How fitting for the best news story I could possibly hope to hear all year (yes, even more satisfying than hearing
Tom Hardy would be in Batman 3), to fall on the last day of 2010. Megastar
Brad Pitt has confirmed that he will star in
Cogan's Trade, the crime/heist film that will re-team Pitt with writer/director
Andrew Dominik and most likely actors
Casey Affleck (attached) and
Sam Rockwell (in talks). All four men are the major players from the 21st century classic Western
The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, a movie I dream, obsess and lust over more than Kevin Spacey does his screen daughter's high school friend Mena Suvari in American Beauty. Seriously. I forget to pay my bills because the ideas from the film - the images, the music, the performances, the emotion of the poetic masterpiece keeps creeping into my head. Pitt says filming on Cogan's Trade begins in March in New Orleans, Louisana (a change from the Boston setting from the novel), where the actor would play Jackie Cogan, an enforcer investigating the robbery of a high stakes poker game protected by the mob. The film, adapted from the book by George V. Higgins (
seemingly impossible to buy brand new on Amazon) is said to be a more serious version of
Ocean's Eleven and Dominik is looking to cast a similarly large ensemble. Alongside Pitt, Affleck (who incidentally were both in the Ocean's franchise) & Rockwell -
we previously heard of Dominik's desire to cast
Mark Ruffalo and
Javier Bardem, and now
Scene Louisiana back-up those names and also add
Josh Brolin, Bill Murray and
Zoe Saldana to the list of potential new additions. Ain't that a cast for sore eyes? Only thing missing is
Nick Cave to score. Now I must watch Jesse James for the fourth time today. I must. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp2ppYB9fDo (p.s. - I previously wrote about my Jesse James obsession,
HERE)