At this rate there won’t be a moment of Abe Lincoln’s life – real or fictional – that hasn’t been committed to film. We’ve already had him fighting vampires and this autumn we get Spielberg’s look at his later life. Now Jason Clarke has signed up to star in The Green Blade Rises, about the President’s younger years.
None other that Terrence Malick is producing the movie, while his regular collaborator AJ Edwards is writing and directing the movie. Deadline says the film ‘tells of the formative years of the 16th US president and the hardships that shape him including abandonment by his father (Jason Clarke) in the harsh winter wilderness, a tragedy that marked him forever, and the two women who guided him to immortality. Clarke’s character has a callous, quiet demeanor, verbally and physically abusive towards Abe on many occasions, but lets his son know how proud he is of him. He is married to Sarah Lincoln (played by Diane Kruger), Abe’s beautiful stepmother.’
It doesn’t sound like this will all be about Lincoln cutting down cherry trees and never telling lies then.
Aussie actor Clarke’s profile is likely to rise soon with roles in Lawless, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby and White House Down.
At Sundance in January, the movie Million Dollar Man was announced, with Luke Wilson attached to the title role. It’s been slightly stuck in development since then, but now it’s moving forward as 
Warner Bros. has picked up film rights to Dan Krokos’ young adult novel The Planet Thieves, with the hope that the studio can set it up as their own big hitter along the lines of Twilight and Hunger Games, although more decidedly sci-fi based. The book is being published by Tor/Macmillan in the US next May.
Michael Fassbender is a ridiculously busy man who seems to be on a mission to appear in as many films as humanly possible. He’s just signed up for another one called Frank, which 
Spike Lee must have been impressed by Nate Parker’s work on Red Hook Summer, as the actor is now in talks to reunite with the director for his remake of Oldboy, according to 
Normally holiday weekends are when studios roll out some of their biggest movies, but Labor Day is pretty much the stepchild of these occasions, as the fact some States don’t recognise it and that it comes just before kids go back to school, mean it isn’t seen as a good time to bring out big movies.
Having started out as a writer on Saturday Night Live, Bob Odenkirk is best known for out and out comedy, usually of the rather silly type, but more recently he’s been flexing his muscles in Breaking Bad.
The larger than life (literally) Michael Clarke Duncan has passed away at the age of 54. The actor was receiving treatment in a Los Angeles hospital, having never rebounded from a heart attack he suffered in July.
Back in the early 1980s, it was generally seen as career suicide to ‘play gay’, but that didn’t mean stars weren’t interested in roles with a bit of homoerotic subtext. That seems to be true of Richard Gere, who’s told EW that one of the reasons he chose to star in American Gigolo was because of its gay themes.