EIGHT years after a tepid UK production, an American - and Americanised - remake of Fever Pitch, based on Nick Hornby's novel, opens in the US today. Brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly are the directors of the new version, which features Saturday Night Live comic Jimmy Fallon (seen here last year in Taxi and the Farrellys' Stuck On You) with Drew Barrymore, who is also one of nine credited producers. First played by Colin Firth, the teacher who "measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures" is now obsessed with baseball.
The movie was shot against the backdrop of the 2004 baseball season, necessitating some hasty rewrites when the Boston Red Sox unexpectedly won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. Early US reviews have noted that the film is mature, tasteful and even sweet by Farrelly standards, with hardly a trace of their gross-out humour from There's Something About Mary. The new Fever Pitch is scheduled to open here in August.
Return of big-screen Bean
Simon McBurney, the founder and artistic director of the innovative Theatre de Complicite stage company, is set to make his feature film debut as a director with Bean 2, Rowan Atkinson's sequel to his hugely profitable first Mr Bean movie in 1997. An unlikely pairing, perhaps, but Atkinson believes that McBurney's flair for blending comedy with imaginative physical theatre will be the perfect match for his own physical style of humour as the rubber-faced, accident-prone Mr Bean.
Theatre de Complicite, which has performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival (with both Street of Crocodiles and Light) and the Galway Arts Festival, recently enjoyed a sell-out success at the National Theatre in London with McBurney's acclaimed revival of the company's first play, A Minute Too Late, which draws heavily on mime and slapstick. An actor in his own right, McBurney has appeared in over a dozen movies, including Tom & Viv, Onegin, Bright Young Things, The Manchurian Candidate and Human Touch, which screens in the Australian Film Festival at the IFI in Dublin on April 21st, and in several TV series, including four episodes of The Vicar of Dibley.
Byrne, Linney reteam
Ray Lawrence, the imaginative but less than prolific Australian director of Bliss (1985) and Lantana (2001), is shooting his third feature film in 20 years. Jindabyne is set in the wilderness near the New South Wales country town of the same name, and based on a short story by Raymond Carver. It stars Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, reunited after playing a divorced couple in PS last year.
Lawrence describes Jindabyne as an "adult ghost story", but he is keeping the plot under wraps: "Most films are hyped to the point where they can't live up to it."
Crime time for Scorsese
After his disappointments at this year's Oscars, Martin Scorsese is going back to work and starts shooting his new movie, The Departed, in Boston on Monday week. Transposing the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs to an Irish-American criminal milieu, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Ray Winstone.
Fooled you
For the record, none of the stories in last Friday's Reel News was an April 1st joke, although a number of readers suspected otherwise. However, the six-star review of Sail-Proof Lady was a complete spoof, beginning with its title, an anagram of April Fool's Day.
