Bashful Benigni slips out new movie

All of Italy knows when Roberto Benigni has a new movie. Flamboyant as ever, the tireless Tuscan self-publicist has been all over the country's media in recent weeks promoting The Tiger and the Snow, a yarn of unrequited love set in present-day wartime Baghdad.

Benigni wrote and produced the movie, and stars in it with his producer and wife, Nicoletta Braschi. It's his first feature since Pinocchio (2002), which was a hit in Italy but went unreleased here and flopped elsewhere, in marked contrast to the international success of Life Is Beautiful, which won him the best actor Oscar.

Benigni has been out on the streets of Rome with hundreds of actors, writers and artists protesting against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's proposed draconian cuts in the country's arts budgets. Benigni has also been in more familiar madcap pose, crashing the studio of Italy's top-rated TV news programme, stripping off his shirt and draping it over the startled newscaster, and loudly declaring, "Berlusconi has resigned!"

War is hell

While Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez are busy working as co-directors on Sin City 2 for release late next summer, shooting started in Montreal this week on 300, based on another of Miller's graphic novels. It recounts how an elite unit of 300 Spartan warriors thwarted the massive Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. In Miller's blood-spattered interpretation, the story culminates with Spartan king Leonidas riddled with arrows and exacting revenge on Xerxes with his final dying breath.

Gerard Butler is playing Leonidas, heading a cast that includes Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West and Vincent Regan. The director is Zack Snyder, who remade George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and will follow 300 with a remake of Romero's Day of the Dead.

Film of Márquez masterpiece

Mike Newell is to direct the epic Love in the Time of Cholera, based on the celebrated novel by Gabriel García Márquez and chronicling a love triangle set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-20th-century South America. Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Pianist, has adapted the book for the screen. Márquez rebuffed various offers to turn his novel into a movie and finally relented after being pursued for two years by Scott Steindorff, who is producing the film. Newell, whose credits include Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco and the Irish-made Into the West and An Awfully Big Adventure, most recently directed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which opens here on November 18th.

Pluto benefits Unicef

The gala Irish premiere of Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto will be held in the Savoy Cinema, Dublin on January 11th, followed by a party at Lillie's Bordello. Jordan and writer Patrick McCabe will attend, along with many of the movie's large cast, including Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea and Liam Cunningham. Proceeds will benefit Unicef's programmes for children orphaned by Aids. To reserve tickets, contact Unicef Ireland on 01-878-3000.

Luke tells Flynn tales

Luke Flynn will play his grandfather Errol in In Like Flynn, which deals with the actor's youthful adventures on the high seas. It's based on Errol Flynn's memoir Beam Ends, which portrays the fallen Hollywood legend as a swashbuckling 23-year-old daredevil whose escapades included opium smuggling, womanising, bar brawling and gold mining.

A former model, Luke Flynn, now 30, has also scripted a film about Sean Flynn, his uncle and Errol's son, an actor turned photojournalist who covered the Vietnam war for Paris-Match and later vanished on an assignment in Cambodia where, his family believes, he was executed by the Khmer Rouge.

The wild pre-Hollywood years of Errol Flynn were also the subject of the 1989 Australian film Flynn, which featured Guy Pearce, fresh from four years in Neighbours, in his first starring role. Jude Law had a cameo as Flynn in The Aviator last year.