* Adam Shankman's Rock of Ages, based on the Broadway musical using 80s rock hits as the standard, is really picking up momentum. Along with Tom Cruise, Mary J. Blige, Alec Baldin, Russell Brand, and Julianne Hough, Paul Giamatti has now been signed to play the manager of Cruise's character, Stacee Jax. Deadline also notes that Amy Adams is in the lead to join as a reporter out to do a hit piece on Jax, but winds up falling in love with him. I'm never going to be a big fan of musicals, but the casting in this one is just crazy enough to turn even me.
* Columbia Pictures isn't wasting any time getting all their Spidey ducks in a row. With The Amazing Spider-Man not due to open until July 2012, they've already got writer James Vanderbilt plugging away on the sequel. It was Vanderbilt's script which wound up being the backbone of Marc Webb's upcoming film, and an outline for a trilogy has already been established.
* I'm still trying to scrub some of the filthy images from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist
out of my brainpan, but even while I do so I'm eagerly awaiting his disaster film, Melancholia. That film should be wrapping up soon and burning a permanent place in our minds come later this May, and already the controversial director is lining up his next project. Von Trier tells ScreenDaily that his next film could be The Nymphomaniac, about a..you guessed it, a nympho. Or as Von Trier puts it, "a woman who discovers her eroticism". Put Charlotte Gainsbourg in it and I'll already start marking my calendar.
