On the one side, there's Howard Marks -- international drug smuggler and U.K. spy. On the other, there's some faces that you might not expect to find in international drug and spy territory.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny, and David Thewlis are wrapping up negotiations to star in Mr. Nice -- Bernard Rose's adaptation of Marks' autobiography of the same name. Ifans, who long ago played Puff in Michel Gondry's Human Nature, will head the cast as Marks. Once Britain's most-wanted man, he morphed from Oxford grad and teacher into a drug smuggler -- all to impress his wife Judy (Sevigny). Thewlis comes into the picture as an Irish Republican Army boss he asks for a job, which leads Marks to his other gig -- informant for British intelligence.

But wait -- don't expect lots of violence and action -- according to Wikipedia, Marks says that he never used violence during his smuggling career. But with these actors, and the director behind Immortal Beloved, methinks the action won't matter.

Occasionally Hollywood cobbles together random members of the A-list to play family members on film, even if their genes obviously come from opposite ends of the earth. If the actors are good enough or if the chemistry is there, sometimes the combo can work, such as Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Cassandra's Dream. Other times, it stretches credibility, such as Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited. My all-time favorite oddball casting is in Sidney Lumet's Family Business (1989), with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick playing grandfather, father and son. (Huh?) At the same time, there are actor combos out there who just scream to be paired up in a family capacity. Remember Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick in Something to Talk About? Well, neither do I, but that pairing was perfect. Here are a few others that could work:

1. Helen Hunt & Leelee Sobieski

They're so similar it's spooky, from their hair and foreheads, right down to the tonal quality of their voices. Anybody check the hospital records for mixed-up babies? (Helen is about 20 years older.) Not too long ago, both careers hit a peak: Helen won an Oscar while Leelee was working with Stanley Kubrick and playing Joan of Arc on TV. Now they're both in decline. For some reason, whenever Helen's name comes up, I hear "I HATE Helen Hunt!" And Leelee's last movie was for Uwe Boll. Now would be the perfect time for these two to team up in a mother-daughter drama. If they cooked up something along the lines of Terms of Endearment, with a good, solid writer and/or director, it could be interesting. Or better yet, how about something really strange and kooky with Spike Jonze or Harmony Korine? (Note: apparently the two once went head-to-head on "Celebrity Death Match.")

Gallery: Actors who could play relatives

The story of a womanizer who gets beaten for his ways and loses his balls is interesting in its own right. It's strange, different, and has a ring of poetic justice. Now, continuing the uniqueness, this castration comedy is getting a diverse cast. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Judy Greer, Chloe Sevigny, Cybill Shepherd, and Billy Dee Williams have signed on to star with Patrick Wilson in Barry Munday. This is one cast I never would have dreamed could come together.

As we told you back in February, the film is based on Frank Turner Hollon's book, Life is a Strange Place. It focuses on a womanizer who gets caught canoodling with a teen, and his father beats him so hard for it that Barry ends up in the hospital with injuries that lead to castration. He begins to see that his life is not quite how he'd like it, and just as he realizes he will never be able to have kids of his own, he's named in a paternity suit. "Barry is elated at the second chance at fatherhood. Now if he can just avoid his crazy ex-girlfriend, her rabid dog, a mob of angry gay midgets, and his mother until the baby is born..."

Judy Greer will play the ex-girlfriend and soon-to-be mom, Sevigny will be her flirty sister with a secret life who hits on Munday, Shepherd is taking on the role of their mother, and Billy Dee will be a "tough boss at Munday's insurance company." Is anyone else as charmed by this cast as I am?

Just when you thought there was little to no movement on the do-we-really-need-another-one Terminator 4, comes word from Moviehole that a couple of high-profile actresses might be battling it out to play the lead female. First off, take this all with a grain of salt since it comes via two websites called Celebrity Spotlight and GlobalArnold.com. Since I dig Clint at Moviehole, and trust his opinion, I've decided to link directly to his story (in which he provides links to the original articles). That said, according to whomever, both Rachel Weisz and Chloë Sevigny approached Terminator producers Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek at a recent party -- and, apparently, inquired about "the role." I'm not sure what "the role" is, but I assume it's the same character portrayed by Claire Danes in Terminator 3.

Additionally, they also claim that a "high profile hunk has already been cast as the male lead," which most likely means Nick Stahl will not be reprising his role as John Connor. No idea who that could be, but feel free to throw out guesses based on what we already know about the John Connor character and the words "high profile hunk." Fred Savage? Fingers crossed! Another, more interesting (to me, at least) note is that they also mention the following with regards to Weisz's busy shooting schedule: "She is already signed up to star in Peter Jackson's Lovely Bones and next year will start shooting Sin City 2 with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez." Oh really?

First off, when did Weisz sign on for that role (which, in all likelihood, would be that of Ava Lord), and when did Rodriguez solidify a shooting schedule? From what we know, no one is really planning post-strike right now, and even so, Rodriguez has to shoot his Barbarella remake first. So, has Weisz been officially cast? And seeing as she turned down a third Mummy film, what makes you think she'd be interested in a fourth Terminator film? Chloë Sevigny, on the other hand, is super sexy in that "I might kill you after we sleep together" kind of way -- which I really dig -- so go ahead and sign her up. All rumors for now; we'll let you know if anything more concrete materializes.

For decades San Francisco and its surrounding counties were haunted by a faceless, seemingly unstoppable killer -- one who crowed about his murders to the press and struck without warning. From the late 1960's until the 1980's, a killer known as Zodiac took credit for 37 murders. That number may be a fabrication of a psychopath's bravado -- but it's incontrovertible that Zodiac committed 5 grisly shootings and stabbings that took place on lover's lanes and darkened streets. Director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) grew up in the Bay Area during those years, and revisits that time of terror and tension with his new film Zodiac. There's one easy criticism that can be lodged at Zodiac from the start: How can you possibly make a suspense film out of a story that's still a mystery? The Zodiac killer was never caught, after all -- so where's the climax, the closure?

The easy answer to that is simple: Life often doesn't provide closure -- and Fincher expertly crafts tension and suspense from the things we don't know about the Zodiac case. Zodiac follows the parallel investigations by police and press, the possible suspects, the tantalizing leads, the frustrating dead ends, the exciting possibilities. By showing us the details in carefully-wrought, exacting fashion, Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt turn the hunt for the Zodiac killer into thrilling, exciting cinema -- and the best true-life tale of detection we've had on the big screen since All the President's Men.

In a lovely little film called The Hanging Garden, writer/director Thom Fitzgerald gave us a character at three stages of life, growing and changing and crashing into old conceptions of himself. The three Williams, at different ages, even appeared on screen simultaneously. Fitzgerald's latest triptych is more subtle in the way it sews together its three-paneled story, but no less successful. 3 Needles is a clever anthology, spaced across three continents, in which AIDS and money are aggressively juxtaposed against each other until the point -- the new possibility of bartering with the disease -- emerges. One third of the story takes place in a French-Canadian household, where Olive, played by Stockard Channing, purposefully contracts HIV as part of a bold insurance swindle. A world away, in Southern Africa, a cynical Afrikaans plantation owner called Hallyday (Ian Roberts) invests in AZT because 70 percent of his workers are positive, and the drug will keep them alive and working longer. In rural China, a blood smuggler called Jin (Lucy Liu) sells tainted blood to start-up hospitals that are not yet sophisticated enough to reject her.

Each story has the low-energy pitch of a routine business meeting where everyone knows more or less how things will shake out. Nearly every scene is shot inside a blah-colored office or a workplace -- we even see some bored-looking porn workers greet a nurse who arrives to give them a routine HIV test. Ten years ago, a movie with AIDS as its central subject would have found it necessary to deal with the horror of lesions, hospital goodbyes and grief. This film seeks to rob AIDS of its plague-mystique and drag it into the realm of the workaday and the banal, where most other aspects of a managed life reside. It mostly succeeds, although a burdensome narration (can you name the last movie that was actually improved by a narration?) and a remarkably aimless ending hurt the project a great deal. The African story in particular seems to have been considered a weak link -- it shows many signs of editing-suite triage. Thankfully, the other two parts of the film are good enough to make up for it.

I don't know if it's genius or pure insanity to direct a remake for your first feature, but that's what Douglas Buck is doing. After helming a couple of shorts (one of them really long -- nearly an hour), he rolled up to Hollywood and said "Hey man, gimme some De Palma." And the decidedly un-glamorous No Remorse Pictures said "Right on, brother! We'll produce that. Let's go to Canada!" Or, you know, something like that. What it comes down to is that Buck is directing a remake of Brian De Palma's 1973 film Sisters, a psychological horror movie about twin sisters. It's not universally loved at all, but the people who like it really, really like it, and are surely contorted with rage right now if this is the first they've heard of Buck's venture.

The film stars Stephen Rea as a shrink, Chloë Sevigny as a "nosey reporter" and French actress Lou Doillon (Hey, she's Jane Birkin's kid! Thanks, IMDb.), and is currently filming in Vancouver.

I'm sure Chloë Sevigny had a very good reason for agreeing to star in Carousel, a advertising film for Ritz Fine Jewelery that runs over six minutes and consists mostly of her lolling around hotels rooms in various costumes and wigs. A desperate love for Ritz products, for example. Or a desire to stretch herself as an actress in a way that doesn't involve Vincent Gallo. Or, more likely, cold, hard cash.

While a Bande à part reference is always welcome no matter how cheap and obvious it is, the short as a whole is just painfully boring - though I suppose it would be even more so were the face pouting in the middle of it a slightly less familiar one. But really, is anyone going to watch the movie and be seized by a need to buy diamonds from Ritz, thus repaying whatever it cost the company to get Sevigny to appear? I'm thinking no.

[via A Socialite's Life]