News: Robert Redford

Veteran screen icon Redford hasn’t been showing so much of his usual good taste in picking his roles of late, with his turn as a horse in this week’s Charlotte’s Web not quite what you’d expect from the Sundance Kid.

Next up he’ll be returning to directing for the first time since 2000’s cheesy disappointment that was The Legend of Bagger Vance with another typically Redford schmaltz-fest along the lines of his earlier The Horse Whisperer and The River Runs Through It, in which he’ll also star. Aloft follows a couple of men who track a peregrine falcon across America, so looks to be more of the same.

This is the man who’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for the success of the Sundance Film Festival, for God’s sake, and so in turn for the careers of the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch and Kevin Smith – he should know quality when he sees it, so why hasn’t he directed a decent film since 1994’s excellent Quiz Show?

Well, with any luck, his other upcoming directorial project, Lions For Lambs, could finally indicate that he’s got his film sense back. He’ll again star – alongside Tom Cruise (in his comeback flick after the world decided he was certifiably potty) and Meryl Streep – though this time the material looks both far more interesting andfar more promising, set as it is around the events in modern day Afghanistan, and how they have impacted on United States society. It could well prove to be the first major War on Terror-era movie to join the “Vietnam Vet” genre, of which the impressive likes of The Deer Hunter and Tom Cruise’s best film Born On The Fourth Of July are but two of the most well-known. It’d be nice to see Redford do well again at any rate – even if a side-effect would be the revival of Cruise’s career…

News: Meryl Streep

After her turn in this week’s A Prairie Home Companion, Streep will continue to churn out film appearances like nobody’s business. There’s the usual smattering of heavyweight projects, like Dark Matter, based on the true story of a Chinese academic studying the origins of the universe, Evening, following a dying woman reflecting on her youth and young love as her daughters come to terms with her death, Dirty Tricks, based around the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and fall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Chaos, taking in the effects of rape and prostitution, and the highly topical Rendition, looking at the secret CIA kidnapping and torture of terror suspects.

Less hard-going are likely to be First Man, where Streep will play a female President of the United States whose husband – to be played by Robert De Niro – sets aside his successful business to help run her campaign, and thriller Wanted, where she’ll star alongside Jennifer Aniston as two convicts who stage a breakout to prove that Aniston’s former cop has been framed for drug trafficking.

Despite the high chances of success of any project with Streep attached, the one most likely to make mega-bucks is surely Lions for Lambs, due out in the UK on 2nd January 2008. Directed by and starring Robert Redford, it is set around a platoon of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a Congressman’s dealings with a journalist, and an idealistic university professor attempting to inspire his students. The main reason for its likely success (bar the sure-fire hit-making team-up of Redford and Streep)? It will be Tom Cruise’s first film since his bizarre pre-nuptual antics, and he’s bound to do everything he can to make sure both it – and he – are as good as they can be.