'Gotti: Three Generations' lands Al Pacino, Joe Pesci

By Sarah Sluis

I think I've been a little suspicious of the project Gotti: Three Generations ever since they tried to cast Lindsay Lohan in one of the main roles. Lohan's career is so far off track she can only get recruited for the indie-est of the indies--right? Then there's the Gotti family itself. Way back when, I saw all of twenty minutes of the reality show "Growing Up Gotti," and was totally horrified. The family was awful. And this is coming from someone who likes "Jersey Shore." It was kind of like that scene in Goodfellas when Karen (Lorraine Bracco) marvels at the tacky, poorly dressed women around her who hit their kids and complains about how rotten they are. The Gotti family fits right into that sequence.

But now, Gotti: Three Generations has lined up an impressive cast. They have Al Pacino, who people will come to see if only for the hope of seeing a hint of the iconic gangster he played in Scarface. Joe Pesci, of "I'm funny? How am I funny?" fame in Goodfellas, has also signed on, as has John Travola, his wife Kelly Preston and Lohan. Barry Levinson, who won a directing Oscar for Rain Man, will direct, and Leo Rossi, an actor who also has writing credits for projects like Mafioso: The Father, the Son, is writing the screenplay. Sounds much better.

The rights for the project were acquired from John Gotti Jr., and the story will center on his relationship with his father. I thought there was some kind of law against profiting from the story of your crimes, but Wikipedia informs me that prosecutors were never able to successfully convict him on racketeering charges and announced they wouldn't pursue the case any further.

Americans have always loved gangsters and a real-life gangster story, and the popularity of these stories abroad will only add to the international appeal. I'm changing my opinion of the project to tentatively positive. Filming starts this fall (which I'm sure will end up being a source of Lohan drama) with plans to release the film in late 2012.

With Al Pacino to star, 'Blink' winks at buyers in Cannes

By Sarah Sluis

At the Cannes Film Festival, buyers are being presented with the opportunity to grab soon-to- be-produced Blink, to star Al Pacino and be directed by Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) from his own script. Based on New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's nonfiction bestseller, which explores the benefits and drawbacks of split-second judgments, the unlikely adaptation was optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Whereas Malcolm Gladwell's book was divided into chapters, each presenting a case study about judging people in an instant, it appears the film will use Blink as a launch point. Pacino will play a father who discovers that his estranged son is good at sizing up people. He tries to place the boy on New York's financial district, where he thinks the skill will net him big bucks. The plot sounds vaguely familiar to Rain Man, if you replace autism with people smarts and Vegas with Wall Street. I imagine the story will be interwoven with moments straight from Gladwell's book, much like romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You created fictional storylines around examples from the self-help book that inspired the film.

One of the themes of Gladwell's book is that not judging people often yields better results than going on first impressions, often skewed by our prejudices. In one chapter, Gladwell talks about a used-car salesman who offers the same price to everyone instead of guessing a buyer's financial situation and changing quotes person by person. That salesman sells more cars than his colleagues. I'll speculate that the screenplay will make this "realization" the turning point of the film: either Pacino's son uses this strategy from the get-go, and only convinces others late in the game of its worth, or else his attuned sense of what people need and want goes askew, forcing him to change perspectives and adopt the "equal approach to everyone" gambit.

While I'm sure the marketability of Blink the movie will benefit from the popularity of Blink the book, there's a chance that viewers will feel cheated if they get something that deviates too far from Gladwell's scientific but friendly prose. That is to say, what's to prevent the film from becoming too didactic, or simply ignoring the themes in the book? The writer and director of the project, Stephen Gaghan, has proved himself adept at balancing multiple storylines --he wrote Traffic as well as Syriana (in addition to the playboy-comedy Alfie). His work has been critiqued for being too opaque compared to crystal-clear Hollywood plots, but in honor of Blink, I'll refrain from making a similar prejudgment about this story.