The first press screenings of Sam Mendes’ Jarhead that I’ve heard about will begin late next week. The sound of those slowed-down synthesized helicopter blades on the website is an obvious salute to Apocalypse Now, but the script suggests it’ll be something more Full Metal Jacket-ish than Platoon-like.

Director Tony Scott (Domino) on his forthcoming remake of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (’79), which will start shooting sometime in ’06: “I see it as Kingdom Of Heaven meets The Warriors because with these gangs…instead of having twenty or thirty guys, I’m going to have three thousand, five thousand guys in the L.A. river beds and it’s going to look like L.A. during the riots. I love the original movie…that’s why I’m in doing this, but I’m not going to copy the original”. Hill’s film,
based on the ancient Greek nonfiction tale “Anabasis,” was about a New York gang trying to make it get home to Coney Island alive after being framed from the murder of an untouchable gang leader. The director’s cut version of Hill’s film came out on DVD on 10.4.

Leonardo DiCaprio obviously has this liking for dark heavyweight melodramas (The Blood Diamond, The Departed, The Chancellor Manuscripts, Gangs of New York) or biopics about famous ballsy guys (The Aviator, Catch Me If You Can and a film in development about Timothy Leary). Is anyone else thinking he needs to make something light…a clever comedy, maybe a mushy romance of some kind?

There’s an “airline geek” named Andy Smith who points out that (a) there’s a dusky twilight shot of the mythical 747 that Orlando Bloom’s character takes from Portland to Louisville in the trailer for Elizabethtown, and says (b) that this aircraft “is none other than Columbia Airlines flight 409 (obviously not a real airline) from the movie Airport ’75. You know…the one with crossed-eyed stewardess Karen Black trying to fly a plane with a large hole ripped into it from an air-to-air collision?” This has to be checked out. Bloom and Dunst flirting all alone in first-class, and Karen Black in the pilot’s seat? Awesome if true. Anyone?