By: Henry J. Fromage –

Vince Vaughn is tiring of this whole comedy business.  He’s recently been attached to action films from Tony Scott and Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace, and now he went ahead and bought the rights himself to The Risk Agent.  It’s assumed he’ll take the lead role of an American investigator who teams up with a Chinese forensic accountant to look into the disappearance of a Chinese member of his American company.  Apparently, private investigation is illegal in China, which ups the stakes a bit.  While this is a bit of a departure from his usual wiseguy comedy, I guess we can’t say Vaughn’s never strayed from it.

After all, this is a real thing, really.

We have another J.J. Abrams-produced movie a-comin’, so of course details are scarce.  All we know is that it’s about a giant earthquake, which is enough for me.  I usually don’t report on these, though, until a few more things are known, but the name of the scriptwriter is enough to comment on- Dustin Lance Black.  That’s right, the Oscar-winning writer of Milk is writing an disaster flick for J.J. Abrams.

I guess San Francisco would be a logical place to set an earthquake flick…

It had been awhile since we heard from Kimberly Peirce, and now here’s the second new project for her in the last few weeks.  The indie directress extraordinaire will next remake With a Friend Like Harry, a French thriller that cleaned up at the César Awards- their equivalent of the Oscars.  Since it’s a thriller, of course it’s being billed as “Hitchcockian”, involving a mysterious man who claims to be a schoolmate showing up in a man’s life and throwing it into disarray.  Wentworth Miller, who you’d likely recognize from Prison Break, is making this his second script after the intriguing-looking Stoker.  Now, hopefully he can deliver something a little more “Hitchcockian” than we’ve been getting lately.

No.