Carey Mulligan may play a young Hillary Rodham Clinton in 'Rodham'

I never thought I would say there was a resemblance between Carey Mulligan and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but so there is. With a strategic prosthetic or two, Mulligan could easily play the former

Secretary of State and First Lady. While deals are still in the works, Mulligan may play the young Clinton in a biopic entitled Rodham. It focuses on the lawyer's participation in a committee focused on President Richard Nixon's impeachment proceedings, as well as more personal matters--her relationship with future husband, Bill Clinton. The script by Young Il Kim made the 2012 Black List of unproduced films, with the fourth-highest number of votes. Here was the logline:

"During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the
youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but
she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House
and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches
law in Arkansas."

Since Clinton is rumored to be in contention for the presidency in 2016, the biopic has an added relevance that it might not have otherwise. There's also a chance this movie will offer a take on the sacrifices women often make in the name of their families, a debate that's still raging--consider the response last year to the article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in The Atlantic, written by an advisor to Clinton. Rising director James Ponsoldt (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) has signed on to helm, and it looks like this script will join fellow 2012 Black List scripts, including Draft Day and The Judge and The Fault in Our Stars, that are moving forward into production.

Pick your indie: 'Pawn Sacrifice' or 'Nancy and Danny'

Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan both star in The Great Gatsby, which recently moved from a December 2012 to a summer 2013 release--much to my chagrin. The movie was a meeting point for the two stars--one on the rise and the other on his way back up (Maguire took a pay cut from his seven-figure salary in the original Spider-Man franchise). Director Baz Luhrmann's projects, when they're good, can yield both critical acclaim and box-office success, so the project was a strategic career choice for both of them.

Now both Maguire and Mulligan are lining up indie projects that will probably end up releasing sometime in the wake of Gatsby.

Mulligan has signed on to a thriller that's been described as similar to To Die For, the project that made Nicole Kidman a breakout star. Perhaps Mulligan also hopes this role will launch her further into the stratosphere? In Nancy and Danny, she would play Nancy, a woman who has failed at making it in the big city. She returns home and manipulates a former classmate into helping her in a get-rich-quick scheme she also hopes will help her land her former high school crush. James Marsh, whose documentary Man on Wire won the Best Documentary Oscar, will direct. Between Mulligan, Marsh, and the story, which seems like a thriller version of Young Adult, there's a lot in this project that looks good.

Maguire is teaming up with Ed Zwick for his indie, Pawn Sacrifice. He'll play chess great Bobby Fischer, a boy wonder who turned into a recluse.  Zwick (Love and Other Drugs) is pursuing this project while he waits for financing to come through for The Great Wall, a supernatural project he is set to helm. Zwick is actually taking the reins from David Fincher, who was attached at one point. If Maguire is cast as Fischer, that could lend a clue about what the biopic is going to cover. Maguire is 37. Fischer was 29 when he won the famous 1972 match against Soviet Boris Spassky. After that, he lived in near-obscurity for close to twenty years. It seems likely that the project would focus less on Fischer as a boy wonder and more on what led him to be both the most legendary chess player and a recluse--a bit of a Howard Hughes role, it seems, like that of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator.

Both of these projects seem like worthy follow-ups to the roles of Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan, but only time will tell if they are are as promising as they appear.

First look at Baz Luhrmann's 'The Great Gatsby'

The most important thing about a Baz Luhrmann movie is seeing it. Although a few cast photos circulated of Carey Mulligan in '20s gear, that's nothing compared to the visual feast that's present in the trailer for The Great Gatsby. Warner Bros. has high hopes for the adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, giving it a prime Dec. 25 release date. As a big fan of Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, it looks like there will be plenty more sumptuous costumes, extravagant party scenes, and emotionally charged moments. Though the online trailer is in 2D, the film itself will release in both 2D and 3D. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy.

I love how Luhrmann's vision of the '20s isn't real, but hyperreal. Times Square is covered with more neon than the actual Times Square, an achievement in itself. It's also worth noting that, in a historical nod to the Harlem jazz clubs that were so popular during Prohibition, he includes black faces in his tale--too often historical pictures are lily-white.

The Australian-born Luhrmann is coming off a flop, Australia, but that film didn't have the supercharged visuals of his previous hits, Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. I have a feeling that this film will be a megahit--and become a popular shortcut for high school students ducking their sophomore reading list.

Here's the trailer:

A new kind of getaway scene: 'Drive'

By Sarah Sluis

I'm not really into car chases. They require a suspension of disbelief that bores me and makes me tune out. Car chase sequences that really broke ground, like the one in 1968's Bullitt, have been so copied that watching the original feels like "same old." The only car sequence that truly freaked me out in the past decade or so wasn't even a car chase, but that out-of-the-blue car crash in Adaptation. That felt incredibly real and scary.

For this reason, I wasn't that excited about the indie movie Drive. Ryan Gosling plays a professional driver who moonlights as a getaway car driver. After a job goes wrong, a contract goes out for his death. He runs away with the girlfriend of one of his crime associates (Carey Mulligan), and presumably there's some smooching involved.

The FilmDistrict film is a selection at the Cannes Film Festival, and the festival website just posted a clip of Drive that's truly stunning. It's chock-full of suspense without going over 40mph. Car chases generally involve lots of crashing through intersections, high speeds, and improbable moves like going off a ramp on a pier and landing on a barge in a river (just riffing here). Drive takes the rare step of doing something simple and realistic like pulling over to evade the cops. I almost fainted from excitement.

I don't know if the rest of the movie will be able to pull of that level of suspense, but I also like that the first look of the movie wasn't a trailer, but a brief clip The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, has written and directed seven low-budget action/thrillers that get distributed by the likes of IFC, First Run, and Magnolia. He hasn't ever had the chance to prove himself with a larger budget or well-known stars. But within the low-budget realm, he created Pusher, so successful it was turned into a trilogy and inspired a remake. This man must be doing extremely well in the rental/DVD arena.

Drive will benefit from the support of newbie distributor FilmDistrict, which has been performing strongly. One of its first releases, the horror movie Insidious, has earned $50 million in the U.S. alone off a reported $1.5 million production budget, making it the most profitable movie of 2011. A while back, Drive was given a release date in the fall, where it can take advantage of the post-summer slump.

For a closer look at the Cannes Film Festival, check out Film Journal contributor Jon Frosch's Cannes blog.

Carey Mulligan to play Daisy Buchanan in 'The Great Gatsby'

By Sarah Sluis

Director Baz Luhrmann has a knack for colorful epics that seem to move in a parallel universe to their original historical context--Moulin Rouge! or Romeo + Juliet, anyone? I'm still harboring disappointment that his version of Alexander the Great didn't get made (and Oliver Stone's so-so Alexander did).

So I'm willing to see the Australian take on the great American jazz age novel The Great Gatsby, which, like Romeo + Juliet, is part of the high school assigned-reading canon. He just announced that he cast the British actress Carey Mulligan as the female lead, Daisy Buchanan. The role was apparently in hot demand, with much of young Hollywood auditioning for the role, according to Deadline Hollywood. In the end, he chose the spritely Mulligan, whose career has exploded since her Oscar-nominated performance in last year's An Education.

During a workshop of the screenplay, Leonardo DiCaprio (who was Luhrmann's Romeo) played Jay Gatsby and Tobey Maguire the narrator, Nick Carraway. Tom Buchanan, the third main male role, has not been cast.

Now that he's cast his female lead, there's the question of when the movie will start production. Mulligan just completed Drive with Ryan Reynolds, so it appears her schedule is fairly clear, and both DiCaprio and Maguire have mainly producer credits in their "in-production" sections on IMDB. My guess: soon.

Luhrmann's last film, Australia, was a bit of miss at the box office, in spite of its massive Oprah endorsement (I guess she has more sway with her book club). For Americans, at least, The Great Gatsby has more appeal, especially because it's so widely assigned in schools--I know that had an impact on all the teens who caught Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (or perhaps saw it instead of reading the play).

The character of Daisy has been called superficial and manipulative, as evidenced by a couple of choice lines she recites in The Great Gatsby, which may or may not appear in Luhrmann's script.

After the birth of her child: "All right...I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

"I KNOW. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything�Sophisticated - God, I'm sophisticated."

If Mulligan can manage to give these lines the innocent yet willful spin she succeeded in conveying in An Education, maybe we'll end up with a Daisy that's a bit less of an enigma and more someone with whom the audience identifies.

(Photo of Carey Mulligan during a screen test from Deadline.com)

Movies to look forward to: 'Never Let Me Go' & 'Somewhere'

By Sarah Sluis

Focus and Fox Searchlight, those dependable distributors of specialty fare, recently released trailers for Somewhere (trailer) and Never Let Me Go (trailer). Both of the trailers are moody and exciting and fabulous, and I can only hope the movies match up to the previews.

Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight) stars Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield (The

Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) as '70s boarding school students with an unusual purpose. In a kind of parallel Britain, they are clones that are educated and then donate four organs before "completing." The movie is based on an acclaimed book (that I couldn't get through) by Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki a decade after the A-bomb went off (read a great review of the book here).

What sets this world apart from other dystopias is the characters' belief in the system. They don't question what they've been instructed to do, even though they want to live longer than they've been told they will. In the trailer, they seem to be under the impression that if they find true love, they will be given a few more years to live. It's been said that the British love to form a queue, and this adherence to the rules even when the audience clearly sees evidence to the contrary is maddening, creepy, and sad. The director, Mark Romanek, last directed the dark movie One Hour Photo. The trailer offers a first look at the cinematography and costuming in the film. It's odd to see a futuristic movie set in '70s Britian, and the hairstyles sported by Knightley and Mulligan are priceless--who knows, maybe they'll even inspire a trend. The movie will be out October 1st.

The trailer for director Sofia Coppola's Somewhere (Focus) follows the formula of her trailer for Marie

Antoinette--great indie music, decadent locales, and people walking down halls while crazy things are happening. Coppola's movies make really good trailers, but they don't always match

up to the preview highlights. I still remember the excited feeling I got watching

the trailer for her Marie Antoinette (with the great New Order

song "Blue Monday"), but the movie didn't have the same effect on me.

This trailer starts out with music by Phoenix before shifting to the lower-key song "I'll Try Anything Once" by The Strokes. Elle Fanning looks great in the role of a movie star's abandoned daughter, enough to quiet my thoughts of sibling nepotism (she's the younger sister of Dakota). The movie star is played by Stephen Dorff, who has two decades of movie credits without a role that I remember him in. It's great casting--a suitable blank face with movie star looks, and not someone that the audience would have any recollection of from the tabloids. Coppola has been criticized for her lonely-people-in-glamorous-locales theme, but who cares? Audiences like seeing what it's like from a higher perch. The trailer also reveals her fantastic eye for details and looks. She can tell so much by showing father and daughter getting into a car together wearing matching sunglasses, or playing the swimming pool game tea party. Likely pursuing an awards campaign, Fox Searchlight has the movie aimed for a December 22nd release.