The Associate - Variety reports screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) has been tapped to adapt the John Grisham novel as a starring vehicle for Shia LaBeouf with Paramount Pictures distributing. "LaBeouf will play a Yale Law School student with a sordid secret that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail. He's manipulated into taking a job at a law firm and working on a multibillion-dollar lawsuit." Doesn't sound particularly exciting, but I really enjoyed Matt Damon in John Grisham's The Rainmaker, so this could work out.

The Expendables - Ain't It Cool News got info that Arnold Schwarzeneggar is joining the upcoming action bonanza written and directed by Sylvester Stallone. Unfortunately he won't be joining the titular team, but will rather be playing himself as California governor. The Expendables tells the story of a covert team sent in to South Africa to take out a tyrannical dictator. Rest of the cast already includes Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Forest Whittaker, Dolph Lundgren and Eric Roberts. Sounds like a good old fashioned action flick in the same vein as Rambo.

The Days Before - Production Weekly reports via Twitter that negotiations are underway to have Robert Downey, Jr and Reese Witherspoon in the Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) directed film. Story is best described as a sci-fi Groundhog Day where an alien race is traveling through time and destroying the human race yesterday, and the yesterday after that. So everyday the human race was destroyed yesterday, and today and one man has to convince the world each day that they will be destroyed, over and over again. Yeah, I'm confused too, but it sounds like an very intriguing concept.

Labels: Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Cinema Bits, Mickey Rourke, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Downey Jr, Shia LaBeouf, Sylvester Stallone, The Associate, The Days Before, The Expendables, Timur Bekmambetov

This past weekend I had the chance to check out Henry Selick's Coraline in 3D (my review is on the way), and I was mesmerized by a trailer that I hadn't seen before. The movie is called 9 and it comes from producers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of last summer's Wanted). An official plot synopsis follows below courtesy of IMDB.

9 takes place in a world parallel to our own, in which the very legacy of humanity is threatened. A group of sapient rag dolls, living a post-apocalyptic existence find one of their own, 9 (Elijah Wood), who displays leadership qualities that may help them to survive.

All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they’ll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them.

The conflicted, but resilient group includes 1 (Christopher Plummer), a domineering war veteran; 2 (Martin Landau), an aged inventor; 5 (John C. Reilly), a stalwart mechanic; 6 (Crispin Glover), a visionary and artist; and 7 (Jennifer Connelly), a brave warrior.

The film is based off of a 2005 Academy Award nominated short film by Shane Acker (a former artist for Peter Jackson's WETA Digital, the effects team behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, who is also directing the feature length version) and you can check out the original short here. These characters are very similar to the Sackboy characters created for the Playstation 3 game Little Big Planet.

The trailer for the feature length film is action packed, and looks like one of the most original concepts for a computer animated film outside of every film Pixar tosses at us. This is definitely one of the few that could hold a stick to Pixar's seemingly never-ending hits. On a personal note, what really cranked this trailer up to 11 for me was the use of rock band Coheed and Cambria's song Welcome Home throughout nearly the entire trailer. We've embedded the trailer below. What do you guys think?

Labels: 9, Christopher Plummer, Crispin Glover, Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau, Nine, Shane Acker, Tim Burton, Timur Bekmambetov, Trailers