Michael Mann is preparing a feature film based on his 1980s TV series, Miami Vice, and Colin Farrell is the front-runner to step into the sockless shoes of Don Johnson as detective James "Sonny" Crockett.
Jamie Foxx, who starred in Mann's Collateral, is likely to co-star as fellow detective Ricardo Tubbs, the role originally played by Philip Michael Thomas.
Meanwhile, Dallas, a TV series hugely popular in its 1980s heyday, is to be turned into a feature film directed by Robert Luketic, who made Legally Blonde and Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! In the movie, set in a post-Enron world, the conniving J.R. Ewing will be the head of the most powerful energy company in the world.
The nostalgia continues with Jay Chandrasekhar's feature film based on another 1980s TV series, Dukes of Hazzard, which starts shooting in Louisiana next month with Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville cast as the reckless hillbilly boys, Bo and Luke Duke, who were played on TV by John Schneider and Tom Wopat.
Pedro's Irish translations
Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins and Julie Christie will head the cast of The Secret Life of Words, which starts shooting in Ireland next month. The film is an English-language production from El Deseo, the production company founded by Pedro Almodóvar and his producer brother, Agustin; the cast will also feature Javier Camara and Leonor Watling, both of whom were in Almodóvar's Talk to Her and Bad Education. The director is Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, whose previous film, My Life Without Me, also featured Polley and Watling. In the new film Polley plays a woman who survives the war in Yugoslavia and finds herself in a world of men on an oil rig.
O'Donnell's private dick
Damien O'Donnell is set to follow Inside I'm Dancing with Noir, a quirky, dark romantic comedy based on a play by Peter Straughan, a spin on film noir in which the lone detective figure becomes a security guard with delusions of grandeur. When he is hired to investigate a supposedly unfaithful wife, the story takes in crooked evangelism, literary ambition and sexual frustration.
Undressed to impress
Writer-director Ken Wardrop scored a double victory at the Cork Film Festival awards ceremony on Sunday when his film, Undressing My Mother, took the Jameson Award for Best Short Irish Film and the Audience Award for Best International Short. Martin McDonagh, the award-winning playwright of the Leenane trilogy, received the Claire Lynch Award for Best First Irish Short for Six Shooter, featuring Brendan Gleeson and Ruadhri Conroy. The Gradam Gael Linn Award for Best Irish-language Short was given to Hugh Farley for An Diog is Faide, now on release with Man About Dog.
The Award for Best International Short Film was shared by two English entries, Sam Huntley's Polish Your Shoes and Andrea Arnold's Wasp. Padraig Trehy's My First Motion Picture received the Made in Cork award, and the Audience Award for Best Irish Short went to Daniel O'Hara's Fluent Dysphasia.
After a very successful festival, the organisers are already preparing for next year's event, a double celebration marking the festival's 50th anniversary during Cork's tenure as European City of Culture 2005.
Bond's big night out
Pierce Brosnan will be present to receive the Outstanding Irish Contribution to Cinema Award and Maureen O'Hara will attend and accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Film and Television Awards, to be presented, in association with Eircom, in Dublin on October 30th. James Nesbitt will return as compère for the evening, having presented last year's show, at which his performance in Murphy's Law earned him the award for Best Actor in a TV Drama. He is nominated in that category again this year, for Wall of Silence, along with Dylan Moran (Black Books), David Wilmot (The Clinic), Ciaran Hinds (The Mayor of Casterbridge) and Simon Delaney (Pulling Moves).
Chris rocks the Oscars
The Oscars are about to get "bigger and black", according to the notoriously foul-mouthed comedian Chris Rock, who has been signed to host the 77th Academy Awards on February 27th. Rock's film credits include Nurse Betty, Down to Earth, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (as Chaka Luther King) and Head of State, and he joins Adam Sandler, Burt Reynolds and singer Nelly in the remake of The Longest Yard, which opens next summer.
mdwyer@irish-times.ie
