Movie Make-out

Apple brings us this beautiful, affecting trailer for adaptation of Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In the film, Stephen Dillane plays Jakob Beer, “a man whose life is haunted by his childhood experiences during WWII. As a child in Poland he is orphaned during wartime then saved by a compassionate Greek archaeologist. Over the course of his life, he attempts to deal with the losses he has endured. Through his writing, and… the discovery of true love, Jakob is ultimately freed from the legacy of his past.”

Well-shot and featuring what seems to be a strong cast of relative unknowns, this one could be well worth checking out. Fugitive Pieces falls into theaters on May 2nd.

After working together on the acclaimed Volver, filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz have announced a new collaboration, according to The Guardian. The “50’s film noir” drama, titled Broken Embraces, is the longest script Almodovar has ever written and follows “a woman who has a passionate and destructive love life.” Almodovar will detail the production on his blog. The previously announced Almodovar-Cruz project, The Skin I Live In, has been delayed, but Almodovar plans to work on it after Broken Embraces.

According to Variety, Australian filmmaker Shane Abbess’ next project is a huge step up from his previous work. Abbess, whose previous independent film Gabriel was shot for $200,000, which he raised, has been tapped to direct Source Code, a “gothic sci-fi thriller” at Universal. Abbess, who got his start doing commercials, co-wrote, directed and produced Gabriel. It went on to make $1.2 million in Australia, winning Abbess international recognition.

Variety also reports that the upcoming Philip Roth (The Human Stain, American Pastoral) novel, Indignation, has been preemptively grabbed by producer Scott Rudin (No Country For Old Men). According to Variety, the book “focuses on the 18-year-old son of a kosher butcher in Newark who grapples with anti-Semitism, sexual repression and the escalating Korean War as he comes of age at a Midwestern Lutheran college.” No studio is attached to the picture yet.

Again at Variety, we find that the Warner Bros. “period noir drama,” The Kind One now has a producer attached to it. Ridley Scott will produce the film, which will star Casey Affleck. Tom Epperson, the novel’s author, will write the screenplay. It “centers on an amnesiac who finds himself working for a mobster…and falling in love with the thug’s girlfriend.”

M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action adaptation of the animated television series Avatar: The Last Airbender has received an official release date. According to Variety, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies announced the film, re-titled The Last Airbender to avoid confusion with James Cameron’s Avatar, will see release on July 2, 2010. It is the first film to lay claim to that date so far.

Shyamalan, whose film The Happening will be released on June 13, tells Empire Online that he was drawn to the Buddhist and Hindu aspects of the show, noting, “When I realized that is what it was, it really drew me as the template for putting storytelling on a new level. There is a kind of thread that connects Star Wars and The Matrix — the first one. That same thread is in this story, about a forgotten belief system, or the illusion of the world now.”

He describes the plot as being

in a place where there are four tribes of people. And these people each have people within their tribe that have mastery over one element: water, earth, fire or air. They all live in a balance and harmony and once every generation there is born an individual who can bend — that is manipulate — all four of those elements and thereby keep a balance between all. They are kind of a Buddha figure to some extent. The story is about how, in this particular time, this avatar is born into the airbenders and disappears. Then all hell breaks loose and the fire nation basically commits genocide and eradicates the air tribe in the hopes of killing the avatar and taking over control of everything. This child then re-emerges, which is the beginning of our story. He reappears having been frozen in the ice — there is a whole story about how that happens — a hundred years later and this world is all fucked up and he is the last airbender, but he doesn’t want this job. He’s forced into the position of putting the world back together again. It actually has a lot of Shakespearean overtones to it. There’s lots of family angst, and fathers denying sons in different storylines.

The film, the first of a planned trilogy, will be shot in Philadelphia and Greenland. In keeping with the series, which was heavily influenced by Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle), Shyamalan is aiming to “make a live-action version of a Miyazaki film.” Reading the interview at Empire Online, it is clear that he has a deep reverence for the source material. And I have to say, despite how bad The Village was, I have high hopes that the mind behind Unbreakable will lead this project to success.

Related posts: Trailer Watch: Vexille, Redbelt, The Happening (updated)

This isn’t movie-related, although Portishead’s decade-old PNYC (a.k.a. Portishead: Roseland New York) is one of the best concert movies ever made. The downtempo/trip-hop group’s long-delayed third album, unimaginatively named Third, came out yesterday (April 14th), and here’s a seven-song sampling from it, courtesy Current.com, from a recent show in their namesake town:

Variety brings word that DreamWorks has picked up the rights to Masamune Shirow’s classic cyberpunk manga, Ghost in the Shell, about Major Motoko Kusanagi, a member of a covert ops section of Section 9, which specializes in combatting technology-related crimes, and intends to adapt is as a 3-D live-action film.

Steven Spielberg personally stepped into to help land the rights, nabbing it from under Universal and Sony’s noses. “Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite stories,” Variety quotes Spielberg as saying. “It’s a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks.”

The three-volume Japanese manga has previously been adapted by Mamoru Oshii into two of the smartest, most beautiful anime flicks ever made, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. An animated TV series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (in two 26-episode seasons) and a feature film follow-up to the series, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.: Solid State Society, have also been made, in a separate continuity from the films and the comics. Most likely, they’re going back to the source and re-adapting the first volume for this film as it own entity, apart from the other adaptations.

Jamie Moss (Street Kings and the upcoming Last Man Home) is set to write the screenplay. Avi Arad (Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Incredible Hulk) will produce with Ari Arad and Steven Paul of Seaside Entertainment.

Here’s a clip from the intro to the first Oshii film. (WARNING: Cartoon boobs. Not safe for work unless you work at a strip club.)

Related stories: Warner Bros. set to make Akira two-parter (updated), Quick Cuts: Akira, Toy Story 3, Ye Olde Times

According to Variety, scribe David DiGilio (Eight Below) is set to write the screenplay for Dreamworks’ adaptation of Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s graphic novel, The Damned. The graphic novel, originally published by Oni Press, is described by Variety as following “a Los Angeles detective who discovers that a new gang with ties to the supernatural has infiltrated the city.” A look at The Damned’s official website reveals an intriguing cast of devils, demons, half-breeds and more as mobsters and criminals in Los Angeles. Very interesting.

Comingsoon.net has an exclusive with director Vladimir Perelman (House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes) on one of his upcoming projects. Perelman has revealed that he has finished the script on the long-anticipated film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, though it is anyone’s guess how the 1,100+ page tome will be condensed into a single film. The film is in production at Lionsgate, and they reportedly want Perelman to start shooting by December. Angelina Jolie has been attached to play Dagny Taggart for some time, and IMDb suggests that Brad Pitt may be in as well.

And in very minor but personally interesting movie news, Cursive and The Good Life frontman Tim Kasher has sold his first screenplay, according to an interview in the L.A. Times. This is mainly intriguing because of its title and subject matter. The film, which is being produced by indie production company Parts & Labor, is titled Help Wanted Nights. Kasher’s dark pop band, The Good Life, released a similarly titled album in 2007, which was publicized as the soundtrack to the upcoming film. The film, according to the Times, is a look at what happens when “a stranger’s car breaks down in a rural town, and he’s sucked into the locals’ personal noirish hells.” Given the intricate and evocative nature of the storytelling present in all of Kasher’s musical work, this film will definitely be worth a look.

The theatrical trailer for Nanette Burstein’s high school documentary American Teen is up courtesy YouTube, or also see a higher quality version over at Yahoo! Movies. Consciously patterning the marketing after The Breakfast Club is an iffy proposition (although why that film is so beloved is kind of beyond me), but it seems to fit the tone of the film — the obvious intention being that the four main kids in the film are “everymen,” like the characters/archetypes in Breakfast Club.

For a little more about the film, check out this brief interview (with a little extra footage) with Ms. Burstein from the Sundance Channel, also from YouTube:

The arty girl who dates the most popular guy in school (a.k.a. the Ally Sheedy) looks like the soul of the film, as well as the most interesting of the four leads, so as long as Emilio Estevez doesn’t “get high” and punch dance, this will probably be well worth seeing.