The Latest in Latino Entertainment News

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to direct ‘X’

Spanish helmer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has made a deal with MGM to develop a film based on director Roger Corman’s 1963 pic “X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes,” a movie from the Lion’s library.

The original starred Ray Milland as a scientist who is near a breakthrough in X-ray vision technology when his funding is cut off. Desperate to show results, the doc applies eye drops that eventually cause him to lose control over his growing powers.

Mandeville Films partners David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman will produce with Enrique Lopez Lavigne. Lou Arkoff will exec produce.

The director hasn’t committed to a film since “28 Weeks Later.”

Fresnadillo is in Hollywood this week meeting with writers for “X” and is expected to set one quickly.

Javier Bardem to join ‘Cartel’?

Latino Review is reporting that Javier Bardem is in talks to join Sean Penn in Cartel.

The movie would star Penn as a man who journeys to protect his son after his wife is brutally murdered in the gritty world of Mexican cartels.

Bardem would take the role of Rafael Castillo, a wealthy but righteous DA who wants to put the cartels away. Castillo shunned his rich family for the law.

Asger Leth will direct from a script by Peter Craig. The project started as a remake of 1993 Italian film La scorta but has since evolved into an action vehicle for Penn.

Sean Penn vs. Mexicans in ‘Cartel’

Sean Penn is in talks to star in “Cartel,” a drama for Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment.

Asger Leth will direct and Brian Grazer is producing.

Scripted by Peter Craig, the mission movie will follow Ed Marker as he journeys to protect his son after his wife is brutally murdered in the gritty world of Mexican cartels.

The drama took root at Imagine as a remake of 1993 Italian film “La scorta,” which followed four cops’ struggle to guard a special prosecutor trying to bring mob bosses to justice. It evolved into an action vehicle for Penn.

Robert Stone and Webster Stone will exec produce.

Leth makes his dramatic feature directing debut on the film. He previously won a DGA Award for directing the 2006 documentary “Ghosts of Cite Soleil.”

The studio and Imagine want to get the picture into production by summer. Start date won’t be firmed until Penn’s deal is made.

Penn has also been in discussions to star with Naomi Watts in the Doug Liman-directed “Fair Game,” a drama about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame that landed at Bill Pohlad‘s River Road after Warner Bros. dropped out. Those talks continue.

Imagine is in post-production on the Ron Howard-directed “Angels and Demons,” which Sony releases May 15. Company is also prepping the untitled Robin Hood film to be helmed by Ridley Scott, with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett starring. Lensing is set to begin April 1 for Universal.

Surprise! ‘Watchmen’ is #1 at the box office

“Watchmen,” the superhero epic from Warner Bros. and its partners, led the movie box-office through another strong weekend but stopped short of peaks hit by some of its predecessors.

The film, directed by Zack Snyder and based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, had an estimated $55.7 million in ticket sales, easily outpacing the weekend’s second-place film, “Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail,” from Lionsgate, which took in about $8.8 million at the domestic box-office for a total of $76.5 million to date.

“Watchmen” was handicapped by its unusually long running time of nearly 2 hours 45 minutes. Longer films get fewer showings in each theater through the course of a day.

The movie was also stung by the ambivalence of critics and fans, many of whom came to it with expectations based on a familiarity with, and often deep reverence for, the complex illustrated story of damaged crime fighters being hunted by a killer.

“Everyone around me liked it a lot more than I did,” said James Thompson, who teaches a course in genre film, television and comics.

Oddly, though, his doubts may bode well for Warner. Thompson said that he and others he knows expected to see the film again this week, to reassess an opinion that he said may have been colored by his own history with the illustrated series. Repeat customers are definitely gravy.

Also in the top five at the weekend box office were “Taken” at No. 3 with $7.5 million, “Slumdog Millionaire” at No. 4 with $6.9 million and “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” at No. 5 with $4.1 million.

The ‘buzz’ surrounding Mexican cinema

We have seen it at football grounds. The crowd heaves in a rise and fall, a giant moving undulation that someone, somewhere, for some reason, dubbed the Mexican wave. Maybe it’s because Mexicans do things big. They grandstand when they come to town. They put their hearts, minds, souls and body language into a thing.

Consider a Mexican wave bigger than any other in recent times. The movie wave: Like Water for Chocolate (1991), Cronos (1993), Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). And larger in impact than any, Amores Perros (2000). Guillermo Arriaga, the writer of that film, a brilliant, brutal set of stories about passion, poverty and obsession, went on to write 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006). It is a screenplay oeuvre that merits, for some fans, a Latin American art throne alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Luís Borges.

Guillermo Arriaga’s new film is directed as well as scripted by him. The Burning Plain (released in the UK next week) is a typical arson attack on the viewer’s mind and senses from a man who, when I meet him in a London hotel, seems to have emerged from a minor furnace himself: a smoky, pale-tanned 50-year-old, slim of frame with a thinning stubble of hair. That he also has luminous, El Greco eyes and speaks accented, mellifluously persuasive English may explain how he beguiled two A-list Hollywood actresses, Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, into starring in a film about self-mutilation, cancer, violent death and childhood trauma.

The plot and its payoff are ringed with “don’t reveal” security tape. Enough to say that the parallel stories of quest set in Mexico/New Mexico and Oregon – quest for love, truth, ancestry, destiny, quest for the consummations that may also destroy us – explore and expand Arriaga’s favourite metaphor for the human condition. Hunting.

“We are all hunters and stalkers. We come from hunting genes. It’s what defines the human race. For me, it’s my antidote against alienation.” Another antidote is cinema and the innovative story structures he began to fashion in the three films made with director Alejandro González Iñárritu. The jigsaw patterns of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel have influenced virtually every succeeding movie with a globalist reach, from Syriana to The International.

Arriaga doesn’t fashion these structures to be difficult. “I want the audience to be actively engaged in the story”, he says, “and sometimes, when you take the logic out of storytelling, people get involved emotionally rather than rationally. They start to trust their feelings. At the same time it allows the audience to fill the gaps with their own story, their own imagination.”

Since he founded a virtual new storytelling tradition in cinema, it is easy to understand Arriaga’s anger when Iñárritu retreated from a claimed agreement to share credit. “The problems began early on after we made Amores Perros. I am not a writer for hire. I do not ‘work for’ a director. These are original stories and when Alejandro began to say, ‘This is my film’, I said, ‘This is not what I think is right.’ We didn’t share the original creative vision. These are personal works that come from my own life.”

They split up before Babel began shooting. Will they work again? “Never. Never. The ways are parted.”

He found another soulmate, for one project at least, in the actor-turned-director Tommy Lee Jones. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada – for me Arriaga’s best film – is a burnished tale of revenge and redemption, turning on a man’s violent death and the pilgrimage of his friend (played by Jones) to bury him in his native Mexico.

The US-Mexican border, with all that it implies about neighbourhood and division, is at the heart of Arriaga’s new trilogy, whose first two parts have taken shape in Three Burials and The Burning Plain. The third part, The Deer’s Sun, set in Texas and across the border, will be about the death penalty.

“We cannot forget that the American south-west was once part of Mexico,” Arriaga says. “It still has Spanish names – Los Angeles, El Paso. So there is this strange relationship between the countries.”

Strange and strained, I say. Everyone seeks a solution, no one finds one. “The solution is very easy,” he says. “Mexico needs work, the United States needs the workforce. Mexicans need to be able to work and go back.

“People get crazy with jealousy,” he elaborates. “My friend Melquiades Estrada – he’s a real person: I named the film in homage to him – met his daughter when she was nine. He left Mexico when his wife was pregnant to live and work in the US. Meeting your daughter when she’s nine, that’s heartbreaking! And every month you send home money to a wife you don’t know is still faithful. And the woman at home thinks, ‘Is he in love with someone else?’”

This pondering of connection or disconnection across spaces, the biggest theme in Arriaga’s stories, touches in turn on the biggest theme in contemporary discourse – globalisation, the linking leitmotif in Babel.

“We cannot be naive. Globalisation is happening, we can’t stop it. But the concept of nationhood is very young. The USA is 250 years old. In terms of humanity, that is almost nothing. Six hundred years ago, Spain was dominated by Arabs. So what defines nationhood?”

Something, some would say, like the Mexican New Wave in cinema. Identity through art. But even this happy convulsion, Arriaga says, was a fluke of history. “In Mexico we had an economic crisis that prevented a whole generation from shooting films. So it was like a boiling culture that was waiting to explode.”

As for a distinctive “Mexican-ness” in his country’s cinema, he starts by waving away the generic cliché for Latin American narrative art. “Magic realism no longer exists. Even García Márquez did it in such a way as to leave nothing for others to take up.” Then he says art is about individual voices, not national ones. “Look at some of the novelists who represent the United Kingdom. Hanif Kureishi. Kazuo Ishiguro. Are they ‘British’?”

He remembers, illustratively, the first conversations he had with Tommy Lee Jones. It was, in the best sense, a dialogue of the deracinated. “He rang me out of the blue, speaking Spanish. ‘ Hola, Guillermo! … I saw Amores Perros’, he said, ‘and I would like to work with you. Where are you?’ I’m in León. ‘Let’s have dinner.’ We met and since I was going to write for him, we quizzed each other about our tastes. Who is his favourite filmmaker? Kurosawa. He asks me who is my favourite novelist. Cormac McCarthy. Favourite painter? Edward Hopper…”

Thank goodness for film, the common language of the world. And thank goodness for filmmakers, who know that in the arts, at least, the border crossings are open for business.

ShowBizCafe on the radio: ‘Watchmen’

We’re being innovative and are going to crossover some Spanish content from time to time for those of you who understand Spanish. This is a weekly radio segment we do every Friday, en español, on the ‘Luis Jimenez Radio Show’, one of the top FM morning shows in New York City. We’re sort of pioneers as this is the only Spanish language movie radio segment tht does it in the US.

So to give you a brief recap of what we spoke about today, we spoke about the Oscar’s and reviewed the new releases ‘Watchmen’.

On the DVD front, Australia and Beverly Hills Chihuahua from Disney.

If you’re interested in listening to the show live, you can log on every Friday at 10:50am to get the movie download via: http://www.luisjimenezradio.com/

Official posters of ‘Broken Embraces’ revealed

November 6 is the release of Pedro Almodovar’s ‘Broken Embraces’ in the US and film products from the movie are beginning to be unveiled by Pedro himself. We just obtained these new official posters of the film which are designed in a ‘Warholesque’ way.

The film reteams Almodovar with Penelope Cruz and the plot itself gives you a little more insight into the design:

Broken Embraces is a four-way tale of amour-fou, shot in the style of ’50s American film noir at its most hard-boiled, and will mix references to works like Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” and Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” with signature Almodóvar themes such as Fate, the mystery of creation, guilt, unscrupulous power, the eternal search of fathers for sons, and sons for fathers.

The international teaser trailer is already available right here on our site, but I am sure it won’t be too long before we start to hear more and more as it debuts in Spain on March 18 and has a slow international roll until its end-of-year domestic release.

Here are the posters – enjoy!

DiCaprio & Nolan to work on "Inception"

Leonardo DiCaprio will star in “Inception,” the science-fiction film that Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”) wrote and will direct as his next pic at Warner Bros.

The project shoots this year and is slated to be released in summer 2010, with Nolan and Emma Thomas producing. DiCaprio’s deal is in final negotiations.

Script has been kept under wraps but the studio calls it a contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.

DiCaprio, coming off “Revolutionary Road” and “Body of Lies,” will next be seen starring in the Martin Scorsese-directed “Shutter Island” at Paramount.

Braga, Rourke, will star in ’11 Minutes’

Alice Braga, Mickey Rourke and Vincent Cassel are set to star in “11 Minutes,” an adaptation of the steamy Paulo Coehlo novel that will be directed by Hany Abu-Assad.

Hollywood Gang’s Gianni Nunnari is producing, with Craig J. Flores and George Waud as exec producers. Shooting begins June 1 in Brazil and Geneva.

Braga plays a naive girl who is betrayed by her first lover and swears off romance. She becomes a high-priced call girl who works at an upscale gentlemen’s club in Geneva. Cassel plays a music exec who gets her hooked on S&M. Rourke plays the club owner.

Italian heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio is in talks to round out the cast.

The book was a global bestseller translated into 40 languages. Abu-Assad, who made his film breakthrough with “Paradise Now,” has rewritten a script by Marcos Bernstein.

Hollywood Gang will fully finance.

Braga just completed the Universal sci-fi thriller “Repossession Mambo.” Rourke is coming off “The Wrestler” and is negotiating to play the villain in “Iron Man 2.” Cassel was seen in “Eastern Promises” and just won the acting Cesar for French pic “Public Enemy Number One.” Scamarcio is coming off the Costa-Gavras-directed “Eden a l’ouest.”

For Hollywood Gang, “11 Minutes” becomes one of four 2009 production starts. It produced, with GK Films, the Martin Scorsese-directed “Shutter Island,” set for release in the fall. It’s in pre-production on WB sci-fi film “The Days Before,” with Timur Bekmambetov directing, and on the Tarsem-directed “War of Gods” with Relativity. Also, Hollywood Gang and GK are plotting an April production start for the Scorsese-directed “Silence.”