Less than a month ago, I brought you word that Julianne Moore was going to star in a new horror thriller called Shelter -- a project that has been in the works for a good 4 years now. With a star in place, and production to begin late next month in Pittsburgh, Variety reports that she's got a co-star; none other than Henry the VIII himself, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Now Variety says that the logline (one-sentence film summary) is "being kept under wraps," but as I mentioned last time, this project has been around for ages, and MovieWeb put up a summary back in 2004 (the original THR link is dead). Unless there's been a major rewrite, Michael Cooney's script "follows a female forensic psychiatrist who specializes in debunking multiple personality disorder. When she discovers that her latest patient's various personalities are all murder victims, she struggles to find a logical explanation for the man's delusion."

Well, it looks like Ultimate Fighting champ Randy Couture has caught the acting bug. Couture is a multiple title holder in the UFC, and is making his acting debut in David Mamet's Ju-Jitsu flick, Redbelt. Now, The Bad and Ugly is reporting that Couture told Columbus Ohio radio station, QFM 96.3, that he was on his way to China in the next few weeks to begin work on the big screen version of Mandrake the Magician.

The film is based on the 1934 comic strip about a magician with lightening fast hypnotic powers who, along with his partner Lothar, would battle the usual crew of comic strip bad guys (just your usual array of crime lords and mad scientists). The film will be directed by Chuck Russell, and will star Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Mandrake. According to Ugly's tipster, Couture told the DJs "...he had quite a few scenes in the movie, and that it was being billed as a cross between James Bond and Harry Houdini." The bad news -- Russell is also the director behind some fairly crappy flicks including Bless the Child and The Scorpion King -- so we should probably keep our fingers crossed that Meyers is up to the task of carrying the movie.

Back in June there had been talk from celebrity magician Criss Angel that he was in the midst of making his own movie about the hypnotist/crime fighter, but it looks like Russell and company have beat him to the punch. I wouldn't count on another magician movie battle a la The Prestige and The Illusionist -- mainly because there hasn't been a peep out of Angel's Crow-inspired adaptation since June. Mandrake has yet to find a release date, but we are bound to hear something as soon as shooting has wrapped in China and the States.

[via ComingSoon.net]

Leave it to Hollywood to dig up a fact that nearly two centuries of historical research has missed -- that the famous Bronte sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte, were all smoking hot. A new biopic of the trio, simply titled Bronte, has just been greenlit for a fall start, and will star Bryce Dallas Howard, Michelle Williams and Evan Rachel Wood. Annoyingly, the Variety article doesn't identify who will be playing which sister, but I think Howard would be the obvious choice to play Anne, the least successful sister whose most accomplished work was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She can do the whole constipated-with-disappointment thing pretty well, I imagine. Emily and Charlotte were the real stars of the family, with the former penning Wuthering Heights and the latter topping that with Jane Eyre. The article also declines to give us any kind of outline as to the story, unless its doing so by proxy when it mentions that the sisters, as youngsters, "created epic fantasy worlds to entertain themselves."

The film was written and will be directed by Charles Sturridge, whose last effort was the 2005 film Lassie, which was barely released in U.S. theaters. Before that, he mostly did TV, including a rendering of Gulliver's Travels, so who knows what kind of quality we're looking at here. Interestingly, IMDB has had a Bronte page up for a while, and there are other actresses in all the main parts except for Michelle Williams, who is credited as Charlotte. Nathalie Press is credited as Emily and Emily Barclay is credited as Anne. Guess that was until Gwen Stacy decided to come knocking. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is also credited on IMDB as Bronte brother Branwell -- who knows if that still applies. The film is set to get rolling in September.

The names in the title of this post kinda sound like they're from some sort of funky international law firm or something, don't they? Or maybe, instead of a law firm, a relief agency for orphaned children specializing in Asia? That would actually make more sense considering the true nature of this post. What the heck am I talking about? Glad you asked.

According to Production Weekly, Jonathan Rhys Meyers (of Bend It Like Beckham and the underrated Ang Lee film Ride With The Devil), Radha Mitchell (of High Art and Man on Fire), master of swords and two-handed pistol shooting Chow Yun Fat and former Chow co-star Michelle Yeoh are booked to be in the period drama The Children of Huang Shi for director Roger Spottiswoode.

The film, which tells the story of young British Journalist Gregg Hogg (played by Myers) who saves a group of orphaned children during the 1937 Japanese invasion of China by taking them on a 1000 mile journey to safety, is being written by Jane Hawksley. Mitchell will play the brave Australian nurse who helps Hogg save the children.

This new film covers similar ground explored before by Steven Spielberg in his film Empire of the Sun . In that film, a very young and pre-Batman Begins, Christian Bale is forced to flee his home when the Japanese invade China. He ends up separated from his parents and living at an abandoned airfield with other refugees -- including John Malkovich, Joe Pantoliano and a young Ben Stiller in one of his first movie roles . Empire of the Sun is a great movie that if you haven't seen lately, or at all, deserves a look.

If The Children of Huang Shi, which while obviously dealing with similar subject matter tells a different story, turns out to be half as good as Empire of the Sun, I will definitely be interested in seeing it. Even if Chow Yun Fat doesn't fly through the air, pistols blazing away in both hands, taking out bad guys.

Filming on The Children of Huang Shi is expected to begin mid-November in China with production moving later to Australia.

According to this morning's Guardian, a warts-and-all biopic of the entire Bronte family is being planned in England. Quite logically entitled Brontë, the film is budgeted at about $11 million and will place Charlotte, Anne, and Emily in a realistic 19th century England, filled with "dungheaps and foul drains ... open sewer[s] in the street and ... cholera and typhoid that killed most children before their sixth birthday." Mmm ... dungheaps.

Since the movie begins filming next month, most of the cast is in place -- and it features some big names, particularly considering how under-the-radar it's been flying. Starring as Charlotte (Who, as all American high school students know, wrote Jane Eyre.) will be Michelle Williams, Nathalie Press will play Emily (Author of Wuthering Heights. That's all, just Wuthering Heights.) and Anne, she of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, will be played by New Zealander Emily Barclay. Also along for the dung-laden ride will be Jonathan Rhys Meyers (sadly for JRM, his character is apparently straight), Brian Cox and Ben Chaplin.

It isn't that unusual for straight actors to be comfortable playing gay, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers is apparently more than just okay with it. In fact, he really, really likes playing homosexual men, and he's looking forward to more gay roles in the future. So far he has only played gay in the films Velvet Goldmine and Alexander, though he might also include the TV movie Elvis, as he swears that the rock legend was, "the gayest f**king thing on two legs."

Maybe Rhys Meyers is unaware, but there are plenty of gay parts that he can play. Of course, they are in low-budget films that mostly only play at specialty theaters like The Quad in New York (and no, I'm not talking about gay porn), but they do exist. The thing is, Rhys Meyers wants to play famous gay men, like Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift, though he admits he's too small for Hudson. Until someone decides to do one of those biopics, perhaps he can campaign for a sequel to Brokeback Mountain.