It’s been rumored for a while, but it looks like it’s actually happening, per Deadline: Al Pacino and David Gordon Green are teaming up. As reported a while back, the unlikely duo are pairing up on “Manglehorn,” which will see Pacino as “an eccentric man who tries to come to terms with a past crime that cost him the love of his life.” While Pacino’s been doing some solid work on HBO, it’s a full decade since his last great big screen performance (in Christopher Nolan‘s “Insomnia“), so the team up with Gordon Green couldn’t have come soon enough, especially as we’re hearing good buzz on “Joe,” his next film, with Nicolas Cage. Photography will get underway in October
Meanwhile, Zach Braff doesn’t just have his Kickstarter funding, he now has $10 million in other financing for his “Garden State” follow-up “Wish I Was Here,” and is coasting towards production. And he’s now landed a couple of cast members, per press release, in the shape of “Homeland” star Mandy Patinkin, and “The Book Of Mormon“‘s Josh Gad. The pair will play the father and brother to Braff’s character, a father struggling to get by who loses himself in fantasy.
It’s been four years since “Public Enemies” — though he worked on the HBO series “Luck” in the meantime — but Michael Mann is finally at work at his next big screen outing, the still-untitled Asian-cyber-theft-thriller. Already shooting in China, it was only a matter of time until we got news of Asian actors joining the cast and indeed, THR is reporting that Wei Tang and Leehom Wang have joined the film as a “brother-and-sister-duo” with Tang tipped as Chris Hemsworth’s love interest. Tang and Wang are no strangers to working with auteurs, they previously worked together as the leads in Ang Lee’s 2007 erotic-spy-thriller “Lust, Caution.” Plot details are still under wraps but with Mann said to be working in the same groove as “Heat” and “Thief,” we’re definitely excited.
While we already knew that Paul Walker and the original star David Belle would be toplining “Brick Mansions,” the English-language remake of parkour-vehicle “District B13,” it appears they finally got themselves some co-stars. THR and The Wrap, respectively, are reporting that multi-hyphenate RZA and the unknown Colombian model-actress Catalina Denis have joined the cast. RZA has nabbed the lead villain role as “the formidable drug warlord in the community who is in possession of” the neutron bomb that Walker and Belle are tasked with disarming. Denis, of course, plays Walker’s love interest who we assume works in the tenement where Walker goes undercover. Then, presumably, parkour happens.
Deadline is reporting that “Parenthood” star — the NBC TV series, not the Ron Howard film — Dax Shepard has joined the already-stacked cast of “This Is Where I Leave You.” Shepard’s set to play a “Howard Stern-like radio shock jock” in the Shawn Levy-directed dramedy that includes Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Jane Fonda, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schwartz, Corey Stoll, Rose Byrne, Kathryn Hahn, and Adam Driver. We normally avoid Levy but with a cast like that, how can you stay away?
The Black List-approved and Ivan Reitman-directed football movie “Draft Day” has, according to Deadline, landed the man with the famous drawl, Sam Elliot as the college coach of the top NFL draft pick, the same pick that Kevin Costner’s Cleveland Browns’ GM is desperately trying to secure. Elliott joins Jennifer Garner, Frank Langella, Tom Welling, Chadwick Boseman, Denis Leary and Timothy Simons in the picture.