Irish Film Board has released a trailer for director Des Doyle’s upcoming documentary Showrunners. Interviews include genre writer/creators Damon Lindelof (“LOST”), Ronald D. Moore (“Battlestar Galactica”), David Eick (“Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome”), Jeff Pinkner & J.H. Wyman (“Fringe”), and Steven S. DeKnight (“Spartacus: Vengeance”).
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Australian actress Isabel Lucas, best known as the Decepticon with the dangerously long tongue and deliciously short skirt in Transformers 2, is set to join director Erik Van Looy’s men-behaving-badly psych-thriller Loft.
Loft, a remake of Looy’s 2008 Belgian thriller of the same name, is the story of five married men who together rent an apartment where they can each take their mistresses to bone. The plan is sheer genius and works wonderfully up until the point where one of the guys’ conquests is found dead.
Lucas will play a naive little plaything named Sarah. She joins a cast that includes Patrick Wilson (Insidious), James Marsden (Straw Dogs), Wentworth Miller (Resident Evil: Afterlife), Matthias Schoenaerts (Pulsar) and Eric Stonestreet (“Modern Family”).
Up next for Lucas are Relativity Media’s sword-and-sandal fantasy The Immortals and MGM’s long-delayed remake of the classic 1984 actioner Red Dawn. The 26-year-old shelia can also be seen in the 2009 Lionsgate vampire thriller Daybreakers.
Loft will roll cameras on June 6th in Louisiana.
Tom Cruise is now officially set to star in Universal Pictures’ live-action Wall-E remake Oblivion. Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy), the film centers a lonely soldier (Cruise) left behind on an uninhabitable earth to do shit work. One day, a woman crash lands on the planet and they fall in love.
Oh, and there’s a roach.
What? Oblivion isn’t a live-action remake of Pixar’s Wall-E? Are you sure? OK, OK. Oblivion is a post apocalyptic sci-fi thriller that finds people living on clouds high above a destroyed earth. Cruise is a soldier left on our planet to fix drones that kill dangerous alien life forms. He meets a girl and rethinks his life.
Oblivion is budgeted at a cool $100 million. Cameras will begin to roll in October.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios held the grand opening today for its newly revamped Star Wars attraction Star Tours: The Adventure Continues. The festivities included appearances by George Lucas, Darth Vader, Jango and his son Boba Fett, Aurra Sing, Chewbacca, R2D2, C3PO, and some Disney character named Bob Iger.
The new Star Tours attraction is presented in 3-D and features 54 different simulations, among them trips to Tatooine, Coruscant, Hoth, Naboo, and an unfinished Death Star! Along the way, travelers may also encounter familiar faces such as Vader, Yoda, Boba Fett, Princess Leia, Admiral Ackbar, and Chewie.
Also cool: James Earl Jones, Frank Oz, and Carrie Fisher all recorded new dialogue for Vader, Yoda, and Leia respectively.
If you’re from Cali and can’t dig up enough druggats to buy a plane ticket to Orlando, FL, Star Tours: The Adventure Continues opens at Disneyland in Anaheim on June 3.
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Argentine actress Mia Maestro (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn) is set to star in Venezuelan director Eduardo Rodriguez’s abduction thriller The Darkness of the Road. The gorgeous 32-year-old will play a young single mom desperate to find her six-year-old daughter after losing her during a road trip.
The official synopsis reads:
A single mother named Siri (Maestro) and her daughter Eve pull over on a desolated road in a moonless desert. Everything seems to be going according to plan as they resume their trip toward a new home… But after meeting Iris, a young female hitchhiker, Siri realizes that her 6 year-old daughter has gone missing.
As the search for Eve develops, a merciless force begins to attack and torment the two women, unraveling a world of terror. Siri and Iris must survive this hellish nightmare if they are to discover the terrifying truth behind Eve’s disappearance…
Maestro has starred in such critically acclaimed fare as The Motorcycle Diaries and Frida, but is probably best known to us uncultured degenerates for starring in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon and playing Sydney Bristow’s half-sister-turned-spy Nadia Santos on J.J. Abrams’ hit ABC show “Alias.”
She will next be seen as vegetarian vamp Carmen of the Denali Coven in the upcoming Twilight Saga chapters Breaking Dawn 1-&-2.
The Darkness of the Road will be distributed by Maya Entertainment, the same folks behind the psycho-bitch thriller Playing House starring the gorgeous Mayra Leal (Machete).
The CW has released a handful of promo images and a trailer to get folks pumped for the new Kevin Williamson-produced tween-friendly witch series “The Secret Circle.” The series stars Brittany Robertson (”Life Unexpected”) as a California teen named Cassie who discovers she’s a witch when she moves in with her grandmother.
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The show’s synopsis reads:
Cassie Blake was a happy, normal teenage girl – until her mother Amelia dies in what appears to be a tragic accidental fire. Orphaned and deeply saddened, Cassie moves in with her warm and loving grandmother Jane in the beautiful small town of Chance Harbor, Washington – the town her mother left so many years before – where the residents seem to know more about Cassie than she does about herself.
As Cassie gets to know her high school classmates, including sweet-natured Diana and her handsome boyfriend Adam, brooding loner Nick, mean-girl Faye and her sidekick Melissa, strange and frightening things begin to happen.
When her new friends explain that they are all descended from powerful witches, and they’ve been waiting for Cassie to join them and complete a new generation of the Secret Circle, Cassie refuses to believe them – until Adam shows her how to unlock her incredible magical powers. But it’s not until Cassie discovers a message from her mother in an old leather-bound book of spells hidden in her mother’s childhood bedroom, that she understands her true and dangerous destiny.
What Cassie and the others don’t yet know is that darker powers are at play, powers that might be linked to the adults in the town, including Diana’s father and Faye’s mother – and that Cassie’s mother’s death might not have been an accident.
The “Secret Circle” also stars Shelley Hennig as head witch Diana, Thomas Dekker (Nightmare On Elm Street) as Adam the eldest member of the coven, Natasha Henstridge as a former friend of Cassie’s mom, and Jessica Parker Kennedy (Now), Phoebe Tonkin (Bait 3-D), and Louis Hunter as members of the circle.
“The Secret Circle” is an adaptation of author L.J. Smith’s bestselling novel of the same name. Williamson, the creative force behind the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer films and the TV series “Dawson’s Creek” and “The Vampire Diaries,” penned the pilot and serves as executive producer.
Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) has landed the female lead in Voice From the Stone, director Eric Howell’s adaptation of Italian author Silvio Raffo’s 1996 novel “La Voce Della Pietra.”
Set in the Italian countryside, the film revolves around a nurse’s (Gyllenhaal) efforts to help the young son of the man she’s sweet on survive the evil spirits that haunt him.
Gyllenhaal played ill-fated Assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes in Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel The Dark Knight and was cast as Donnie Darko’s sister in the 2001 cult classic. She is best known, however, for her role as emotionally damaged submissive Lee Holloway in the kink-fueled comedy Secretary.
“X-Files” star and geek Goddess Gillian Anderson is set to face the undead in British actor-turned-director Mathew Butler’s zombie period piece The Curse of the Buxom Strumpet. The horror-comedy costars Ian McKellen (Lord of the Rings), Judi Dench (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides), and Mark Williams (Harry Potter).
Set in a small sea-side town in England during the 18th century, The Curse of the Buxom Strumpet follows a small group of zombie apocalypse survivors as they attempt to reach safe haven in France. Butler and producing partner Tori Hart are shopping the project at Cannes and hope to start shooting in Scotland later this year.
Anderson, best known for her role as Agent Dana Scully on the Fox sci-fi series “The X-Files,” has not been seen near supernatural forces since 2008’s regrettably dull The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
Michelle Williams is set to stir things up as Glinda (The Good Witch of the North) in director Sam Raimi’s Wizard of Oz prequel Oz, the Great and Powerful. The 30-year-old stunner joins a cast that includes Mila Kunis as Theodora (Wicked Witch of the West), Rachel Weisz as Evanora (Wicked Witch of the East), and James Franco as the soon-to-be wizard.
Oz, the Great and Powerful tells the tale of how a lost snake oil salesman and illusionist (Franco) defeats evil witches Theodora (Kunis) and Evanora (Weisz) with the help of their sister Gilda (Williams) to rule the land of Oz. The film goes into production in July and is slated for 2012 fall release.
Williams, who made her genre debut at age 15 as Young Sil in the 1995 sci-fi classic Species, received an Oscar nomination this year for her performance in the relationship drama Blue Valentine. Her horror creds include 1998’s Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and the slightly better-reviewed 2010 Martin Scorsese thriller Shutter Island.
Imagine having the ability to alternately wake up every morning next to either Laura Allen (“Terriers”) or Michaela McManus (pictured above). Sounds pretty fucking sweet right? Such is the reality Jason Isaacs’ character Detective Michael Britten is living on NBC’s much buzzed-about mind-fuck of a show “Awake.”
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Of course, a series about a guy who gets to bang two beautiful women for the rest of his life isn’t going to score big ratings from women-folk. Things need to be complicated. He needs to suffer. That brings us to the synopsis:
When Detective Michael Britten regains consciousness following his family’s car accident, he is told that his wife Hannah (Allen) perished but that his teen son, Rex (Dylan Minnette), has survived. As he tries to put the pieces of his life back together, he awakens again in a parallel reality in which his wife is very much alive — but his son Rex died in the accident.
In order to keep both of his loved ones alive at one time, he begins living two dueling realities in parallel worlds, which churns up confusion — in one moment, Michael and his wife debate about having another child to replace their son, while in the other reality, he is attracted to his son’s tennis coach, Tara (McManus), to fill the void from the loss of his wife.
Trying to regain some normalcy, Michael returns to police work and solves crimes in both worlds with the help of two different partners — Detective Isaiah “Bird” Freeman (Steve Harris) and Detective Efrem Vega (Wilmer Valderrama).
So, will Det. Britten end up living his life with his wife or his kid and the hot tennis instructor? It’s quite the dilemma. Thankfully for him, one that can be pondered while having lots of sex with both women.