Here's another casting switch-up for you. Variety reports that not even a month after Toni Collette signed on for a role in Sam Mendes' untitled "relationship comedy,"* she's out and Maggie Pinch Hitter Gyllenhaal is in. The actress dropped the gig when delays messed up the schedule, so Maggie stepped up to the plate. First she replaces Katie Holmes, and now, Collette. Maybe she should also add: "suitable substitution for just about any actress" to her resume. My favorite Satan-worshipping makeup artist has come a long way!

The film focuses on a couple who decide to travel across the US, trying to find a perfect place to hunker down and raise their family. Collette was set to play their friend, a university professor who thinks their child will be dysfunctional no matter where they live. Variety ups the description by saying that she's a bohemian prof who is an old friend of John Krasinski's character. (Maya Rudolph is playing his wife.)

In its vagueness, it doesn't sound like the best plot I've ever heard, but I imagine that it could make for some entertaining cinema between the eye of Sam Mendes and the words of Vendela Vida and Dave Eggers. As for Gyllenhaal, I like seeing her continue to expand her diverse portfolio of roles. Production is currently under way in Connecticut.

*"Relationship comedy" keeps getting used to describe this film. Are the powers that be trying their darnedest to keep people from calling it a romcom?

You know those kinds of movies that you want to see, but you also know that it won't be a fun time at the movies? Well, that is exactly how I felt after watching the theatrical trailer for Towelhead. The film is based on Alicia Erian's novel about a young girl adjusting to her new life with her strict Lebanese father in Houston, Texas.

Summer Bishil stars as the young protagonist, Jasira, whose budding sexuality is either ignored or fetishized by the men in her life. Aaron Eckhart stars as a friendly neighbor who quickly degenerates into someone who should maybe have one of those 'meetings' with Chris Hanson; and the cast also includes Toni Collette as an understanding neighbor, and Maria Bello as Jasira's self-centered mother.

The book caused a stir when audiences were little shocked by the frank sexuality in the book (Jasira is a 13 year-old girl). I don't know if they made Jasira a little older in the film, but there is still plenty in the story to freak out conservative audiences. The film originally premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival and at Sundance under the name, Nothing is Private. I guess they figured the movie is bound to offend people anyway, so why not keep the original title?

Six Feet Under's Alan Ball wrote the screenplay, and Towelhead marks his directorial debut. Some early reviews for the film were positive, but, I'm still curious to see if mainstream audiences will be lining up for what looks to be an equally funny and disturbing film. Towelhead is scheduled for limited release on August 15th.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Towelhead (click on the image to enlarge), based on the popular book by Alicia Erian and directed by the very awesome Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under). With a superb cast that includes Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil, Towelhead premiered earlier this year at Sundance to a whole lotta praise. Personally, I didn't get a chance to see it and have hated myself ever since. Love the poster too; it has that dysfunctional cookie-cutter look to it -- not far from Ball's prior material.

Kim summed it up nicely when she wrote about the film from Sundance: "It's about the sexual awakening of a young girl, and the situations she gets into as she wrestles with her blossoming sexuality. Very intense, but a very well done film that a lot of women, especially, will relate to from their own teen years -- particularly the conflicting messages young girls get about themselves as sexual beings and learning to express that sexual power in a world where a girl who has sex is a slut, but a boy who does the same is just 'becoming a man.' Very powerful film."

Towelhead arrives in theaters on August 8.

The long-awaited directorial debut of Alan Ball does not disappoint. Nothing is Private, based on the Alicia Erian novel, Towelhead, is an alternately moving and bitingly funny portrait of a Lebanese-American father and daughter who are lost at sea when it comes to understanding the country they live in, but no more so than their neighbors. Fans of the television show Six Feet Under will instantly recognize Peter Macdissi, the actor playing Rifat, the father, as the unscrupulous art teacher Olivier who was forever giving terrible advice to Lauren Ambrose's character on that show.

Here he affects the same kind of aggressively clueless persona, but with a stronger tinge of seriousness. Rifat, while educated and Americanized, is also a fierce traditionalist who slaps his daughter to the ground for wearing skimpy clothes, and then tries to recover by telling her "I forgive you." Summer Bishil plays 13 year-old Jasira, who is tormented at school by boys who call her 'towelhead.' One of those boys follows up that insult by promptly walking back up to Jasira and telling her 'You shouldn't let people call you that.'

A weepie examination of female and sexual identity whose worth is roughly equal to that of a used Kleenex, Evening is a schmaltzy nostalgic fusion of clichéd melodrama and carpe-diem lessons about regret, love and courage. Based on Susan Minot's novel from a screenplay by the author and The Hours scribe Michael Cunningham, director Lajos Koltai's (Fateless) feature is a golden-hued eye-roller, full of gorgeous seaside locales, beautiful people, and oh-so-profound issues of life and death, not a one believable thanks to Koltai's insistent sappiness and a story that's familiar, goofy and unbearably corny. A bifurcated affair, Evening begins at the bedside vigil of dying Ann (Vanessa Redgrave), where her two daughters Constance (Natasha Richardson) and Nina (Toni Collette) argue over their differing life paths -- Constance is a suburban wife and mom of two, Nina is an aimless mess unable to commit to the boyfriend with whom she's expecting a child -- while listening to mom enigmatically prattle on about a man named Harris.

Commence flashbacks and the piano-and-flute score, because this soggy mystery is the film's meat-and-potatoes, as Minot's tale goes on to detail the momentous romance between young Ann (Claire Danes) and Dr. Harris (Patrick Wilson) at the 1950s Newport wedding of Ann's best friend Lila Wittenborn (Mamie Gummer, who plays -- and in real life is -- the daughter of Meryl Streep). A Greenwich Village bohemian who pays her way singing in skuzzy nightclubs while dreaming of stardom, Ann arrives at Lila's cliffside mansion with Lila's brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), a cheery fellow who drowns feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy about his writing talents (he dreams of being the next Hemingway) with alcohol. Koltai shoots this swanky setting like he's working on the latest J. Crew catalog spread, his overly sentimental images of the outstretched twilight ocean nicely meshing with dying Ann's faux-wondrous hallucinations about fireflies, butterflies, and a night nurse dressed in a sparkly evening gown. Every moment and aspect of Evening is suffocatingly twee and self-satisfied -- except, that is, for those brief occasions when it's just pitifully conventional.

The 60th annual Festival de Cannes has concluded, and the Palme D'Or goes to ... not the Coens? Despite all the praise and hype, No Country for Old Men was passed over for the prize in favor of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, an abortion drama that our own James Rocchi called "incredibly affecting, magnificently acted and superbly made." Looks like he called that one. The Grand Prix, which is second prize, went to Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, a French-Japanese co-production that Variety says "had viewers and critics streaming for the exits." The 60th anniversary prize, which is third place, went to Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a drama about a teen skateboarder in denial over having caused someone's death. James reviewed that one too, but wasn't exactly blown away by it. "I have to wonder when -- or if -- the fierce filmmaking of [Van Sant's] earlier career will return," he wrote.

Julian Schnabel took the best directing prize for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which has been snapped up by Miramax. Get a load of this line, again from Variety: "Perhaps imagining he was at the Oscars, Schnabel overstayed his welcome at the spotlight at least three times over, shaking the hand of every jury member, making his cast stand up and rambling as he thanked everyone he could think of." The screenplay prize went to The Edge of Heaven, from a Turkish-German filmmaker, while the best actress prize went to Jeon Do-yeon, a South Korean actress who appeared in Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine. Best actor went to Konstantin Lavronenko for The Banishment. The jury prize was a tie vote between Persepolis, a French-U.S. production and Silent Light, about a mennonite community in Mexico.

At the jury press conference following the prizes, Stephen Frears was asked how Javier Bardem didn't win the best actor prize, Frears joked: "He's terrible, absolutely dreadful ... he's a wonderful actor. Why did we not give it to Javier? He owes me 500 pounds." Sarah Polley and Toni Collette were also asked to defend their odd choices, with Polley saying "I've never seen so many people listen to each other so closely." The jury also included Maggie Cheung, Maria de Medeiros, Abderrahmane Sissako, Marco Bellocchio and Orham Pamuk. If you want the full rundown, you can go to Variety and check it out.

We hear it on the news twice a week, it seems: A young dead woman has been found on the road, in a ditch, back behind someone's barn, etc. We give the news a casual listen, perhaps offer a brief bit of sympathy to the girl's family, and then throw our focus back into our own lives. The world can be an ugly place; best not to dwell on the more horrific aspects of it ... until we have to.

Karen Moncrieff's follow-up to 2002's Blue Car is a decidedly unique take on the "serial killer movie." The Dead Girl is not a mystery, nor is it really a thriller. It's more of an anthology piece that introduces us to a collection of people on the periphery of a horrible murder. It's not a movie about the killer, per se, nor is it a character study of the victim ... except when it is. It's a tough movie to describe, a tougher movie to "enjoy," but an easy one to recommend -- provided you don't mind a little darkness, gloom and sobriety mixed in with your indie-style ensemble pieces.

While most of Hollywood's big shots are likely up in Toronto for the film festival, producer Brian Grazer is reportedly hanging around NYC for Fashion Week. According to Radar, he was in Bryant Park on Sunday taking in the shows of Diane von Furstenberg and Naeem Khan, and sources say he wasn't there to merely check out the new collections. Grazer may also be doing some research for a new film about Vivienne Westwood, the designer who helped pioneer the punk look in the late '70s with then-husband Malcolm McLaren. At this time we can only speculate as to whether the project will be a biopic or a documentary -- Grazer recently spotlighted '70s decadence with the doc Inside Deep Throat -- or even if it has anything to do with the punk movement at all. But, considering Grazer's own hair could be compared to Sid Vicious', I can only hope that he's curious about how safety pins and torn clothes were given their fashionable beginning.

In the event the film is a dramatic telling of her younger days, I can imagine a few actresses in the role, including Toni Collette, Kim Gordon, and my personal choice, Cara Seymour. Then, Grazer could have Judi Dench or Maggie Smith as the older Westwood. I'd love to see either one of them take on the hair and wardrobe for the part.

[via Hollywood Wiretap]

After the Oscar-winning success of his first produced screenplay, American Beauty, writer Alan Ball instantly became a hot commodity, 'round Hollywood way. Despite the massive piles of money that were surely used to tempt him, Ball returned to his roots in TV, creating and then writing and directing several episodes of the critically adored Six Feet Under. Now that the series is over, though, Ball is ready to go back to the movies -- and he's directing this time, too.

According to this morning's Variety, Ball's long simmering, still untitled directorial debut has finally secured both financing and a cast, and will go into production in LA next month. The screenplay, also by Ball, was inspired by a novel called Towelhead, and its story revolves around "Jasira, who struggles with identity and sexual issues as the daughter of a Lebanese-American father and an American mother in Texas during the Gulf War." Though the girl will be played by a relative unknown (Summer Bishil) and her father by Six Feet Under vet Peter Macdissi, there are in fact several big names in the cast, including Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette and Maria Bello.

You may not know this about me, but I am addicted to IMDb. Every now and then, as I'm sitting here working late on a Saturday night, I stop and think to myself, "Gee, I wonder what Brittany Murphy is up to next?" Actually, it's not always Murphy. Sometimes I'll get the urge to go IMDb Jennifer Jason Leigh, or Sarah Polley, or even Juliette Lewis -- heck, once I even checked in on old Corey Haim. Once I get the idea in my head, it's stuck there like a bad '80s rock ballad, and until I give in and satisfy that IMDb jones, it just sits there in my brain, nagging at me.

Anyhow, this time it was Brittany Murphy for some reason -- perhaps because Chris was recently ragging on her Tinker Bell gig -- so I checked her out. And, holy cow! She's got a LOT on her plate these days. In addition to aforesaid Tinker Bell madness, Murphy has no fewer than five films on her slate (if you count the voice work in Happy Feet, that animated penguin flick from Warner Bros.) -- and some of them actually look to be (potentially) good.