Jason Reitman will be staging a live reading of John Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985) tonight at LACMA. The full cast, reading through the screenplay together for the first time, won't be known until they appear on stage at 7:30 pm. Update: At Vulture, Margaret Lyons notes that Reitman has tweeted the names of the cast. "Michael Chiklis will play the principal, Jennifer Garner will play the Molly Ringwald character of Claire, and Aaron Paul will play Judd Nelson's character, Bender. Aaron Paul! As Judd Nelson! They join Mindy Kaling (Ally Sheedy), James Van Der Beek (Emilio Estevez), Patton Oswalt (Anthony Michael Hall), and JK Simmons (the janitor)."
"18 years after the sudden death of actor River Phoenix, Dutch director George Sluizer says he will finish Dark Blood, the 1993 drama that Phoenix was shooting when he died of a heart attack on Halloween night outside the Viper Room in Los Angeles." Ab Zagt has the story in the Hollywood Reporter and the Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth shows us a bit of footage from a Dutch documentary on the film.
More news on upcoming projects: Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest will play Alfred and Enid Lambert in Noah Baumbach's adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections for HBO. Jaume Collet-Serra will direct a live action adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (1988). Matt Damon's directorial debut will be a legal drama he's co-written with John Krasinski; both plan to appear in the film as well. The Swedish crime wave is still on: Kenneth Branagh will likely direct an adaptation of Henning Mankell's novel Italian Shoes.
"Several leading Hollywood organizations representing writers, directors, actors and the group that awards the Oscars, issued a sharply-worded statement on Wednesday lending their support to jailed Iranian filmmakers," reports Bob Tourtellotte for Reuters. Ray Pride has the statements from the Academy, the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild, Writers Guilds, American Cinema Editors and American Society of Cinematographers.
"In its 20 years, this is the most impressive — if not perhaps the best — lineup the Philadelphia Film Festival has ever had," declare Matt Prigge and Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Over the next fortnight, the latest from Alexander Payne (The Descendants), Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss) and Lars von Trier (Melancholia) — not to mention art cinema titans Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (The Kid with a Bike), Hong Sang-soo (The Day He Arrives), Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre) and Béla Tarr (The Turin Horse) — are yours for the peeping." But the festival will also be showcasing "plenty that won't be returning here for a theatrical stint." These are the films the guys highlight in their capsule previews. There's some sort of linkage problem with the City Paper's coverage, but it may well be fixed by the time you read this. At any rate, the festival opens today and runs through November 3.
The week-long Austin Film Festival opens today and the Chronicle's critics pick out their highlights.
The 16th annual Berlin & Beyond Film Festival opens today in San Francisco and runs for a week. Michael Hawley's got an overview.
The other day in Paris, Anne-Sophie Lehec presented MUBI awards to the films at the Korean Film Festival with the most fans. The winning feature is Kim Da-hye's Space Radio and the winning short is Hyun Jeong-jae's Make-Up.
As Amanda Dobbins notes at Vulture, critics' organizations jostling for the earliest possible spots on the calendar to make their awards announcements is not unlike the current race among a handful of states to hold the first Republican primaries of 2012. At any rate, the New York Film Critics Circle has bumped its voting day November 28, which is not only two weeks earlier than their usual date but also ahead of just about everyone else.
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