Wong Kar Wai's latest will open the 63rd edition of the Berlinale February 7th out of competition. Also in Wednesday's round-up of news, Angelina Jolie is eyeing her second directorial project for Universal; Jon Voight is eyeing a KGB agent role in an upcoming Ronald Reagan pic; Universal sets a date for Riddick; and the National Film Registry names titles to its list.
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If you haven't been following Vin Diesel's Facebook page, you are missing out on the dorkiest and most touching thing in all the universe. Vin and his 36,982,149 devoted fans live in perfect, sentimentally cheeseball symbiosis, and those fans are a huge part of why he continues to be able to make movies. Chief among them is the incredibly successful Fast & Furious series, which has earned more than $1.5 billion for Universal Pictures. No doubt Universal is counting on that for the upcoming big screen adaptation of the classic 1970s cop show Kojak, because they've done the obvious and genius thing: They're making Vin Diesel the new Telly Savalas.
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Production is underway on The Fast and the Furious 6, director Justin Lin's anticipated follow-up to 2011's Fast Five and his fourth trip behind the camera in the Fast & The Furious franchise. Yes of course, you should be excited; Fast Five was awesome. Just look at how happy stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker are in the first image from the set!
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Exciting news for Gina Carano fans: According to a THR report, the Haywire star/former MMA fighter is in talks to join the cast of Justin Lin's Fast & Furious 6. Carano would play a member of the Diplomatic Security Agent working under Dwayne Johnson's agent Luke Hobbs, who was last seen in the post-credits of Fast 5 sniffing out the trail of Dominic Toretto & Co. Details on the plot are still under wraps, but give how the last sequel ended it doesn't seem too far-fetched to hope for a potential... girl fight, if you will, between Carano's character and a certain franchise favorite. Do you believe in fighting ghosts? [THR]
Much of director Olivier Megaton's female assassin pic Colombiana coasts on a certain popcorn movie badass factor -- lithe star Zoe Saldana as stone-cold killer hell-bent on vengeance for the murder of her family, slinking through missions in skintight catsuits (or less) and gracefully blasting away bad guys with beautifully cold precision in the grand tradition of producer Luc Besson's most famous female killers. But Saldana feels a more weighty responsibility when it comes to her action heroine debut and how its success might affect opportunities for women in film to follow.
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Director Justin Lin had no idea how well his supercharged sequel Fast Five would go on to perform back when he was filming it -- but he [Edit. correction: prepped] a 12-minute sequence for a sixth Fast & Furious film (his next upcoming production) just in case: "I already have a 12-minute sequence done. I did it just as an exercise. I had it done before we were finished with Fast Five, actually. So I wanted to do that just to have it there and to be honest with you, I didn't know if I was going to do a Fast Six. I didn't know if people were going to embrace Fast Five and we were going to have an opportunity. But I felt like I really wanted to make sure that the last scene, which I had talked to Vin [Diesel] about countless times -- I wanted to make sure that was done." [Box Office Magazine]
