve (The Tiger and the Snow), and it’s coming soon to Italy. Reuters and the Associated Press have the scoop.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In