BBC - Films - High Noon - 9th July 2004

		Footy Fever. Not Football, football, football. That's certainly not what Drew Barrymore's thinking about after signing up for Fever Pitch, the American remake of the 1997 Brit flick based on Nick Hornby's soccer mad novel. Get ready to seethe with anger, footy fans, as we reveal that the book has been thoroughly Americanised so that it's now about baseball, not football. And that's only the start of the bad news. Gross-out merchants the Farrelly Brothers are currently lined up to direct (assuming they can slot the production in before their long-awaited Three Stooges movie), which means we may yet get to see the literal meaning of footy phrase "as sick as a parrot". Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon is in talks to play the lead, a man obsessed with (wait for it) the Boston Red Sox. Come back Colin Firth, all is forgiven. Even those Arsenal boxer shorts...

		Raise The Flag Clint Eastwood is following in the footsteps of John Wayne (again) with a film about the Battle of Iwo Jima. The ageing heartthrob is teaming up with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks to direct an adaptation of the book Flags Of Our Fathers: Heroes Of Iwo Jima. It tells the story of the battle for the Pacific Island in 1945, which proved a turning point in the Second World War and produced the iconic image of six soldiers raising the US flag on the island's highest hill. Not long after the war, the battle was the basis of The Sands Of Iwo Jima (1949), in which John Wayne's tough drill sergeant led his men to victory. That tub-thumping pro-American movie was a box office hit, winning Wayne his first Oscar nomination. Are Eastwood and Spielberg - two famous conservatives - hoping to drum up some of that patriotic magic for these troubled, Bushwhacking times?

		Rock-a-long with Tom More good news for DreamWorks as Tom Hanks signs up to play the lead in a biopic of American rocker Dean Reed. Reed was a rocker turned filmmaker who defected to communist East Berlin in 1971 and decided to stay there after marrying a German woman. He toured the Eastern bloc until he was found dead in a lake, in mysterious circumstances, in 1986. Hanks, who recently went out to Berlin to meet Reed's widow and receive her blessing for the pic, has been trying to get the project off the ground for the last three years.

		Doc Horror After Fahrenheit 9/11, The Fog Of War and Bus 174, 2004 is definitely the year of the documentary. But does that really excuse the sheer vanity of this next project? Filmmakers Chris Bradley and Kyle LaBrache have announced that they're making a film about thesping smarm-machine Jeff Goldblum and his fiancée Catherine Wreford. The doc, which follows Goldblum behind-the-scenes of stage play The Music Man, is supposed to be an in-depth look at the actor, his work, and his love (pass us a bucket, please). There's more to come: Goldblum is producing the film, which makes the words 'interest' and 'conflict of' spring immediately to Uncle High Noon's mind. Hey, it's Friday and we're obviously just a bit jaded and cynical.

		Robbie Loves Jenny After so many years in the business, veteran star Robert Redford ought to know better - but it seems the Sundance Kid is still a bit of a ladies man. After working with J-Lo in forthcoming drama An Unfinished Life - about a hard-up mom (Lopez) who moves in with her cranky father-in-law (Redford) on his Wyoming Ranch - Redford's been waxing lyrical about his new co-star. "She's a very good actress... All I know is what I saw when I worked with her. She's a natural talent," Redford told website Ananova.com. When asked what he thought about the debacle that was Gigli, he replied: "Are they going to blame her for that film?" No, Rob, you're right. It was obviously all the fault of her horrible ex-fiancé, Ben Affleck.