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Editorials > Filmwad Breaks it Down: Thursday November 1

The big news of the day is that Cloverfield may indeed be called just Cloverfield. Though it's still entirely possible that they could change the title to something else before the film is released. After all, if the film is a monster movie that takes place in New York, it doesn't make much sense to name the film after a street in LA.

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are getting back together for Duplicity, a con-artist movie set in the corporate world. Roberts hasn't been very prolific in the past few years, this kind of movie might be just what she needs.

Peter O'Toole and Jeremy Northam are going to star in Dean Spanley, a film about stuffy Brits and the dogs they love. The film reportedly, "reveals just how deep an Englishman's love for his dog can go." I don't know that I like the sound of that.

Paul Giamatti is going to be playing Philip K. Dick in The Owl in Daylight. The film will be a combination of an actual story by Dick with biographical elements of his life mixed in. This can go very right when it's done well (Adaptation.) or very badly when it's not (Slipstream).

The first trailer for today is for Awake, a thriller with a cast that includes Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Terrence Howard, Lena Olin, and Fisher Stevens. I've always felt that Christensen wasn't really to blame for the missteps in Star Wars. All of the usually good actors in that movie were terrible. So in my book, he's got a free pass. Jessica Alba on the other hand has no excuse. The movie actually looks pretty cool (if a bit Twilight Zoney). The only thing that made me a little uneasy about this trailer is that the conspirators are a black doctor and a Jew who wants money. So remember, white people, when choosing surgeons…

The other trailer is for a documentary called Mr. Untouchable, a biography of Harlem drug kingpin Nicky Barnes. Coincidentally, Barnes is a character in Ridley Scott's American Gangster which opens this weekend (Cuba Gooding Jr plays Barnes). It's directed by Marc Levin, who also brought us The Protocols of Zion a few years ago, a well-regarded documentary about the rise of anti-Semitism in post 9/11 America. This new doc explores the life and times of Nicky Barnes and asks us if he's a figure worthy of the admiration that was directed at him, or if he's just another contemptible stool pigeon for the feds. Do people still say stool pigeon any more? Clearly I was born in the wrong decade.

Written by David Morgan