With an eye on the possible writers' strike and a Christmas 2008 release, Columbia is fast-tracking Angels & Demons, the Ron Howard-directed follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, for a February production start.... Also per Variety, Dakota and Elle Fanning will star with Cameron Diaz in an adaptation of the Jodi Picoult novel My Sister's Keeper.... Michael Mann is developing the mob drama Frankie Machine as a star vehicle for Robert De Niro.... According to the Reporter, Woody Harrelson will join Bruce Willis and Channing Tatum in Oliver Stone's new Vietnam drama Pinkville.... Jamie Foxx is a detective investigating race-related slayings in The Zebra Murders.
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The one thing I realized as Oscar night droned on and on for nearly four hours: If I ever had to choose someone to be stranded with for hours on end (say, like those poor Jet Blue passengers a few weeks ago), it would have to be Ellen DeGeneres.Keeping her cool, and her genuine aura of chipper goodwill, throughout three costume changes (in suits from red velvet to all-white to royal blue) and what seemed once again like an overindulgent excess of movie montages (we definitely could have done without Michael Mann’s fuzzy survey of cinematic American history), Ellen was welcome nearly every time she popped up. Offering a spec script to Martin Scorsese, directing Steven Spielberg on how to take her photo with Clint Eastwood, asking the megastars in the front row to lift their legs as she vacuumed the Kodak past midnight (ET), while informing us that Helen Mirren had just asked for a rum and coke (sounded pretty good to me at the time), Ellen did her darndest to deflate the bloat a...
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