Reel Mews

Rip It Up, Issue 237, 1 May 1997, Page 37

Reel Mews

I Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey will star in The Thin Red Line, which begins shooting in Queensland later this year. Penn will also co-star alongside Michael Douglas in David Fincher's The Game ... Gillian Anderson will appear with Sharon Stone in Mighty ... Uma Thurman will play Emma Peel to Ralph Fieness’ Agent John Steed in the big screen version of The Avengers. Fieness also stars in Oscar and Lucinda, directed by Gillian Armstrong ... movies about both Led Zeppelin and the Monkees are in the works . . . Tim Roth and upcoming Crash star Deborah Unger co-star in No Way Home. Canadian born/LA based Unger had some trouble re-entering the States recently, when Customs officials took offence to the contents of the Crash script in her baggage. Meanwhile, in the UK, Westminster Council has banned Crash from being screened at any cinemas in its borough unless three pivotal scenes are removed ... Mira Sorvino follows her co-starring role in this month’s Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion with an action turn in The Replacement Killers... Emilio Estevez has apparently made good again, with the film he forewent his D 3: The Mighty Ducks salary to make. A deal which saw the studio invest said pay cheque into The War at Home (which Estevez directs and stars in, as a Vietnam veteran) has paid off with rave reviews. Other brother Charlie Sheen, however, has made a desperate bid for credibility by reverting to the name Charles ... the latest Marvel comic-based character movie is Blade, starring Stephen Dorff and Wesley Snipes ... Gwyneth Paltrow plays a cocktail waitress-cum-hooker in writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut, Hard Eight. Seinfelds Phillip Baker Hall stars as (according to Details) ‘the coolest guy on the planet’, giving style lessons to John C Reilly, while Samuel L Jackson plays the guy who wants to piss on their parade ... John Singleton directs Jon Voight and Ving Rhames in the based-on-fact film Rosewood ... Kyle MacLachlan follows up his lead role in this month’s The Trigger Effect playing a womanising gangster in the black comedy Trigger Happy, which co-stars Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin. MacLachlan also stars in Mike Figgis’ upcoming One Nightstand... John Turturro follows his role in Grace of My Heart with one in The Truce (which is based on a Primo Levi novel), while Grace co-star Patsy Kensit makes her follow-up in Human 80mb... (just to prove we only read Playboy for the articles) Drew Barrymore’s film company, Flower 1 Films, have chosen a true life story which appeared in the same issue of the magazine Drew kitted off for as the basis for their first production. All She Wanted is the story of Teena Brandon, who passed herself off as male to the benefit of her sex life with other women, until she was murdered by two men who discovered her secret. Flower Films’ next production continues the gender bending bent with Like a Lady — a take on the Pygmalion story with a drag queen in the role of the professor. Meanwhile, Barrymore will star alongside her boyfriend Luke Wilson in Home Fries and Independence, and also has Wishful Thinking on the way ... Glenn Danzig recently finished filming his debut film role in Prophecy 11, in which he plays one of Christopher Walken’s clan of fallen angels. Jennifer Beals co-stars... United International Pictures are bringing the Alfred Hitchock classic Vertigo back to the big screen (tentatively scheduled for a July 10 start). Barf bags may be required for that staircase stuff at this size ... Gus Van Sant’s next film will be Good Will Hunting, which was co-written by co-stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck ... another Hunter S Thompson film is in the works, this time directed by Alex Cox. Early word on the project comes from the good Doctor himself: “Cox’s only real problem is that he’s a stupid fuck.”