Not very long ago, Jessica told you that Steve Zahn and Timothy Olyphant had signed up to play in David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway, but it seems like the writer / director was scouting for actresses over the weekend. Looks like Milla Jovovich will be paired up with Zahn (the lucky dog) and Ms. Kiele Sanchez will be hanging with Mr. Olyphant. (Genre fans will remember David Twohy from flicks like The Arrival, Pitch Black, Below, and ... The Chronicles of Riddick.)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Jovovich and Sanchez join Timothy Olyphant and Steve Zahn in the thriller, which revolves around a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in Hawaii who run into two hikers who turn out to be vicious killers." Call me psychic, but I'm betting it's the Olyphant / Sanchez couple who do the stalking and the Zahn / Jovovich duo who do the running ... although it'd probably be more interesting the other way around.

The whole gang will begin shooting A Perfect Getaway next week in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Tough gig. As far as the flick is concerned, I'm just a bit skeptical. Haven't we had enough of the Americans Terrorized Overseas thrillers yet? Then again (Chronicles notwithstanding) I'm a big fan of the Twohy, so I suppose one more dose of Passport Purgatory won't be all that bad.

To be honest, I'm always a little surprised that Steve Zahn managed to carve out a dramatic acting career. I can't help but think 'Studs' whenever I look at him, but since Rescue Dawn I'm not the only one who discovered that Zahn can handle the 'grittier' side of life. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Zahn has signed to star alongside Timothy Olyphant (Hitman) in the psychological thriller, A Perfect Getaway.

David Twohy will direct from his own script about a honeymooning couple who become the targets for a pair of killers. Zahn will play the husband and Olyphant (true to form) will play one of the violent psychos. There is no word yet on the partners for each of our leading men, but it's not like its going to be all that difficult to fill the parts of 'Frightened Wife" and "Psycho Killer". Twohy made his name as a screenwriter and has made some good and some not so-good movies. Twohy has directed in the past, but with the exception of Pitch Black, there isn't much to recommend some of his previous endeavors.

Zahn already has three other films in various stages of production. First up will be two comedies, a baseball flick titled Calvin Marshall and then a romantic comedy with the very unfunny title of Management. A Perfect Getaway is set to start filming on location in Puerto Rico and Hawaii starting at the end of this month, but there is no word of a release date. Stay tuned to Cinematical for any news that comes our way.

Strange Wilderness is a new comedy starring Steve Zahn as the host of a wilderness television show with plummeting ratings. To increase viewership, he assembles a motley crew and sets out on an expedition to find Bigfoot. The cast includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Ashley Scott, Peter Dante, Jeff Garlin, and -- believe it or not -- Ernest Borgnine! The red band trailer for Wilderness just hit the internet. (Need a little incentive to check it out? There's nudity. You're welcome.) Cinematical spoke with two of the film's stars -- Kevin Heffernan (of Broken Lizard fame) and Allen Covert (pretty much every Adam Sandler movie, Grandma's Boy) -- about this film and their careers. First up is Kevin Heffernan...

Cinematical: Who do you play in the film?

Kevin Heffernan: I play a character named Whitaker. When they go out on this trip, they need to hire an animal wrangler. I'm a car mechanic and I have no animal wrangling experience. Basically, I'm just looking for a job. So I go and interview with them and I win the job but I have no knowledge of animals. I don't even like them that much really! It's got this great ensemble cast and some great cameos...

Cinematical: It does have such a great comedy cast, was improvisation encouraged on the set?

KH: Yeah man. The script was so good, I mean it was written by Fred Wolf and Peter Gaulke who have a lot of comedy writing experience, but it was just one of those kind of movies where there's always like six or seven people on the screen. And they left it free for us to do the improv stuff that we all love to do. So there were a lot of people going off, and they had to kind of pull you back to the script a little bit.

Just this morning our wonderful Editor-in-Chief Erik Davis blogged about Woody Harrelson joining that upcoming fantasy adventure called The Other Side. He's going to play both the father and son who fund a scholarship for the character that Katie Holmes is in talks to play. (I imagine she'll take it -- with the Jason Lee Scientology camaraderie and all, Cruise has got to approve!) But that's not the only role(s) that Woody is adding to his diverse repertoire. Variety reports that he's joined Tape scribe Stephen Belber's upcoming romcom Management, which Steve Zahn and Jennifer Aniston already joined this past summer.

The pic is about a traveling art saleswoman (Aniston), who has a brief fling with an assistant motel manager (Zahn). This romantic interlude inspires the guy to follow her on her travels across the US. Now, if you're like me, you were thinking that the movie needed a yogurt mogul, right? Well have no fear -- Woody has signed on to make that happen. He's going to play Aniston's ex boyfriend, who is also, as I stated above, a yogurt mogul. How Belber came up with that profession, above all others, is beyond me, but I have this feeling Harrelson can pull it off. How he fits into the story, well, that's what confuses me. I could see if she was a traveling yogurt saleswoman, but she deals in art. I guess every great stalker just needs to be balanced by the man who gives you yogurt.

I once saw Leelee Sobieski in person after an awards show. I was dazzled by how young, slender and beautiful she looked, and at how tall she was -- she towered over Jack Valenti. Of course, even short little me was taller than the late, diminutive Mr. Valenti, but Sobieski stands over six feel in heels. Yet the thing that impressed me most when I first saw her act was not her physical appearance but her calm maturity. She was just 14 or 15 when she did James Ivory's A Solider's Daughter Never Cries. She was poised, independent and radiated intelligence, not an easy thing to do. Ever since then, I've been hoping that she'd have a chance to give another breakout performance. She kept busy until she headed off to Brown University, but her recent work has been mostly unseen -- I don't think Lying, Heavens Fall or The Elder Son have received US theatrical distribution yet, In a Dark Place went straight to DVD, and the less said about the dreadful Wicker Man remake, the better, though Scott Weinberg liked it more than I did.

Ever an optimist, a brief casting note caught my eye. Variety reports that Sobieski will star in the independent thriller Night Train. Evidently already in production, the film also stars Danny Glover and Steve Zahn. Tthe plot "concerns three strangers competing for a mysterious object on a train on Christmas Eve. Sobieski plays a seemingly sedate med student." Glover is always reliable and I usually enjoy whatever Steve Zahn does, so adding Sobieski to the mix sounds very promising. Debuting director Brian King also wrote the script; he previously penned Cypher. Sobieski has three other films waiting for release: as a fledging dominatrix in the comedy/thriller Walk All Over Me, 88 Minutes (with Al Pacino) and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.

I'm a complete fence-sitter when it comes to Jennifer Aniston. I'm no big fan of her mainstream films, and could do without them, but I happen to like some of her indie work, like Mike White's dysfunctional flick, The Good Girl. (Although man, I know I'm not the only one who thinks we could do without Derailed...what were they thinking!?) Now she's got a new romcom on the way called Management. She will play a traveling saleswoman who sells cheap art to small companies and motels. When she has a fling with an assistant motel manager (played by Steve Zahn), things get tricky because he starts to follow her around the U.S. (What's with the stalking-across-the-country films lately?) Now, before you groan -- this might, just might, actually be good. Or, at least, decent.

The film will be playwright/screenwriter Stephen Belber's directorial debut, and he wrote the script. He has not only worked on The Laramie Project, but he's the pen behind Tape. Did you ever catch that flick? It is a simple, and intriguing Richard Linklater indie movie starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard as three old friends in a motel room who rehash past traumas. It's got a hell of a lot more depth than a romcom, so I can only hope that some of it will carry over, making this more than just the next kiss-kiss, laugh-laugh movie.

As a good film scholar/geek, I have tried to enjoy the films of Werner Herzog over the years, but I haven't yet seen enough of them to find many that I particularly like, although I respect them as good films. That's a discreet way of telling you that I nearly fell asleep during The Wild Blue Yonder, can't remember a thing about Heart of Glass or Aguirre: The Wrath of God when I watched them for classes in college and haven't yet seen Fitzcarraldo, although it's on my list. In short, I'm not a rabid Herzog fan, which may actually be the reason why I liked his latest film, Rescue Dawn, as much as I did. Based on Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this fictional adaptation has a typical linear narrative structure and tells a clear and unambiguous story.

Christian Bale stars as the aforementioned Dieter Dengler, who has wanted nothing more in life but to be a fighter pilot (thus the title of the documentary). The film is set during the Vietnam War, and you know from the first scene, a group of U.S. Navy pilots watching a lame survival film, that someone's going to get lost in the wilds. Sure enough, Dieter's plane is shot down over Laos, in a strikingly gorgeous and terrifying jungle. Dieter is eventually captured and taken to a POW camp in the middle of the jungle, where the Viet Cong jailers don't seem to be in much better condition than the prisoners. His fellow prisoners include Gene (Jeremy Davies) and Duane (Steve Zahn), all half-crazed from the terrible conditions. However, Dieter is determined to escape -- he wants to survive, and fly again.

News bites for Tuesday:

• Sony Pictures Classics grabbed the rights to the Chinese war drama, The Children of Huang Shi, which Chris Ullrich told us about in October. Based on actual events, the film centers on a British reporter (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who is in China when it was invaded by Japan in 1937. The man rescues 60 war orphans and leads them a feet-aching 1,000 miles to a village near the great wall. Chow Yun-Fat plays a political leader, Michelle Yeoh is an aristocrat and Radha Mitchell plays a nurse he falls for. The film should be released later this year.
• Another name has been added to the upcoming comedy, Sunshine Cleaning. Earlier this month, I shared news that Alan Arkin had joined Amy Adams and Emily Blunt in the movie about sisters who start a new business cleaning up crime scenes. Now Steve Zahn is a part of the cast, playing a married cop who is getting a little of Adams' character on the side. Now the question becomes: will this be a goofy cop, or will Zahn wow us with a little depth?
• Ms. Keira Knightley, the young, tough, sex symbol from Pirates of the Caribbean is baring all for her new film, Silk. According to MSN entertainment, her nudity is used to chastise her. A source is quoted as saying that during one of her two nude scenes, "she leans over her husband with her gown gaping open and he remarks that her breasts are small and like a little girl's." In the film, she plays the wife of a silkworm smuggler (Michael Pitt) from the 1800's who becomes obsessed with a concubine of a baron in Japan. Obviously, he's all sorts of charming and respectful.

Okay, where in the world did this one come from? Well, we know where the rumor came from (Teletext UK) and who picked it up (our friends from FilmRot), but if it is indeed true then how come there hasn't been an explosion yet here in the States? Wait, let me back up for a minute: According to a story in Teletext UK, it appears as if folks finally found their Magnum P.I. Not only that, but a director is attached, a cast is set and a release date of Summer 2008 has been slapped on to seal the deal!

Um, perhaps I should back up even more: See, Hollywood has been attempting to bring the TV show Magnum P.I. to the big screen for quite awhile now, with folks like Ben Affleck, George Clooney and Vince Vaughn circling the project at one point. Needless to say, none of you liked those choices -- in fact, the Clooney rumor really pissed people off. Shut it down. Turn it off. Months go by ... and, now, here comes Matthew McConaughey to save the day. America's number one stud and the perfect (in my opinion) choice to take over a role owned and originated by the ultra cool Tom Selleck.

Teletext UK also informs us that Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) has been tapped to direct (off his own re-write of the script) with Steve Zahn and William H. Macy returning for a little Sahara reunion to play Rick and Higgins respectively. If that's not enough to whet your Magnum appetite, then I should also tell you that (apparently) Tyrese Gibson has signed on to play the role of T.C. All I can say about that is ... wow. For now, we'll officially chalk this one up as a rumor, but it's the best news I've heard about this project yet. What do you think?

Just hours before it was to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, MGM (with the fest's first notable buy) acquired all North American distribution rights to Rescue Dawn, written and directed by Werner Herzog. In the pic, Herzog (who seems to have a knack for telling survival stories) brings us the real-life story of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), an American pilot whose plane was shot down during a top-secret mission in Viet Cong territory at the start of the Vietnam War.

After he's taken hostage, tortured and held in some sort of POW camp along with other captured prisoners, Dengler plans a daring escape, only to realize the jungles around them are just as dangerous. Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies also star, with MGM planning a December 2006 theatrical release. For more on Rescue Dawn, stay tuned for Martha's TIFF review coming up later this week.