Now starring in this week's US box-office champion, The Bourne Supremacy (which goes on Irish release from August 13th), Matt Damon will team up with Leonardo DiCaprio for The Departed, writes Michael Dwyer.
This is Martin Scorsese's US remake of the Hong Kong action movie Infernal Affairs, which has spawned a sequel due for Dublin release in September. Damon will play a gangster who infiltrates the police department while an undercover cop (DiCaprio) joins his gang at the same time. Scorsese's version re-locates the scenario to Damon's hometown of Boston.
Brad Pitt is producing the remake with Jennifer Aniston through their company, Plan B.
Bridges at his best
In a career that has spanned over 30 years and more than 50 movies, Jeff Bridges has been nominated three times for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar - for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Contender - but only once for Best Actor, in Starman, and he has never won. One of America's most gifted, least showy actors, Bridges is on vintage form in The Door in the Floor, which opened in the US this month.
Scripted and directed by Tod Williams, this melancholy drama - based on the first third of John Irving's novel, A Widow for One Year - recalls Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water in its picture of a naïve student (Jon Foster) and an older couple (Bridges and Kim Basinger), whose marriage is disintegrating.
Bridges excels as a vain, testy writer unhinged by the sexual threat the young newcomer represents. Unfortunately, it's likely that the movie has opened too early and on too limited a release for Bridges to be remembered at Oscar next year.
Doogie slays 'em in Big Apple
Most child actors are forced to find a new occupation at a certain age. However, Neil Patrick Harris, who has worked mostly in theatre and TV movies since he starred in the 1989-93 TV sitcom Doogie Howser MD, has been demonstrating a fine singing voice and striking stage presence in Joe Mantello's thrilling Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's musical, Assassins.
The winner of five Tony awards this year, Assassins imaginatively brings together eight notorious would-be killers and would-be killers from different eras, from John Wilkes Booth, who murdered Abraham Lincoln in 1865 to John Hinckley, who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. Now 31, Harris plays the show's singing narrator - and doubles as Lee Harvey Oswald for a sequence culminating in a stunning coup de theatre, as colour footage of the John F. Kennedy assassination is projected on to his white T-shirt.
US to 'Lenin': drop dead
Laden with awards and critical kudos in Europe, where it grossed over $70 million last year, Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! fared below par on US release this year, taking just $4 million. In Becker's clever satire, a passionate East Berlin socialist emerges from a long coma, unaware that the Berlin Wall has come down, and her son, warned that a shock could kill her, improvises elaborate ruses to pretend that nothing has changed. However, the New York Times described the film as a "soft-hearted tribute to - of all things - Communism". In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, "Imagine a film named Good Bye, Hitler!, in which a loving son tries to protect his cherished mother from news of the fall of the Third Reich."
The film's producer, Stefan Arndt, commented, "We didn't realise how touchy Americans would still be with the issue of socialism."
