AS REMAKES continue to proliferate, next up is St Trinian's, a contemporary spin on the entertaining British comedy franchise featuring unruly schoolgirls at the eponymous institution.
The casting is promising: Rupert Everett will take on Alastair Sim's dual role as the headmistress and her unscrupulous brother, with Emily Watson as the police officer originally played by Joyce Grenfell, and Russell Brand in the George Cole role as small-time crook Flash Harry. Jodie Whittaker, from Venus, plays one of the schoolgirls, and there will be cameos from Stephen Fry and Richard E Grant.
Producer Barnaby Thomson and director Oliver Parker, who collaborated on the Oscar Wilde adaptations An Ideal Husband (1999) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), are reuniting to co-direct and co-produce St Trinian's, which starts shooting on Monday week.
Inspired by Ronald Searle's books and cartoons, the original Belles of St Trinian's (1954), spawned three amusing sequels over the next 12 years. But, in 1980, Frank Launder, the writer-director of all four movies, misfired in attempting to revive the series with The Wildcats of St Trinian's, which was to be his final film.
Future shock in the North
The Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission has announced that an elaborate fantasy science-fiction adventure movie, City of Ember, will be shot entirely in the region over 16 weeks in the summer. The film is set in the future, as two teens try to save the underground city of Ember, where people have moved to avoid the toxic atmosphere.
The director is Gil Kenan, who made Monster House, one of last year's best animated features. Caroline Thompson, who scripted Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, has written the screenplay based on a book by Jeanne DuPrau. Pre-production is already under way to transform the Paint Hall in Belfast's Titanic Quarter into the city of Ember.
Harry potters about
Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe, now appearing in the London stage revival of Equus, will star in the UTV drama My Boy Jack, to be shot in Dublin over the summer. The plot has author Rudyard Kipling and his wife searching for their 17-year-old son (Radcliffe) when he goes missing during the second World War.
Brian Kirk, who made his feature film debut last year with Middletown, will direct the film, which will be produced by James Flynn of Octagon Films and Douglas Rae of UK-based Ecosse Films. Their latest production, Becoming Jane, opens here today.
Radcliffe, meanwhile, will next be seen in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which opens on July 13th.
Geezers not lacking for work
Following his remarkable companion films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the venerable Clint Eastwood will next direct The Changeling, set in 1920s Los Angeles. Angelina Jolie stars as a woman whose child is abducted. When the boy is found, she begins to doubt if he is her son and she suspects corruption within the LAPD.
Eastwood, who turns 77 in May, is a mere whippersnapper compared with Manoel de Oliveira, the prolific Portuguese film-maker who turns 99 later this year and started out working on documentary shorts in 1931. He is now shooting Christopher Columbus: The Enigma, based on a book claiming that that the explorer was born in the Portuguese hinterland of Cuba.
Barley and shorts in London
For the weekend that's in it, Reel Ireland will present a programme of movies at the Prince Charles cinema in London on Sunday. The Wind That Shakes the Barley will be screened, preceded by three short films: Hugh Farley's An Díog Is Faide (The Longest Ditch), Ken Wardrop's Undressing My Mother, and David P Kelly's I Only Came Over for a While. The latter features interviews with elderly Irish people who emigrated to the UK between the 1940s and the 1960s. Admission to all films is free on a first come, first served basis. www.reelireland.ie
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