I've been waiting for Michael Pitt to break out big for years now -- ever since Murder By Numbers, I think (he was noteworthy a year earlier in both Bully and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but not quite as promising). He still has a chance, especially if he takes the part of Lt. William Calley in Oliver Stone's Pinkville. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he's currently in talks for the role, and if he's smart he'll just go ahead and grab it. Calley is the central figure in the Vietnam war film, which deals with the investigation into the 1968 Mai Lai Massacre; the Army officer was the one found guilty of giving the orders that sparked the incident. Pitt would join an ensemble cast that already includes Bruce Willis (or as I like to call him, Bruce Billis), Channing Tatum (another young actor continually teetering on the verge of stardom), Michael Peña (previously seen in Stone's World Trade Center), Woody Harrelson and Xzibit, who just joined on this week. Also joining the film is Toby Jones (Infamous), who will portray Lt. Andre Feher, the chief warrant officer who tries to convince Willis' character, Gen. William Peers, that the U.S. Army is responsible for the massacre.

With Pinkville, Pitt would be sure to make up for the mediocre year he's had. Between starring in Tom DiCillo's embarrassingly awful Delirious and the apparently abysmal Silk (it has an astonishingly sad 8% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), the actor has been really struggling to get his due notice. He does have other intriguing projects in the pipeline, however; next year he can be seen co-starring in Michael Haneke's Funny Games U.S., a remake of the filmmaker's own earlier work, and he's set to star as a young Christopher Walken (sorta) in Abel Ferrara's King of New York prequel, Pericle il Nero. It seems that Pitt might prefer working outside of Hollywood, but the guy should at least do a good ensemble piece every now and then, and there's not many better Hollywood directors he could work with than Stone.

I remember the first time I heard of Abel Ferrara. Well, it wasn't him so much as his movie, Bad Lieutenant. I was in high school, and my friend came into school one morning traumatized. She had just seen her first instance of on-screen junk by means of full-frontal Harvey Keitel. But that's Mr. Ferrara for you -- he's the man who also has Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy(Cat) under his belt. It seems that he's quite taken with the city, since he's gearing up for another Italian film after just wrapping the comedy Go-Go Tales, which Chris Ullrich posted about last November.

Variety is now reporting that he is set to shoot a $4 million mob noir film based on an Italian best-seller by Giuseppe Ferrandino, Pericle il Nero -- which translates into Pericles the Black Man. According to Umberto Massa, the film's producer, it will revisit Bad Lieutenant in a Neapolitan setting. The producer also says of the film: "The cop, who works for a Naples Camorra crime syndicate boss, is a very disturbed man who sometimes sodomizes his victims." Lovely, eh? As for the rest, it's up in the air. Not only has casting not been decided (other than that it will feature US and Italian stars), but they haven't figured out which language they want to film it in. Since they plan to start shooting in September, I'm assuming they'll figure it all out soon enough.