Two Irish entries are included in the nominations for the 2005 European Film Awards, to be presented in Berlin on December 3rd. Mark O'Halloran is one of six writers on the shortlist for European Screenwriter 2005, for Adam & Paul, while Ken Wardrop's Undressing My Mother is in contention for the Prix UIP for best European short of the year.
O'Halloran's fellow nominees are Michael Haneke (Hidden), Crist Puiu and Radavan Radulesco (The Death of Mr Lazarescu), Dan Levy and Holger Franke (Go for Zucker!), Hany Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer (Paradise Now), and Anders Thomas Jensen (for both Brothers and Adam's Apples). The nominees for European Film 2005 are Hidden (directed by Haneke), Brothers (Susanne Bier), Don't Come Knocking (Wim Wenders), My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski), Sophie Scholl (Mark Rothemund), and L'enfant (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne).
More remake madness
Is nothing sacred? Producer Jerry Weintraub is planning a remake of Sam Peckinpah's magnificent The Wild Bunch (1969), arguably the greatest western ever made. The new version will transpose the original story to the present and involve a heist, drug cartels and the CIA. It all sounds quite pointless, even though its writer-director, David Ayer, who scripted Training Day, made a thoroughly impressive directing debut this year with Harsh Times, an edgy thriller starring Christian Bale.
Ayer described directing Harsh Times as more intense and nerve-wracking than his former occupation as a sonar technician on a US nuclear submarine. It's most likely that the worst is yet to come when his Wild Bunch comes under critical scrutiny and is compared to Peckinpah's masterpiece.
Shorts for a good cause
Seven award-winning Irish short films will be celebrated at a special event tonight at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre on Foster Place in Dublin. Among the directors introducing their films will be Alan Gilsenan, whose Zulu 9 is showing, and Bernard MacLaverty with Bye-Child. The programme also includes Jelly Baby, Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom, The Ten Steps, Valley of Ghosts and A Dublin Story.
Tickets cost €100 each, which, we are assured, also covers fine wine and gourmet food. All proceeds will go directly to Sophia Housing's new building project for marginalised and homeless people. For reservations, call 01-4738300 or e-mail dluby@sophia.ie.
Handing Andy casting
Guy Pearce doesn't remotely resemble Andy Warhol, but in the belief that modern make-up can work wonders, he has been cast as the New York artist and film-maker. George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl, which shoots in New York next month, stars Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, the model who became Warhol's muse and featured in many of his films. Sedgwick died of a drugs overdose in 1971 at the age of 38.
Among those who have played Warhol on screen are David Bowie (in Basquiat), Crispin Glover (The Doors) and Jared Harris (I Shot Andy Warhol). Pearce is also set to co-star with Rachel Weisz in Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts, as escapologist Harry Houdini, a role already played by, among others, Tony Curtis, Harvey Keitel and Norman Mailer.
An unusual American in Paris
Harmony Korine, the maverick director of Gummo and Julian Donkey-Boy, is preparing a decidedly eccentric new project featuring Mexican actor Diego Luna as a young American lost in Paris and eking out a living as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He happens to meet Marilyn Monroe and follows her to a commune in Scotland, joining husband Charlie Chaplin and daughter Shirley Temple. The communards include the Pope, the Queen of England, Madonna and James Dean.
Some of the film will be set in a Brazilian rain forest, where missionary nuns bring aid to the locals. Denis Lavant (from Beau Travail) will play Chaplin, with Samantha Morton as Monroe and Anita Pallenberg (who herself is portrayed in Stoned, which opens here next week) as the queen.
"I am trying to do things I haven't done before," says Korine. "It's my most ambitious film. I really want to push myself visually." Hmmm.
