It's Monday, and we have a whole week of work ahead of us, as well as these casting bites, courtesy of Variety:

• Paz Vega, the brown-eyed Spanish beauty from Spanglish and Fade to Black, has found herself her next gig. Aside from The Spirit and The Six Wives of Henry Lefay, she will star opposite Simon Baker in the upcoming Not Forgotten -- replacing Jordana Brewster, who left the project. The film is about a couple (played by Baker and Vega) whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing them to face their troubled pasts and consult a Latina soothsayer.
• I have to say, any gig that isn't CSI: Miami, unless you have a weakness for all things seriously silly, is a step up, and Brooke Bloom is making one. Most recently, she popped up as a grocery shopper in The Brothers Solomon (along with other bites actor Johnson), and now she's joining He's Just Not That Into You. If you've followed Cinematical's coverage of the comedy, you'll remember that it's jam-packed with celebs from Jennifer Aniston to Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long to Ben Affleck. The best part for Bloom -- it's not some no-name part, but the role of Aniston's soon-to-be married sister.
  
• She played Myca in The Crow, was put on ice in Angel, got to be a Serpentine in Southland Tales, and now Chinese actress Bai Ling is going to delight in the joys of a Nevada brothel. She has signed on to co-star with Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci in Love Ranch. And it is, most definitely, a ranch of love, or at least, of sex. It sounds pretty goofy, like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but is actually a drama about a couple who opened the first legal brothel in Nevada.
  
• This last casting bite is my favorite, or at least, it will be as long as Variety has a picture of Growing Pains alum Ashley Johnson up. She's not the star of this gig -- sorry Ashley fans -- it's African-American actress Nicole Randall Johnson -- Mad TV comedian, Louise in License to Wed, and the birthing instructor in The Brothers Solomon. She's now joined the cast of Little Big Men -- the new Ken Marino/David Wain flick starring Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott. While they act as Big Brothers, Johnson will play some woman named Karen.

There seems to be a lot of thrillers coming from the world of independent film lately, and The Hollywood Reporter has brought word of the latest production. Simon Baker, who you might remember from The Devil Wears Prada, will leads a new psychological thriller from Dror Soref called Not Forgotten. Baker will star in the film as "a bank manager in a U.S.-Mexico border town haunted by the death of his daughter. He and his wife approach a Latina soothsayer to find out what happened to the girl, but the old woman's visions threaten to dredge up secrets from their tortured pasts." I guess they didn't think about the fact that a seer could see those sorts of things.

If this sounds like the typical creepy movie fare, producer Donald Zuckerman says otherwise: "The key points in this film -- the love of a family, Latino culture, spirituality -- are interpreted in a way we rarely ever see in the movies." Soref wrote the script with Tomas Romero (THR didn't specify which), and will produce with Zuckerman and Myriad Pictures as the feature sets up to shoot this January in New Mexico. This will be Soref's second directorial feature -- the first was an indie flick called The Seventh Coin in the '90s. While it's not too well known, it did boast a cast that included Peter O'Toole and John Rhys-Davies. Beyond that, he's been the head of a short film called Platinum Blonde in the '80s, and Weird Al's video, I Love Rocky Road. Coins, epic actors, Weird Al, and a short with Elizabeth Berkley? This guy knows how to traverse the seas of cinematic themes!