Filming is well under-way on The Da Vinci Code follow-up, Angels & Demons - the movie that will see Tom Hanks make well over $20 million for a few months work in reprising one of his most under realised characters in his filmography.

Hey Tom got a haircut. The mullet piece doesn’t look so bad this time around…

Ron Howard returns to the directing chair, hoping that this follow-up can drum up the same kind of interest that earned Da Vinci over $700 million worldwide.

The first image above shows Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer as Vittoria Vetra, the Italian love interest of the movie. No sign just yet of Ewan McGregor, who plays the powerful Vatican insider who assists Langdon in his struggle against a powerful group who have vowed to blow up the sovereign state.

Personally, I didn’t hate the original. It was exactly like the novel, a bit of light fast food entertainment which you can quickly devour but is never all that satisfying. I’m not quite sure what people were expecting because they got the novel, it wasn’t something radically different on screen. For me, they are just slightly a notch above the National Treasure movies and I know I will have a good time with them.

Look for this one in 2009.

source - coming soon, thebadandugly

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Ewan McGregor is in final talks to join Tom Hanks and yesterday’s casting of Aylet Zurer in Angels & Demons.

McGregor is set to take on the role of a powerful Vatican insider who assists Langdon in his struggle against a powerful group who have vowed to blow up the sovereign city state in the adaptation of the Dan Brown bestseller. It is the role that Orlando Bloom was rumored to be up for last year.

Director Ron Howard has once again gone British for his supporting cast, something he filled Da Vinci Code with. Paul Bettany (who gave a memorable performance as an albino monk), Alfred Molina and Ian McKellen all played their parts pretty well and kept up the interest in the original movie when the writing perhaps wasn’t quite at it’s best.

McGregor will have the same challenge here. His career is quite unlike any other actor out there because he can easily breeze in and out between massive Hollywood productions and small Indie flicks without his Hollywood star diminishing. Filming is set to begin very shortly so we might see more of the supporting cast fall out soon.

source - variety

Tom Hanks will soon work his 3 month (I’m guessing the length there) schedule on Angels & Demons which will earn him the biggest paycheck any leading Hollywood actor has ever received up front for a movie role when he reprises his part of Professor Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code.

And if Angels & Demons makes anywhere near the $758 million worldwide figure that Da Vinci made, then the investment in the actor will most definitely be worth it.

EW have today been informed that Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer has just landed the leading female role of Vittoria Vetra, the Italian love interest of the movie. Zurer appeared as Eric Bana’s wife in Munich and was also in the big cast of this year’s thriller Vantage Point.

If I was being unfair, I would say they have ran out of cash and couldn’t afford to secure a bigger name actress for the lead opposite role - you may remember Naomi Watts was said to have been in the running. If I was being nice, I would say it’s nice they have gone for an unknown who has maybe shown more talent and is closer to the persona they want for the character than a higher profile name.

Zurer’s character is the daughter of CERN physicist Leonardo Vetra. Following her father’s death, Vittoria pairs with Robert Langdon (Hanks) on a journey to uncover the mystery behind her father’s murder and stop a terrorist plot.

The novel follows the exact same plot points as The Da Vinci Code and if you put the blueprint of both books side by side you would see they are exactly the same with the only difference being the names and a couple of slight plot deviations. The same characters, the same beats, the same kind of dialogue is all there… Dan Brown has made a small fortune from writing the same material four times.

Now it will be interesting to see just how different director Ron Howard makes this movie from the 2006 mega hit but critically panned thriller.

source - coming soon

Frank Darabont’s dream project - his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 is once again without a leading man after it’s star Tom Hanks pulled out of the film because of scheduling conflicts. It’s likely his HUGE paycheck role in Angels & Demons has forced him out of what was surely to be a more challenging and worthwhile cinematic project and one that would re-team the A-list star with his director of The Green Mile.

Though it could also have been his long rumored role in Barry Levinson’s Western drama Boone’s Lick and even his voice work on Toy Story 3 which had a hand in this development too.

Darabont revealed the news to MTV…

“Mr. Hanks sadly and regretfully had to back out,” he said. “I was really looking forward to working with him again but his other commitments just precluded it. He had to take a step back.”

“I see this movie so clearly in my head. It’s flowing in my veins,” he said. And just because you think of books first when you think “Fahrenheit 451,” don’t expect something akin to Jane Austen, Darabont promised. He explained, “One character in the script says, ‘It’s not really even about books. It’s about control.’ It’s about the control of government and authority. It’s one of the greatest books ever written. It’s got all that great political stuff underneath the skin of it but really what it is is a great galloping tale.”

“It needs to be somebody like [Hanks] who has the ability to trigger a greenlight but is also the right guy for the part. It’s a narrow target. It’s a short list of people,” Darabont sighed.

Trigger a greenlight?

Man I hate words like that. I was really hoping this would be Darabont’s next picture but I guess it all now depends on whether he can find himself an actor to the studio’s liking.

The Wall Street Journal says the plot for TOY STORY 3 will go something like this…

In Pixar’s coming movie “Toy Story 3,” Woody the cowboy and his toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, leaves for college.

Wait a second - wasn’t that the plot for TOY STORY 2 - Wasn’t the themes of that brilliant sequel about growing out of toys and getting dumped by the ones you love when you grow older?

Speaking of old. Doesn’t it make you feel old now that Andy is going off to college? The kids grow up fast these days!

TOY STORY 3 will be directed by Lee Unrick (co-director of TOY STORY 2) and is written by Academy Award winning LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE scribe Michael Arndt, with the big two - Tom Hanks and Tim Allen (Woody & Buzz, of course!) the only actors as yet signed for the movie.

The film will be released in the summer of 2010 (not as long away as it sounds guy) right after Disney Pixar re-release TOY STORY (October 2nd 2009) and TOY STORY 2 (June 10th 2010) in Digital 3-D, and with that kind of marketing (i.e. getting another set of young kids interested in the franchise) the third feature is guaranteed to make ASTRONOMICAL box office Gold.

And for my two cents. If the film is equally as good as the last two - then it will be cap off the most perfect trilogy of all time. LOTR, THE MATRIX, ALIEN, TERMINATOR, SPIDER-MAN and STAR WARS never had three knock-outs. No pressure then guys!

source - /film

Directed by: Mike Nichols

Written by: Aaron Sorkin

Based on the novel by George Crile

Starring: Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Ned Beatty, Ken Stott, Wynne Everett, Mary Boone Barker, Rachel Nichols, Shiri Appleby, Om Puri, Faran Tahir

Distributed by: Universal Pictures & Playtone

Film was released Dec. 21st 2008

Review by Matt Holmes

Political biopics met with a 30’s style adult comedy satire isn’t something I believe audiences were craving to see and after sitting through a fast flowing 89 minutes of Charlie Wilson’s War, I can’t say I am overly keen to visit it again.

It’s not like Charlie Wilson’s War is a bad movie, far from it in fact. It’s terrifically made from British veteran Mike Nichols whose last film made me wanna pick up a shotgun and violently kill all four leads of his over-dramatic morality play Closer but I was still left confused and frustrated by his intentions here.

Is this movie really just about Tom Hanks travelling the world, doing cocaine, drinking, having sex and meeting people… because that’s just about all I cam remember from this.

Badly mis-cast as the drinking, womanizing but smart and intelligent Congressman, Tom Hanks is Charlie Wilson… the man who pushed for the U.S. to aid the freedom fighters in Afghanistan in their battle against the Soviet Invaders in 1980, a time when it had to be done on the quiet because of the Cold War.

It’s the kind of tale that you just couldn’t make up for a movie without it being a true story, it would be thrown out for simply being too unbelievable to film.

To do this, Wilson has to meet with several people and charm them all so he can raise the funds for such an operation but can’t be too obvious about it without blowing his own cover, because of the serious repercussions such a travesty would cause. To help him are the supporting players, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as intelligence man Gust Avrakatos in another absolutely stellar performance and Texas socialite Johanne Herring (the boring, Julia Roberts) in a movie that breezes by quickly without any kind of purpose or reasoning.

From a script by respected writer Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) I expected something a little more meaty here, away from the glamour that exists within the film. It’s just too formulaic, too single-minded and fails to really delve into some of the true deeper matters and I never felt the importance of the events that he was tackling were as important as they actually were.

Still it’s ok and I left like I learned a couple of things, but it’s not particularly memorable as an entertainment piece which seems to be which side it is aiming to fall down upon. I’m not surprised it’s pretty much tanked in the U.S, it’s subject matter is a tough sell.