Did you know that the beautiful city of San Diego has mean streets? City Lights Pictures announced in Cannes today that it has picked up North American rights to Damian Harris' Gardens of the Night, a drama about two young people struggling to exist hand to mouth on the streets of San Diego. City Lights plans a fall theatrical release, according to a statement released by the company.

Gillian Jacobs (pictured) stars as Leslie, a 17-year-old girl who is still dealing with the trauma she experienced when she and her childhood friend Donnie (Evan Ross) were abducted and held captive by two men nine years earlier. The abductors are played by Tom Arnold (!) and Kevin Zegers.

But can Sisto deliver them from evil?

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Kristin Chenoweth is going to star with Jeremy Sisto in an upcoming indie drama called Into Temptation. And finally, a link in my brain is showing up on the big screen. News of Chenoweth (Running with Scissors), always makes me think of Sisto, the Chenowiths, and Six Feet Under, so it's about time the two were combined.

And just like the dead-filled show, this is far from an upper. "Chenoweth will play a suicidal prostitute who confesses to a priest her plans to end her life on her birthday. The priest (Sisto) then searches for her to intervene."

Firstly, I really like the idea of a priest getting emotionally involved with a story he hears during confession. It breeds a million possibilities, but really -- do we need a struggling stripper on the big screen YET AGAIN? I feel like a broken record saying this, but it keeps continuing, so how can I not? There's enough flipping strippers on the big screen, people. Use those creative juices of yours to come up with new material!

The film is written and will be directed by Patrick Coyle, and production begins next week.

I always chuckle when I pop in the Heathers commentary and hear that Heather Graham almost had a role in the film as Heather McNamara (the yellow-colored cheerleader). But she was only 17, and her parents thought the movie was too dark. I wonder what they think of the films she's acted in since? Only a few years later, she became Cooper's love interest on Twin Peaks, and then had a part in the movie -- Fire Walk with Me. At 37, she's definitely not a kid anymore, and The Hollywood Reporter is posting that she's added another dark role to her roster -- a new drug addiction indie flick called Broken.

Graham plays Hope, a wanna-be musician who takes the cliche road and heads to Hollywood to become a star. Instead, unsurprisingly, she works the night shift at a crappy diner. Continuing her path of good decisions, she finds herself a junkie man, played by Jeremy Sisto, and develops an addictive relationship with him as they share heroin. Jake Busey, Tess Harper and Linda Hamilton co-star as "seedy Los Angeles denizens" who cross her addict path. Broken is Aussie director Alan White's first US film, from a script by Jeff Lester and Drew Pillsbury. The film premiered at the AFI fest last year, and now Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's Truly Indie has picked it up for distribution. Their plan is to release it on October 5 in New York City, with other locales like LA to follow. If you end up checking it out, watch out for Bianca Lawson, who plays Mia -- you might remember her from Saved by the Bell: The New Class, or as the strangely-accented second slayer, Kendra, on Buffy.

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*A guest review today, from Nick Schager, of Slant Magazine


Regrettably but inevitably, Waitress's tenacious optimism is partially offset by the recent, tragic murder of its writer/director/co-star Adrienne Shelly, an actress who made her name in Hal Hartley's early indies and, with this funny, charming slice of Southern country life, appears to have found her voice as a filmmaker. However, the bittersweetness that accompanies the film's arrival is, coincidentally, in tune with its story's miserable protagonist, a young, pretty waitress at Joe's Pie Diner named Jenna (Keri Russell). Stuck in a loveless marriage to her controlling, abusive husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto), and prevented from running away by a lack of cash, Jenna is a forlorn woman who sees dreams of a bright future dissipating before her eyes. To cope, she pours all of her grief, longing and sadness for happier times-gone-by into her unique homemade pies, which – described, at one point, as "biblically good" – are concocted with an array of inventively combined ingredients, and named after the moods that inspired them (such as her "I Hate My Husband Pie" and "Falling in Love Pie").

Tending to her louse of a spouse, wasting time gabbing in the diner bathroom with co-workers Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (Shelly), and waiting on outspoken, lewd diner proprietor Old Joe (a consistently hilarious Andy Griffith) while decked out in her '50s-style blue-and-white uniform – Jenna's life is, at the outset, in a rut. Waitress is too, as its early attempts at establishing a mood are a tad shaky, vacillating unevenly between cutesiness and seriousness. That balancing act becomes much smoother, however, once Jenna – after learning that she's pregnant with Earl's baby thanks to an ill-advised drunken roll in the hay – goes to see her OBGYN and finds, to her surprise, that her lifelong doctor has suddenly semi-retired and been replaced by attractive Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion). Though she's been stashing money around the house for an eventual escape, Jenna makes clear to the married Pomatter that, while she isn't thrilled about the baby (who'll further tie her down), she nonetheless intends to keep it. Her plan to disappear into the night, however, is complicated by the almost immediate and overwhelming mutual attraction that blossoms between doc and patient.

If you could somehow remove all of the powerful, heart-wrenching moments from Memento, The Usual Suspects, Saw and Reservoir Dogs, and replace them with a slew of flashbacks, a lazy script and an assortment of unnecessary twist endings, you'd wind up with Unknown -- a psychological thriller that loses its edge soon after exposing a flashy and intriguing premise.

On the surface, it's a fantastic set-up: Five guys wake up in a warehouse, bloody and beaten with no idea who they are or how they got there; the only thing that's certain is whoever placed them in this situation does not want them to leave anytime soon. Two of the men are tied up, one of which is suffering from a gun shot wound. While the first of the men, Jean Jacket (James Caviezel), regains consciousness, a phone is ringing somewhere off-screen. As he stumbles into a side office to pick up the receiver, for a brief second we expect the person on the other end to ask, "So James, which scary movie do you feel like ripping off?" Instead, it's a strange voice -- a voice that seems to know who its speaking to, even though Jean Jacket is clueless ... except for that loaded handgun sitting in front of him.

Odds and ends from Thursday:

• After already lending their voices to the animated short film Igor: Unholy Frijoles, Steve Buscemi, Christian Slater and John Cleese have signed on to reprise their roles for the feature film based on the same character. This past winter, The Weinstein Co. picked up all North American distribution rights for the animated film which follows the hunchbacked lab assistant of a mad scientist who dreams of winning the Evil Scientist Fair. Slater will, once again, voice the lead role of Igor, with Buscemi playing an intelligent, sarcastic lab rabbit and Cleese taking on Igor's evil master.
• New Line is attempting to pump some life back into its remake of the classic 1940 comedy, I Love You Again. The original, which starred Myrna Loy and William Powell, tells the story of a business man who, after building a nice life for himself, realizes he's been suffering from amnesia for the past seven years and used to be a con man. Studio has now tapped the writing team of Bob Hilgenberg and Rob Muir to pen the script, after striking a deal for the remake back in 2004 and assigning it to scribe Andrew Bergman. With Adam Sandler's Happy Madison involved, unfortunately, I'd look for Rob Schneider's name to pop up soon.
• The always reliable, yet often spooky John Malkovich will star alongside Jeremy Sisto in Gardens of the Night, to be directed by Damian Harris. Pic will delve deep into the world of child abduction following an 8-year-old boy and girl who are taken from their homes and told their families do not want them anymore. After being held hostage for nine years, the two are suddenly set free and must find a way to survive on the streets. Production will begin next month in San Diego and Los Angeles.

• Firewall - Like Rip Van Winkle with a $25 million per picture deal, nap-addled gruff boy Harrison Ford has seen his career hibernate for more than a decade now, scoring hit upon forgettable hit. Ford's latest variation on a theme is, like the bulk of his post-Indiana Jones filmography, predictable formula fare, and therein lies its broad appeal. In what ultimately feels like a diluted remake of Ron Howard's 1996 thriller, Ransom, he plays a bank security expert whose family is held captive in exchange for his aid in electronically liberating $100 million. Bad guy Paul Bettany sneers and jeers so much that we know from the moment he turns up that Ford is going to heroically beat him and his dirty, dirty bastards, and our belief that goodness triumphing over ee-vil will be renewed. Able British stalwart Richard Loncraine, who directed Bettany in Wimbledon, paints this one by-the-numbers, and anyone looking for what might be their last Harrison Ford fix before Indy 4 (and presumed retirement) will get what they paid for, though very little more.

According to an interview with MTV.com, musical yeller Fred Durst is very serious about starting a film career - and he wants to direct, dammit. Despite the fact that people are apparently lining up to have him in act in their projects (he was in NBC's Revelations miniseries, and also appeared with Jeremy Sisto in Population 436, and indie film that just finished shooting in Canada), Durst is determined to be behind the camera. Sure, so far his only non-video directorial work was on Unquestionable Truth, a 30 minute short that appears on a Limp Bizkit release. But he does have a couple of full-length features in the works. Though he won't name the films, Durst has long been associated with Runt, a drama "about a high-school outcast," and a thriller called Joe.

And make no mistake: the man is setting his sights high. "I want to make timeless movies. I want to be beside Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson and Francis Ford Coppola. I'm a real director." Dang. Well, you certainly can't accuse Durst of lacking ambition.