Having finished his porno, Seth Rogen is now getting ready for that mall cop movie I told you about back in March, Observe and Report. The actor will star as Ronnie Barnhardt, "a deluded, self-important head of mall security who squares off in a turf war against the local cops." This is a whole different project than Mall Cop, which has Kevin James facing a collection of thieves, and that makes it all the better.

The Hollywood Reporter now posts that Rogen will be joined by Anna Faris, Michael Pena, Jesse Plemons, and Ray Liotta. Faris gets to play a salesgirl at the mall that Ronnie lusts after, while Pena gets to put aside some of his meaty roles in films like Crash and Lions for Lambs and get funny as Ronnie's right-hand security man, and Plemons plays another mall guard. Liotta, meanwhile, will play Ronnie's nemesis, a police detective. There is, however, no word who will be fighting with the cop on his side of the turf war.

Even though there is no La Fours in sight, nor any flying fatasses, I think this, along with Zack and Miri, will be good for Rogen's career. Whether Judd Apatow continues his reign of comedy or not, Rogen should have a healthy selection of non-Judd work. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if this film has at least a few brief cameos by some of Rogen's previous co-stars. Production begins this week.

With the news that Battle in Seattle will open the Seattle International Film Festival, and coverage of the recent Olympic protests on every channel, it couldn't be a better time to release the trailer for the protest drama. Movieset is currently hosting the full trailer for the film set during the infamous World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999.

In 1999, the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened in Seattle, Washington for a global trade negotiation conference. Before anyone knew what had happened, over 40,000 protesters had amassed outside the conference buildings and the anti-globalization group, Direct Action Network, had total control over downtown intersections. Unfortunately, the protests erupted into violence and a state of emergency pitted demonstrators against the National Guard and local police.

Stuart Townsend's directorial debut has a huge cast including Ray Liotta, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez, Martin Henderson, Channing Tatum, André Benjamin, and Woody Harrelson. Judging by Eric's SXSW review it doesn't look like all that star power has helped the film all that much. Battle was originally scheduled to be released in March, but has been moved back to September. It makes much more sense to release this kind of 'earnest' political drama when everyone is finished with summer popcorn flicks and are ready for something with just a little substance, however heavy-handed it might be.

[via Coming Soon]

I never thought it would happen, but it looks like Tim Allen has finally gotten sick of his kid flicks and goofy entertainment, and is looking for a little variety. First came the half-family, half-adult Wild Hogs. Now he's got some older fare on the horizon that's being topped off with his feature directorial debut. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Allen will helm and star in Crazy on the Outside, an indie adult comedy that's looking to cast Ray Liotta, Carrie-Anne Moss, Julie Bowen (Boston Legal), and Kelsey Grammer in co-starring roles (they're all in negotiations).

Written by Judd Pillot and John Peaslee, the indie will focus on an "ex-con who finds his life outside of prison to be much crazier, especially once he enters his sister's world." There's no word on who will play who, but if Allen has the con role, he'll get to tap back into his bad-boy early days. Whatever the case, it'll be nice to see him without the Santa suit, and doing something indie with a fun cast. This could be his jump to more work behind the camera, but considering that his only other directorial credit is an episode of Home Improvement in 1999, I don't think this will be a career shift.

There's nothing like a good movie poster to pump up your Monday after weekend shenanigans and hours of Oscar coverage. Over to the right, you can see the poster for La Linea. MoviesOnline says that an anonymous scooper sent them the image, and I'm betting that they got it over at IMDb. Whatever the case, it's looking just as sweet as it sounds.

I first blogged about the movie back in September. While it isn't a recreation of that animated line drawing, it is a new drug movie that has one hell of a cast. Ray Liotta stars as Mark Shields, a veteran assassin who is hunting down Pelon (Esai Morales), the head of the Salazar Cartel, while also getting close to a local gal named Olivia (Valerie Cruz). Set in Tijuana, the film has got these men to back up the action: Andy Garcia, Armand Assante, Bruce Davison, the Machete himself, Danny Trejo, and last but certainly not least -- Joe Morton.

The movie is set to hit screens this October, and I imagine that we'll get a trailer soon. Or, at least, I hope so. Every time my eyes read "Welcome to Tijuana" on that poster, I get a head full of Al Pacino following that line up with: "Say hello to my little friend." Whether it will actually be comparable to Scarface, we'll have to wait and see.

Where could the Italian horror master go after The Mother of Tears? Our Scott Weinberg called it "the master's best flick since ... hell, since at least the mid-'80s." That leaves a pretty big wake to fill, and Variety reports that Dario Argento is planning to follow it up with Giallo, "an English-language homage to the genre that made him a cult helmer." (Aside from meaning Yellow, Giallo is also the word given to pulp thrillers in Italy.) The flick is being produced by the LA-based Hannibal Pictures, and comes from a screenplay by Damned writers Jim Agnew and Sean Keller. But what of its stars? Take out the "i," and you've got one -- Vincent Gallo -- who will be joined by Ray Liotta and Dario's daughter, Asia Argento.

In usual horror form, the movie "will revolve around serial slashings of some very attractive women being investigated by a solitary cop, played by Liotta, who engages in a cat-and-mouse game with the psychopathic perpetrator," Vincent Gallo. Someone must've been watching Dirt last season and thought there was way too little blood when Vinnie came to visit. He's definitely the right sort for this role, and I wonder if his penile fixation will find its way into the flick in any way. It'd fit with the whole attractive woman angle. As for vixen Asia, there's no word on who she'll play -- perhaps a would-be victim that Liotta has to save.

When production gets underway this February in Turin (where he shot Tears), Argento aims to put together a movie that taps into the director's 70s thrills, like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Suspiria. Thoughts?

I suppose that reviewing an Uwe Boll film is a lot like having a fancy restaurant critic do a write-up on McDonald's new McGristle sandwich -- but I'm not "fancy" by any definition of the word, and I've grown madly in love with Uwe Boll's enthusiastically slipshod filmmaking techniques. So to those who thought miracles were actually possible, I have some disappointing news: Boll's latest, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, is every bit as consistently awful as the director's earlier offerings -- only it's 126 minutes long. And that's just not fair.

Also unfair is the stunningly blatant way in which Mr. Boll tries to rip off the Lord of the Rings trilogy in this chintzy little epic. Every other sequence has a musical cue, a costume, a bit of dialog, or a background character that just fell off the Hobbit truck. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Uwe Boll just spent 126 minutes telling Peter Jackson how thin, talented and gorgeous he is. To be completely fair, I did notice a few components (mainly the action scene editing and a few moments of strangely effective cinematography) that manage to improve upon films like Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead and BloodRayne -- but really, you could probably improve upon those three movies using only a cell phone camera and a powerful flashlight.

For a flick that runs two hours, the plot is distressingly skimpy: Villains are ransacking the countryside, so a farmer called Farmer takes up arms, grabs a few sidekicks, and heads out to destroy the evil and perpetually cackling Boss Villain. That's it, really. But we're not going to see an Uwe Boll video game adaptation for the plot, are we? No. We're usually watching his flicks for the sheer unintentional hilarity of it all, but King is even better because it's an ensemble piece! We've got...

Once you get mega-famous farting around with guns and people who talk funny, it's got to be tough to see your career get Swept Away in one fell swoop. Since then, Guy Ritchie has tried to go back to what he does best -- tough guys and crime. Although he's currently filming RocknRolla, his flick about London's criminal underworld, he had already returned to form a while ago with Revolver. It debuted at TIFF two years ago, and is finally hitting North American theaters in limited release this December. The delay could be due to rumors of its crappiness, although IMDb has it resting at 6.2/10, which isn't great, but isn't terrible.

Now we've got a trailer to check out, courtesy of Yahoo. While it starts off looking like this tough-guy chess movie, with dark, pouring rain and sliding chess pieces, it then jumps into typical criminal territory: the games, cons, and fun of Las Vegas. There's piles of money, bets, scantily-clad women, murder, and everything else you could imagine. Jason Statham stars, sporting lots of distracting facial hair, with the likes of Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore, and André Benjamin. The trailer looks like your typical bright-lights crime caper, which should work well for it. That being said, I'm kind of wishing it was all about the dangerous life of chess players. That would be cool.

When Smokin' Joe Carnahan says he's gonna get someone for a part, you can usually take his word for it. Back in April, he spoke with Cinematical about prepping his two upcoming passion projects: an adaptation of White Jazz and a telling of the Pablo Escobar story, and during that interview he gave us the following dream casting choices. He said he wanted Javier Bardem to play Escobar, and we recently found out that's a done deal, and he said he wanted Charlize Theron to play Glenda Bledsoe, the female lead in White Jazz. He also said he was interested in having Ray Liotta play either Pete Bondurant or Welles Noonan in that film. Now, after half a year of waiting, Carnahan has let it be known to readers of his blog that the role of Bledsoe has been cast, although he's being coy about the name. He's also cast the role of Junior Stemmons, a young and crazy cop character. The Stemmons name came up during our interview, but he didn't have his sights set on anyone yet. The rumor mill tonight is saying that Chris Pine may have the role, but Joe isn't saying yay or nay.

Meanwhile, Joe is also fuming at the LA Times for writing that his movie Smokin' Aces was a turkey -- $150 worldwide from a $20 million budget -- and blogging about the fact that he just submitted the script for Smokin' Aces: Blowback to Universal Pictures. He says that with the anticipated strike on the horizon, Universal is anxious to ramp that one into production as soon as possible and he expects more news to develop as early as next week. Stay tuned for more.

First, I must disappoint some of you by warning: This film is NOT some strange remake of the classic line-animation La Linea. Remember that? It's the cartoon about a line that becomes a little guy who walks around, often walking into things and always either making requests of the artist, or yelling at him for something. While we won't see a big line on the big screen, this new La Linea incarnation is looking like it's worth the time. The Hollywood Reporter posted that Ray Liotta has signed on to star in the crime drama with Esai Morales and Valerie Cruz, and they've got one heck of an ensemble cast in final talks. There's two of my favorite actors, Joe Morton and Danny Trejo, as well as Armand Assante, Kevin Cage (the porn star, or did THR typo?), and Jason Connery. Plus: Andy Garcia is in early talks for a small role.

The film, loosely-based on the Arellano Felix drug cartel, is about a lieutenant of a drug cartel (Morales) who takes over business and becomes a loose cannon. (Garcia would play the ill kingpin of the cartel.) An LA-based assassin, played by Liotta, is hired to kill him. Cruz, meanwhile, will play a woman named Olivia, who is a meth addict in Tijuana trying to get clean for her kid -- how she fits into the rest remains to be seen. The feature was written by R. Ellis Frazier, who is also producing with Geoffrey Ross, and will be directed by James Cotten. Production is scheduled to begin next month in LA and Tijuana.

Battle in Seattle has nothing to do with the Rumble in the Jungle or the Thrilla in Manila. It's also not connected to the fictional "siege of Seattle" mentioned in Children of Men. No, Battle in Seattle refers to the real-life riots that occurred in 1999 when protesters sought to stop a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Irish actor Stuart Townsend wrote and directed a dramatization of the events, it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival -- and now Variety reports that ThinkFilm has bought the film for a cool $2 million.

Battle in Seattle stars Charlize Theron (Townsend's girlfriend), Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta, among quite a few others, and takes a documentary-style approach, with multiple points of view from multiple characters. We've been following the film for some time: Here are some details from a year ago; here's more casting and plot details.

ThinkFilm proved to be the big spender of this year's TIFF. I told you a few days ago about the distributor's acquisition of Helen Hunt's Then She Found Me for somewhere between $2.5 million and $3 million. Coincidentally, both films are the directorial debuts of well-known actors. Will Hunt or Townsend turn out to be the next Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford? Time will tell.

For a sizable amount of the male population, this is probably the best news they will hear all day. Us Weekly reports that Jessica Biel has agreed to appear nude in the upcoming drama, Powder Blue. Biel will star as a single mother stripping to raise money to save her terminally ill son. Joining Biel are; Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta (as Biel's father), and Patrick Swayze as the owner of the club where Biel works. Directed by Timothy Linh Bui, the story centers on four strangers whose lives intersect in strange ways on Christmas Eve. According to sources for Us Weekly, Biel will retain final say over what makes it into the movie, but, she has reportedly "signed a contract that explicitly details the bare minimum fans will see - including shots of her breasts and butt."

In the past, Biel had been unwilling to bare it all on screen -- much to the disappointment of many I'm sure. The actress had even commented that she had felt she had been overlooked for roles because of it. To be honest, I don't see what all the fuss is about; especially if you remember Biel's controversial Gear magazine shoot back in 2000 -- it's not like the actress has shied away from showing a little skin. Although, Biel was quoted in that same Us Weekly piece as saying that her time as a Gear cover girl left her feeling "humiliated." Biel even recently told Australia's Sunday Herald, "I wouldn't feel comfortable with the extent of the nudity in Monster's Ball, I would be terrified of a role like that right now." So there really must have been something special about Bui's film to change her mind. Blue is currently shooting in Los Angeles and set for release in 2008.

It was back in May that Erik Davis posted about Powder Blue -- the new film from Timothy Linh Bui, which already set up two notable stars -- Forest Whitaker and Jessica Biel. In the post, Erik said: "Now there's a duo I didn't expect to see on screen together." Still banking on an eclectic mix, the latest name to hit the roster is none other than Ray Liotta, and he's going to be Biel's dad, if you can believe that. This is perfect timing for the actor, who has wrapped production on three new films -- Crossing Over, Hero Wanted and Battle in Seattle, and is currently filming his fourth, The Night Job.

As previously stated, the film follows the life of four different characters who spend Christmas Eve together, kind of like Mixed Nuts without the comedy. Whitaker is playing the suicidal ex-priest, Biel is the stripper, who has a terminally ill son and Liotta is her dad, an ex-con who has just spent 25 years in prison and wants to reconnect with her. There's only one main character left to cast now -- the mortician. Convention would suggest that this role will be played by another man who can pull off dysfunction, but I'm hoping for a woman. We always see the female stripper in films, so much so that aliens who catch our satellite waves might think Earth is a veritable cornucopia of them. So, why not? If Liotta can play Biel's dad, anything is possible.

Don't worry. Ashley Judd hasn't slid into the wide world of Disney talking dogs, even if she has been dealing with some pesky bugs lately. Her border run is of the adult drama variety -- she's in negotiations to sign onto the Crossing Over cast. Earlier this month, Jessica Barnes alerted us to Harrison Ford's casting in the film, and then Patrick Walsh upped the ante with word that Ray Liotta would be playing the villain. Now, with Judd almost on-board, the film might have its immigration defense attorney who is trying to arrange the adoption of a Nigerian girl.

Crossing is an immigration drama set in Los Angeles. It revolves around a number of immigrants from different counties who are trying to gain legal status in the city. The movie will dive into border issues, document fraud, asylum, green cards, work-site enforcement, naturalization, the office of counter terrorism and culture clashing. In other words, the whole immigration kit and caboodle. Writer/director Wayne Kramer is in charge of the feature, and while we already have a handful of big names, Variety says that more are expected to be added since some, like Sean Penn, only have brief roles. I would imagine that this will go into the ensemble Crash route, where there's lots of stories that sort of intertwine, and no main star. (If that's the case, Liotta could be a partial villain, or one of a few.) Whatever the case, Cinematical is sure to have more information soon, since Kramer plans to start filming later this month in the city of angels.

When you're dealing with a first-time director whose only other Hollywood credits are for writing a really lame pair of Wesley Snipes movies, you walk in skeptical yet hopeful, perhaps even actively rooting for the filmmaker to make a leap forward with his directorial debut. Well, Wayne Beach pulled it off. The good news is that Slow Burn is indeed a better film than both Murder at 1600 and The Art of War. The bad news is that it's only marginally better than those flicks, and they both stunk.

A late-arriving and barely warmed-up retread of The Usual Suspects, Slow Burn is eleven flavors of cliche, convention and stereotype in one 93-minute chore of a movie. If this cable-level yawner of a flick has even one remotely new or unique idea, I'm guessing it must be buried in the end credits somewhere. (I left before they were over.) To his credit, Mr. Beach has cobbled together a pretty solid ensemble for a movie of this caliber, and there are just enough good lines and interesting scenes to fill a two-minute theatrical trailer ... but ultimately Slow Burn is as tiresome as it is beholden to a dozen (much better) crime stories.

I love Ray Liotta, but he's never quite gotten the respect he deserves. Somehow, the guy has never been nominated for an Oscar, despite great performances in Narc, Blow, Something Wild, and especially Goodfellas, my favorite film of all time. Part of the reason may be the equal amount of stinkers he's appeared in, although he usually makes even the crummiest roles memorable. Hell, he was hilarious in a Jennifer Love Hewitt movie! He's already been onscreen twice this year, in Smokin' Aces and Wild Hogs, and it looks like for his next project he's going for something a lot more substantial.

The film is Crossing Over, and it stars none other than Sean Penn and Harrison Ford (Jessica speculated a few weeks back that this film could delay the release date of Indiana Jones 4, but hopefully that won't be the case). So who will Mr. Crazy Laugh play? According to Liotta, it's "a really really good movie...It's very much in the vein of Traffic and Babel. It involves border control. It's another bad guy...It's a really good part, and you know, even if they're bad, you don't condone them but you try to make them human beings." Liotta's character in the film takes advantage of a young woman who wants to be an actress and doesn't have a green card. "He uses her for his enjoyment," says Liotta. Wayne Kramer is writing and directing Crossing Over, which started out as a 35mm short. I liked Kramer's The Cooler and Running Scared had one of the creepiest set pieces in recent movies (if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about). I'm curious to see what he does with more serious material.