Reel News

Rip It Up, Issue 216, 1 August 1995, Page 40

Reel News

Cameron Diaz has just finished shooting her follow-up to The Mask, the low budget feature The Last Supper. She plays one of a group of liberal, graduate students, who turn their apartment into a slaughter house for invited dinner guests who dare to oppose their leftist views ... Romper Stamper director Geoffrey Wright’s latest youth gone wild flick is Metal Skin, starring Ben Mendelsohn, Aden Young and Tara Morice ... Antonio Banderas will star in the sequel to El Mariachi, Desperado (its working title was Return of the Mariachi). Originally intended as a bigger budget remake of the original, now an entirely new plot line is emerging ... Mike Newell directs Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Prunella Scales and big screen newcomer Georgina Cates in the theatre world tale An Awfully Big Adventure ... Sean Connery stars as King Arthur, Richard Gere as Lancelot and Julia Ormond as Guinevere, in the medieval epic First Knight ... Julia Ormond and Tim Roth star as a prison dentist and an inmate (respectively) who fall in lust behind bars ... Tim Roth stars as a hitman, despatched to his home territory in Little Odessa ... Helena Bonham Carter plays Woody Allen’s wife, in his latest (yet to be named) metropolitan romance ... REM’s Michael Stipe has set up his own film, production company, Single Cell Pictures. New Line Pictures have given Single Cell a two year, first look deal to develop and produce feature films. Stipe is looking to produce projects which will “bridge that chasm” between independent film and Hollywood fodder. Single Cell is already; being swamped with submissions ... Johnny Suede director Tom DiCillo’s latest project , puts the kind , of low budget induced dramas which are usually kept behind the camera in front of it. Living in Oblivion is an indie film making satire which boasts a cast of indie film survivors, including Steve Buscemi, Catherine Kenner, Dermot Mulroney and James

LeGros ... Aerosmith video babe and The Crush star Alicia Silverstone’s next film is entitled Clueless ... The Joy Luck Club director Wayne Wang’s latest film is Smoke. With a screenplay by The Music of Chance writer Paul Auster, the film focuses on the way people talk. Harvey Keitel heads a cast which includes Stockard Channing, William Hurt and Forest Whitaker ... the latest Michael Crichton book to get the big screen treatment is Congo ... Ken Russell’s latest film is Mindbender, based on the life of legendary spoon bender Uri Geller. Towards the end of the film, Geller himself appears on screen to psychically fix any broken watches viewers may have brought. The experiment has tested well in a UCLA study and at a film preview in Israel (where a 60 percent success was reported) ... Cindy Crawford makes her big screen debut as the star of first time director Andrew Sipes’

action movie Fair Game. William Baldwin co-stars ... screenwriter Melissa Mathison has scored her first produced screenplay since ET with The Indian in the Cupboard. Frank Oz directs this tale of a boy and his walking, talking, three inch tall, plastic Indian companion ... Russell Crowe plays a virtual reality serial killer who escapes into Los Angeles, 1999, in Virtuosity. Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man) directs ... Sandra Bullock also surfs the Internet in the upcoming The Net ... Gus Van Sant’s latest movie is To Die For, starring Matt Dillon and Nicole Kidman ... Liv Tyler plays a record company denizen in Empire ... Hellraiser /Vis on the way ... Rick Moranis suffers at the hands of childhood tormentor Tom Arnold in Big 8u11y... Anna Paquin and Charlotte Gainsbourg play the young and elder Jayne Eyre in Franco Zeffirelli's film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel ... Like Water for Chocolate director Alfonso Arau’s new film is A Walk in the Clouds. It stars Keanu Reeves as a choco

late salesman who poses as the husband of a pregnant woman ... Vanessa Redgrave and Uma Thurman star in A Month By the Lake ... Ryan Slater (Christian’s little bro’) stars in The Amazing Panda Adventure, a black and white and furry all over take on the Free Willy theme ... Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home has its original human star (Jason James Richter), while animatronics and stock footage take the place of its original whale star (Keiko) ... Jason London plays a student who beds his saucy maths tutor (Tla Carrere) in Learning Curves ... Patricia Arquette loses her passport and gets caught in the cross fire of a Burmese uprising in Beyond Rangoon ... the Mortal Kombat video game has been made into a movie ... Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker star in the upcoming alien flick Species ... Jeff Bridges stars as the legendary gunslinger and title character of Wild Bill, with Ellen Barkin playing Calamity Jane ... Julianne Moore suffers from suburban neurosis in Safe ... Atom Egoyan’s latest film is Exotica ... Alfred Molina, Helen Slater and Stephen Fry star in the bank heist comedy The Steal.