News: Elijah Wood

The voice behind the CGI penguin star of this week’s Happy Feet really is doing a good job of maintaining a career after his success as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. No Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill-style fall from the spotlight for this young actor, who has already appeared as an underwear-obsessed stalker in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a sadistic psycho in Sin City, and a violent hooligan in Green Street since he returned from his quest to Mordor.

Frodo – sorry – Wood’s next few projects are yet more deliberately eclectic, yet decidedly interesting, movies, that should once again show that there’s much more to this chap than furry feet, wide blue eyes, and a tendency to look a bit pathetic while evil ghost-like things on massive flying dragons whizz around the shop.

Though it came out in France in May this year, and is scheduled for a US release in April 2007, sadly no UK distributors seem ready to put out Paris, je t’aime – a quirkily ambitious project that counts cult favourites the Coen brothers and Gus Van Sant, Scream‘s Wes Craven, French superstar Gerard Depardieu, Children of Men‘s Alfonso Cuarón and Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematographer of choice Christopher Doyle amongst its many directors. Broken into 18 five-minute segments, each overseen by a different directorial team, Wood appears as a young American tourist in “Quartier de la Madeleine”, written and directed by Cube‘s Vincenzo Natali. Co-stars include the likes of Bob Hoskins, Steve Buscemi, Marianne Faithful, Willem Dafoe, Miranda Richardson, Juliette Binoche, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell and Natalie Portman – so quite why this has yet to hit our screens is anyone’s guess.

Wood will also be cropping up in the hugely impressive ensemble cast of former brat-pack actor turned director Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, revolving around the 1968 assassination of US presidential hopeful (and brother of the assassinated President JFK) Robert Kennedy. Due out in the UK on 26th January, the cast is padded out with the likes of Estevez’ father Martin Sheen, as well as Lawrence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, Ashton Kutcher, William H Macy, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Christian Slater and Sharon Stone. Nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this year, it’s definitely one to look forward to.

As for Wood’s other projects, again they are typically diverse and interesting. He’ll voice the young dragon Spyro in the latest in the popular computer game series – alongside Brit favourite Gary Oldman – The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning, and take on the role of a young man forced in to the US army as the draft is re-introduced in the timely exploration of duty in time of war that is Day Zero. Then, due for release in 2008, he’ll play Albert Einstein in the film adaptation of comic Steve Martin’s successful play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, alongside another impressive cast that includes the likes of Martin himself, Kevin Kline, Juliette Binoche, Sienna Miller, Jason Biggs and Ryan Phillipe. Pretty soon Wood’s going to beat even Kevin Bacon for a Hollywood six degrees of separation…

News: Aardman Animations

Aardman and US studio DreamWorks have parted company – pretty much as soon as their collaborative effort, this week’s Flushed Away, was released in America earlier this month. By all accounts, having invested $142.9 million in Flushed Away, only to see the film make $39 million in its first two weeks at US multiplexes, the American producers of the smash-hit Shrek flicks were less than impressed with the more modest showing of their Anglo-American effort.

Dreamworks’ decision to ditch their British partners breaks a five-film deal the two studios had previously agreed, and puts the future of planned projects like Crood Awakenings, a John Cleese-scripted comedy set in prehistoric times and originally set for release in 2008, into doubt.

The current status of Aardman’s other big feature-length project, Tortoise vs. Hare (based on a script by the creators of the Mike Bassett football manager character) also remains unclear. It was originally scheduled for release way back in 2003, and set to star the vocal talents of Bob Hoskins, Brenda Blethyn and Lee Evans, before being put on indefinite hold as long ago as summer 2001, before being revived after the Dreamworks team-up for a 2007 release.

Following the fire at the Brisol-based Aardman’s studios soon after the release of last year’s Wallace & Grommit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, anyone would think that the release of a feature-length Aardman movie has attracted some kind of curse.

Sill, Aardman still seems to be doing OK on the back of last years Oscar-winning Wallace & Grommit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit – which, Dreamworks executives should note, also took a few weeks to really build momentum, but ended up pulling in $192.4 million worldwide… In any case, Aardman have landed at least one lucrative and high-profile project in the US to make up for the Dreamworks fallout: they have produced US superstore chain Wal-Mart’s Christmas advertising blitz, featuring a new double-act, renegade elves Wally and Marty.

News: Bob Hoskins

Playing to type as the seemingly psychotic studio boss in this week’s Hollywoodland, Brit hero Hoskins will be cropping up on the telly in this Christmas’ all-star feature-length BBC One adaptation of The Wind in the Willows as Badger, alongside Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas as Toad, The League of Gentlemen‘s Mark Gatiss as Rat, Lee Ingleby as Mole and Imelda Staunton. He’ll also be returning to TV and period Hollywood for the 1920s-set mini-series The Englishman’s Boy, based on the book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he’ll play a movie producer desperate to hunt down a former Western star. Fingers crossed for a UK screening at some point…

In terms of the movies, Hoskins will take on a more challenging role than usual inthe low-budget Ruby Blue, as an elderly man whose friendship with an eight-year-old girl arouses all kinds of unsavoury local suspicioons when she goes missing. He will then appear alongside Sean Bean in British movie Outlaw, following a modern-day vigilante group out to right the wrongs of an unjust society, with another Brit flick, Sparkle, also due out next year, with Hoskins starring alongside The West Wing‘s Stockard Channing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Anthony Head in a tale of a young Scouser who heads to London to become a rich woman’s toyboy. Perhaps most interesting, however, is Citizen Brando, about a young Tunisian boy’s search for the American Dream through the films of Marlon Brando, which Hoskins is co-producing.