All the latest movie news from Alan Jones

Four Feather Falls
• Another adaptation of classic novel

Wes Bentley from American Beauty will join The Patriot star Heath Ledger in Four Feathers for Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur. The seventh screen version to be based on AEW Mason’s novel The Four Feathers, the 1898-set story follows British officer Ledger who resigns his post before his nation’s invasion of Sudan.

His friends and fiancée send him four white feathers, symbolizing cowardice, but he redeems his honour by disguising himself as an Arab and secretly saving the lives of those who branded him a coward. Bentley will play Lt Jack Durrance, who is in love with Ledger’s fiancée and proposes to her when Ledger is believed dead. Bentley, who dropped out of the Anne Rice vampire picture Queen of the Damned, to join the Four Feathers cast, will start shooting once Ledger completes his starring role in A Knight’s Tale currently on location in Prague.

Charlize Angle • Plans go awry…

Charlize Theron and Vincent Perez will star in The Husband I Bought, based on Ayn Rand’s novella. Stephan (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) Elliott will direct the project which begins shooting September in London. It will mark the first time a Rand story has been brought to the big screen since 1949’s The Fountainhead. The story concerns wealthy Theron who has the perfect marriage to her architect husband Perez.

When a building he designed collapses and kills several people, the architect goes on a downward spiral, and when another woman steps into the picture to bring the architect back into the profession, his wife begins to lose her hold over him. Steve Reuther and Michael Douglas first developed the project during their producing partnership five years ago and will executive produce. The project reunites Theron with Reuther, who produced Sweet November starring Keanu Reeves.

Short Cuts

• Ian Holm, who will appear in Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, replaces Nigel Hawthorne as a Scotland Yard investigator in From Hell for 20th Century Fox and directors Allen and Albert Hughes. Hawthorne, who was to star opposite Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, bowed out because of illness. The new take on the Jack the Ripper murders is currently shooting in Prague.

• Two desperate hikers must have thought that they were hallucinating when they were rescued from a remote mountain by action hero and helicopter pilot Harrison Ford. In his spare time, Ford’s a volunteer rescue pilot in Jackson, his hometown, and was sent to the scene when the two young women needed assistance. Ford shrugged the excitement off, saying, “It was nothing.” Fans who want a similar close encounter with him should strand themselves on Table Mountain in Wyoming and hope he’s on duty.

Just a taste of Alan Jones' extensive news section.
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