Once you get a taste of Smart People, deal with Eddie Murphy's Nowhereland, take on a stalkerific Sandra Bullock, and then steal Kate Hudson's work, it's time to get into some dark drama.

Variety reports that Thomas Haden Church has signed on to star in a new indie film called Don McKay, with the likes of Elisabeth Shue, Melissa Leo, M. Emmet Walsh, and Keith David. Coming from writer/director Jake Goldberger and shielded by a Screen Actors Guild waiver, the $5 million project just started production in Boston. The film focuses on a man who leaves his hometown after a tragedy forces him to do so. Twenty-five years later, he comes back when he hears that "his long-lost love is dying." Not surprisingly, his return spins "a web of confusion, deceit, and murder." Old secrets never die in the movie world.

Church says that it's a passion project that he's been trying to develop with Goldberger since Sideways. Aside from the confusion that it should evoke from those into Canadian poetry, this sounds like an interesting project -- especially with this cast.

Remember that upcoming thriller about the woman who thinks it's a good idea to starve and isolate herself for a month to rid herself of her mental issues? Well, that's Waking Madison, and The Hollywood Reporter have posted the next round of cast members. Disturbia's Sarah Roemer is already set to star as the woman who "locks herself in her apartment for 30 days with no food, telephone, or outside stimuli," and Elisabeth Shue was cast as her doctor. Now we've got Frances Conroy, Will Patton, and word on Taryn Manning's character.

Conroy, who made a neurotic name for herself as Ruth Fisher on Six Feet Under, has been pretty well-cast as Dolly, "Madison's mother and a religious zealot who has her own mental-health issues," while Patton, who was most recently in A Mighty Heart, will play her dad, who is "loving but emotionally absent." Yet somehow, even though Madison has got a whole life of dysfunction, she thinks starving herself for a month will help heal her. Anyhow, Manning, whose casting has been listed on the film's website for a while, is playing Margaret -- "a fellow patient with sociopathic tendencies who resides at the psychiatric hospital with Madison." I'm not sure how Roemer's character can live in a hospital and an apartment, but we'll see soon enough. (Fie vague, confusing plot descriptions!) Production begins in New Orleans today.

While it might sound like some sort of Adam Sandler comedy, Waking Madison is actually an indie thriller from writer/director Katherine Brooks. A woman named Madison, who lives in New Orleans, is suffering from multiple personalities. She makes her money with phone sex, and "is doing everything she can to lead a normal life." A bunch of things happen to leave her desperate and suicidal, so she locks herself in her apartment for a whopping 30 days to try and heal herself. She has a video camera to use as a video journal, and vows to kill herself on the 30th day, if she doesn't feel more at peace by the end of her isolation. Variety says that she's without telephone or outside stimuli, but the film's website says she's doing it with the help of Dr. Elizabeth Barnes -- either the doc is in there with her, or has contact with her somehow. Of course, since this is a thriller, there's also a "climactic twist."

The way Variety describes it -- as a woman who locks herself away, alone, to cure her illness, sounds pretty silly, but considering the summary on the film's website, it sounds like this thriller will be more than that. Sarah Roemer, who was Shia LaBeouf's love interest in Disturbia, has signed on to star as Madison, and Elisabeth Shue, of babysitting fame, will play the doctor. On the film's website, Brooks says that they've also cast Taryn Manning as Margaret, Erin Kelly as Grace, and Imogen Poots as Alexis. It'll be interesting to see what Brooks makes of the female-centric cast, and I'm curious to see how Roemer will handle what looks to be a pretty intensive role.

While they haven't started filming, production begins in New Orleans on November 5, the indie's website is already pretty impressive. There's video, blogs, informations, chat rooms, forums, as well as a member's area where you can sign up for extra content and to even help pick the cast. It really seems like Brooks knows how to get the message out. Her own story, which is on the site as well, is pretty interesting to boot. She ran away from Louisiana at 16, to go to California with a measly $150, and ten years later she's become pretty darned successful. I, for one, can't wait to see what she does with this!

The original run of The Karate Kid series coincided perfectly with my own middle school-aged dalliance with karate, which is probably why the series has an outsized place in my memory to this day. I didn't last long in karate -- green belt, I think, whatever that means -- but I liked the idea of karate, which was better represented on the big screen than in the nerf-chucks I had to make do with, or by my pot-bellied, Bob Guccione Jr. look-alike karate teacher. For me, the word karate will always be synonymous with John G. Avildsen's lightning-in-a-bottle film about a dumb Jersey kid who moved out to California in the mid-80s, just as it was having trouble reintroducing a large population of unstable Vietnam vets back into the workplace. In downtown L.A., Martin Riggs was taking out his sniper's remorse and dead-wife issues on the entire homicide division of the LAPD, while over in the Reseda neighborhood, the war was still going on inside the Cobra Kai dojo, run by a sadist who probably invented the ear necklace.

The character of John "this is a karate dojo, not a knitting class" Kreese was said to be a burden for actor Martin Kove. He apparently had a real problem playing a guy who corrupts a bunch of kids, teaching them the "way of the fist" and generally preparing them for what could seemingly only be a life of organized criminality. We're not talking about poor kids off the street, remember -- we find out late in the film that Johnny (William Zabka), LaRusso's chief rival, is actually country-club rich -- we're talking about young men who are going to take their Cobra Kai misteachings with them into higher education and then the upper crust of the workforce, causing us who knows what kind of damage. The much-maligned third film in the series will take a stab at exploring this angle -- what exactly the Cobra Kai financiers were trying to franchise -- but not to any satisfying degree. For our purposes, the Cobra Kai dojo is the equivalent of a biker bar that our hero innocently wanders into and asks for a Capri Sun.

Too bad we didn't go to Showest this year -- looks like those who did got treated to some interesting stuff. The people over at Latino Review brought back a whole slew of new posters for some of 2007's most highly-anticipated films like The Golden Compass and The Bourne Ultimatum. I have to say that neither of those particular posters are very interesting, and the one for The Golden Compass should absolutely be scrapped -- even for a teaser poster, it's dull and not eye-catching in the least. I'd prefer a poster with some old-fashioned head shots to a poster of an actual compass. The Bourne poster is a little better -- it's Matt Damon standing with his back to the camera and the not-so-bad headline 'This Summer Jason Bourne Comes Home."

The best poster of the bunch, for my money, is one for the Liv Tyler-starring horror film The Strangers, scheduled for release this summer. It's decidedly retro, with a knife being held in the stabbing motion, like something you'd see in a poster for a Friday the 13th film from 1982. Nice. The batch of new posters -- I have a limited memory, so don't leave angry comments if I'm wrong and they've popped up before -- also includes ones for I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, Evan Almighty, and the Elisabeth Shue film Gracie. They also took some snaps of Silver Surfer standees and other things they saw in Vegas. All in all, a pretty good score.

I don't know how this news slipped past us for so long, but there's a Rick James documentary in the works called, that's right, I'm Rick James. (Reading the article about it, I was stunned to see that James died in 2004. Where the hell have I been?) According to UrbanMecca.com, the movie is being made by HiddenDoor Documedia, and will feature tell-all interviews with celebs like Janice Dickinson, Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg and Dave Chappelle, who was once planning to star in a James biopic. Based on the bits and pieces that HiddenDoor are leaking, there's a lot of dirt in some of those interviews, and "some celebrities may be warned to prepare their alibis now." ("Oh crap. Where was I during the entire 1980s? What did I tell my wife?") Included in the fairly hilarious list of those who allegedly partied with James -- at Studio 54 and elsewhere -- during his heyday are Tatum O'Neal, Linda Blair, Prince, Mick Jagger, Eddie Murphy and, of all people, Elisabeth Shue, who must have been about 17 at the time.

While producer Perry Santos claims that the movie will be a portrait of an era, the reality of the situation is that the studio is doing its damnedest to sell it as a good, old-fashion sex, drugs and "funk'n'roll" (as James himself once put it) story. Which, honestly, is probably the best way to put butts in the seats -- if the movie ever gets distribution, that is.