While I've been itching for Uma Thurman to do more period work, there's another famous tow-headed actress hopping in a time machine. Variety reports that Miramax and Pathe are about to close a deal on a big-screen adaptation of Colette's Chéri, for Michelle Pfeiffer to headline. What makes this project even better -- it'll be a Dangerous Liasons reunion. Aside from its star and sexy material, Christopher Hampton penned the script and Stephen Frears will direct it.

Set in 1920s Paris, Chéri focuses on the affair between an older, retired courtesan and a young man some 25 years younger than her, one who is the son of a fellow courtesan. For 6 years they are together until they must part for Chéri to make good on an arranged marriage. However, he doesn't get over his older lover, and as Variety describes it, he "retreats into a fantasy world." Madame de Tourvel has come a long way!

There have been some bumps in the road, but as things stand now -- the deal will give Miramax North American control, and Pathe will get the overseas territories -- much like the deal made for Frears' last film, The Queen. Should everything move along from here, production will start this April in France. Now we just need a young man itching for Pfeiff. Any ideas?

Best Screenplay

Nominees:

Diablo Cody -- Juno

Joel & Ethan Coen -- No Country for Old Men

Christopher Hampton -- Atonement

Ronald Harwood -- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Aaron Sorkin -- Charlie Wilson's War

Predicted Winner: Diablo Cody -- Juno

Often, it's not the finest writing that wins the screenplay award, it's the flashiest. Cinematical doesn't think Globe voters will be able to pass up Diablo Cody's hyper-verbose, show-offy script, chock full of memorable one-liners and quotable dialogue. Plus, Hollywood just can't get enough of her stripper-turned-screenwriter tale. Juno what I'm saying?

Now it's your turn to vote ...

Screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Atonement, Dangerous Liaisons) recently spoke to Collider about his upcoming projects, including the Iva Toguri biopic that he's writing for Frank Darabont to direct. Toguri, a Japanese-American who was in Japan during WWII, was one of only a handful of people in U.S. history to actually be tried and convicted for treason, for her participation in Japanese propaganda radio broadcasts aimed at U.S. servicemen. (You may remember a scene in Clint Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers in which the soldiers listen to the creepy broadcast of Orphan Ann -- Toguri's radio moniker -- in which they're told about fictional U.S. war defeats and also told that their sweethearts back home are cheating on them.) Toguri would also sign off her broadcasts to the troops as "your number one enemy," although she later claimed this to be tongue-in-cheek.

In fact, the case against her was notoriously flimsy -- seven out of eight treason charges were dropped, and although she was convicted and imprisoned, she was later pardoned by Gerald Ford. The one charge that prosecutors snagged her on was related to a broadcast she made in October, 1944, in which she can be heard saying "Orphans of the Pacific, you really are orphans now. How will you get home now that all your ships are lost?" Hampton's screenplay will portray her trial as "a witch hunt. She was absolutely innocent," he says. "Her trial happened to be the longest and most expensive in American legal history at the time -- in the late 40s ... the contours of the story are beginning to emerge and I'm starting to know what I have to keep and what I don't need."

I was a little hard on the International Press Academy last year, but they made some ridiculous decisions when handing out their Satellite Awards. Still, at least they came off as being different than every other year-end awards giver by picking winners like Joseph Cross and X-Men: The Last Stand (best comedic actor and best editing, respectively). Those are at least some interesting, unpredictable picks, right? This year, I feel the need to be harder on the organization, because it's gone totally predictable in honoring No Country for Old Men, Juno, Sicko, American Gangster, Ratatouille, Diablo Cody and Christopher Hampton, among others. The actors they honored -- Marion Cotillard, Viggo Mortensen, Ellen Page, Ryan Gosling, Tom Wilkinson/Casey Affleck (tied) and Amy Ryan -- aren't all the most obvious choices, but they aren't shocking, either. Couldn't they have at least gone with nominee Clive Owen or his nominated "comedy or musical" Shoot 'Em Up (!?!?!?), or something?

Not that the winners aren't deserving, but what good is yet another awards ceremony if it's not going to distinguish itself from the Golden Globes, which are the Satellite's unrecognized yet unmistakable "baby daddy". Yeah, the Hollywood Foreign Press will likely go with some other winners, but they won't seem that different. Again, I do salute the IPA for having a documentary category, though it wouldn't have hurt to give The King of Kong its one possible prestigious(?) award -- not that it was actually a better film than fellow nominee No End in Sight. Also, it's always enjoyable to see what the IPA picks for best DVDs (The Prestige for overall; Borat and Masters of Horror Season 1 (tied) for extras; Ratatouille for youth-oriented; Ken Burns' The War for documentary; The Graduate 40th Anniversary Edition for classic). For the rest of the nominees and winners, head over to Variety.

Surprise! Jason Reitman's Juno, the most buzzed about teen pregnancy comedy of the fall, hauled in an overwhelming take of $60,000 per screen at seven theaters in New York and Los Angeles, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo, easily topping the indie box office chart. It got a head start by opening on Wednesday, but it actually began building momentum when it screened at Telluride more than three months ago. Critical response has been nearly unanimous (93% positive per Rotten Tomatoes), with our own Kim Voynar leading the hosannas. Juno will be opening wide soon, so it will be interesting to see if it can cross over to mainstream acceptance.

Also widely praised since its debut at Venice, Atonement scored very well with a per-screen average of $25,531 at 32 theaters in major markets. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy star in director Joe Wright's adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel. Christopher Hampton scripted the screen version of an epic period romance. Cinematical's James Rocchi participated in a roundtable interview with McAvoy; you can read McAvoy's thoughts on Atonement and much more.

Other indies struggled to find audiences. Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack as a father having trouble telling his daughters that their mother has been killed, had the highest profile, but earned just $3,500 per screen at four theaters. Long on the shelf, The Amateurs may be heading quickly to DVD; despite the presence of Jeff Bridges and Ted Danson, it managed to earn only $4,000 per screen at three theaters in Los Angeles and Dallas. Bridges did all he could to publicize the film; he and Danson participated in a junket, which our own Patrick Walsh just wrote about, and was present for a post-screening Q&A on Friday night in Dallas.

Also debuting over the weekend: Maurice Jamal's comedy Dirty Laundry ($7,700 per-screen at two theaters), Paul Schrader's Washington drama The Walker ($5,533 per screen at three theaters), Guy Ritchie's crime drama Revolver ($2,316 per screen at 18 theaters) and David Wall's religious drama Noelle ($802 per screen at 203 theaters).

What do Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and David Cronenberg have in common? The first two are considered the founding fathers of psychoanalysis; the latter will be making a film about them. According to ScreenDaily.com, Cronenberg's next project "will be an adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure, re-teaming him with Crash producer Jeremy Thomas."

Hampton's play, which premiered in December 2002, is set in the early 20th Century and centers on Jung, portrayed on the London stage by Ralph Fiennes. A review by Lizzie Loveridge at CurtainUp says that Hampton "looks at the issues which initially united these two pioneering psychiatrists and that which eventually divided them and took them off into other areas of investigation." The narrative then plunges into the relationship between Jung and an 18-year-old Russian woman who was his first patient. The CurtainUp reviewer felt that the 2 hour and 25 minute play "tells us more about Jung's affairs than his ideas."

Cronenberg always seems to be shuffling priorities on his projects, dependent on financing and other factors that are probably out of his control, but the combination of Cronenberg and psychoanalysis sounds potent, a great match of filmmaker and subject, and probably a welcome change of pace for the director after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Producer Jeremy Thomas has an excellent track record; in addition to Crash, he and Cronenberg worked together on Naked Lunch. No word on casting yet, but Fiennes previously gave an excellent performance in Cronenberg's Spider, so I imagine he would be first in line to recreate Jung on the big screen.

One of the best-received films at this year's TIFF, Atonement tells the story of a 13 year-old girl who, thinking she's doing something right, actually does something horribly wrong and starts a chain reaction of terrible events that will go on for several years. To say more than that seems unfair, since this is the kind of film that everyone should go into tabula rasa the first time, if at all possible. However, those who have read the highly-praised novel by Ian McEwan already know the ins and outs and can marvel at how delicately and faithfully McEwan's prose has been brought to vivid life on the screen. Christopher Hampton, the film's screenwriter who also penned Dangerous Liaisons, agreed to sit down with Cinematical at this year's festival and talk about the unique challenges of creating a film script that could capture everything great about McEwan's writing and working with Joe Wright, who is proving himself to be one of the most clever and talented filmmakers in the business today. Here's the interview.

Cinematical: Talk a little about the third part, the nursing section -- did you feel, as I did, that Briony paints herself a little too well in that part? When I doubleback after the ending, I look at that section suspiciously, like maybe she's taking liberties with the truth.

CH: The whole motivation of that nursing section -- which, by the way, I think is sort of the best written bit of the book, really exceptionally precise and well-pictured -- I think she throws herself into this job out of guilt. The book is about a life, her life, being ruined by the knowledge that she's ruined other people's lives. I see no reason to doubt her sincerity, although you're perfectly free to do so.

Cinematical: What were the major challenges of adapting the latter part of the book -- part three and the 1999 afterward?

CH: That was a particular problem that one had to find a solution, to find a way to crack it, and in fact what we wound up with was something that was the briefest of the many versions that we had done. You tend to elaborate, when you've got such a complicated thing to get over to an audience. Then we sort of thought, the shorter and more lucid and simpler we did it, the better it would work. But to answer your question about part three, in my original first draft, I had conflated the Dunkirk section and the hospital section. I had intercut, you know, gone back and forth between them. And at a certain point, I decided to go back to what the book does, which is keep them in sections. They are simultaneous in time, those two sections, so it was worth a try. But there's something about having the focus on each character, chapter by chapter, that works very well. Also, it works because Joe made the very smart decision ... there was a lot of talk about whether we could get one actress to do the child and the 18 year-old. You know, if we'd found someone, I could have upped the age to 15 or something, but of course it's not about a 15 year-old. So Joe was very clear about that, and that was a great help, that he said 'no, no, we're gonna have two different actresses.' So that also assisted the idea of focusing on one character at a time somehow.

Last month, while at Cannes, Venice Film Festival artistic director Marco Müller said this year's event will feature a lot of English-language films and a focus on up-and-coming filmmakers. Both statements fit with the announcement now that Atonement will be opening the festival, which kicks off August 29. The UK-produced pic is the sophomore effort of Joe Wright. It also marks the director's continued collaboration with Keira Knightley, who he directed to an Oscar nomination in his debut, Pride & Prejudice. Atonement is a war-time epic romance adapted from Ian McEwan's (Enduring Love) novel by Christopher Hampton (The Quiet American). Months after its premiere at Venice, it opens in the U.S. just in time for Academy notice on December 7.

A few months ago we shared the film's trailer, and just last week we got some photos, but neither is enough for us to tell if Knightley will deserve another nomination for her work with Wright. After recently watching the actress in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, I can't imagine her ever winning an Oscar, but perhaps Wright has some sort of magic touch with her. I will have to wait about five months to judge for myself, but Knightley's fans in the UK will be getting to see the performance about two weeks after it shows in Venice, on September 14. Then it rolls out to other parts of the world in the fall and winter.

So far Atonement seems to be the only film officially announced to screen at this year's Venice Film Festival, though last month Variety reported the fest will include a number of American films, likely including Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. We'll know for sure on July 26. The only other things we know for sure about the fest are that Zhang Yimou is heading the jury, that Tim Burton is getting a career achievement award and that there will be a Spaghetti Western retrospective. If you love both Knightley and Sergio Leone, you may want to start making your reservations today.

To me, Audrey Tautou will always be Amélie. To others, soon, she will be Coco. The French actress, who is actually best known now for playing opposite Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code, has been cast as Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel in a film about the legendary fashion designer's life prior to her becoming famous. And because it only focuses on the first half of Chanel's life, producer Caroline Benjo describes it as not really a biopic. Although it will begin with Chanel's childhood, the plot will mainly follow her as a young woman, during the time she worked as a cabaret singer and became involved with the wealthy horse breeder Étienne Balsan and then the English polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel, both of whom were instrumental in leading her to a career in fashion.

Partly based on the book L'Irrégulière: Ou, Mon Itinéraire Chanel by Edmonde Charles-Roux, the film will be scripted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liasons) and Anne Fontaine (Nathalie ...), who will also direct. Apparently the project was conceived with Tautou in mind, and Fontaine had said she'd only be involved if the actress was interested. Tautou does seem to be perfect for the part, at least if you only know of Coco Chanel, the woman, from photographs like the one above (If only I could also find photos of the two lovers, so I could imagine which actors would be best to play them).

Fortunately for everyone else associated with the project, Tautou liked the idea of playing Chanel. Although, if the film didn't work out, audiences and fashion fans would still have two other movies based on the designer to look forward to. One, about Chanel's relationship with Igor Stravinsky, will reportedly be directed by William Friedkin and will star Marina Hands (The Barbarian Invasions); the other is being written by Oscar nominee Danièle Thompson (Cousin, Cousine). All three films follow the 1969 stage production Coco, starring Katherine Hepburn in the title role, as well as the new play from writer William Luce and Broadway director Philip William McKinley (The Boy From Oz), titled Creme de Coco: A Portrait of Coco Chanel. So, I'm wondering, which of the films will end up being "Chanel, No. 5"?