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Having dipped into the seductive waters of sexy courtesans, Stephen Frears is now looking towards the future, and the future's got lots of gambling. The trades are reporting that Frears is set to direct Lay the Favorite, a dramedy that will rejoin him with High Fidelity scribe D.V. De Vincentis. The project stems from an upcoming memoir by Beth Raymer called Lay the Favorite, Take the Dog, which will be published this Spring.

Now, why did I say trades and not pick one? That's because it's time to play Pick the Plot.

In one corner, we've got The Hollywood Reporter, who says that this is a world of "geeky gamblers" who "figure out how to work the sportsbook system in Las Vegas for their own profit. It centers on a woman in her early thirties who has made a series of bad choices but achieves a redemption of sorts when she meets and then becomes involved with the gamblers." De Vincentis says: "This is the version of 50-year-old math geeks from Queens in basketball shorts who have pet guinea pigs."

In the other corner, we've got Variety describing the story as a "young woman's journey into the world of sports gambling. She starts out as a cocktail waitress but gets caught up in gambling until falling in love," calling it a cross between High Fidelity and The Grifters.

So, geek fest with gambling and a little romance thrown in for good measure, or a romantic world where a cocktail waitress can gamble her way to money ... and love. Which do you choose?

After a year of speculation (Will it be James Bond? Will it be Maximum City? Trainspotting 2?), Danny Boyle has finally settled on his next project. Variety reports that it will be 127 Hours, the tale of mountain climber Aron Ralston. Boyle has been loosely attached to the project since June when the LA Times reported that Boyle and Fox Searchlight had signed a long term, best friends forever deal. Boyle has already penned a treatment, and Simon Beaufoy is in talks to write the script.

In this age of flashmob media stories, you might have forgotten the tale of Ralston. Like your humble authoress and Balloon Boy, Ralston hails from Colorado. He became famous for a Utah climbing accident in 2003, when an 800 lb boulder shifted and crushed his hand. Ralston was forced to choose between life and limb, and in a stomach-turning story heard around the world, he amputated his own hand with a pocketknife. In the media frenzy that followed, Ralston was hailed as a hero and as an idiot, because he had chosen to go climbing alone and without notifying anyone. It was particularly intense locally, and I still remember the heroism debate Ralston sparked in my American Culture class. (It even inspired one student's final project!) Since those heady days of early fame, Ralston has enjoyed success with his autobiography, continues to climb, and is a motivational speaker.

The director is already on the casting hunt for the part of Ralston, which Variety declares will be "a plum job" because it will force an actor to work solo for most of the shoot. Below the jump, I've embedded a video of Ralston describing his amputation. Watch it to prepare for two hours of unflinching detail, and sound off on who you think should be lucky enough to act out a very painful 127 Hours.

August gave us the voice of Matt Damon in Ponyo, September gave us the inner voice of Matt Damon in The Informant!, and now October has brought us a look at his next two performances.

Clint Eastwood's Invictus is one of the last big likely contenders of the awards season, though it is as of yet unseen (unless those very few who have seen it are very good at being very quiet). Damon plays real-life rugby captain Francois Pienaar, whose team saw the support of Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) as a rallying point around which they might lift the spirits of South Africa in the wake of apartheid. It's political! It's underdog! It's opening in December! It's Oscar bait for certain, and Apple has the exclusive trailer.

Paul Greengrass' Green Zone, on the other hand, was shuffled out of the Oscar race once Universal decided to sort out its slate after a lackluster summer at the box office, and that may have been a wise move. Yahoo's trailer (which is also embedded below) comes across as more of a straight-up actioner than a ready-made contender, with Damon back in Bourne mode as a betrayed soldier on the hunt first for WMDs, and then for answers. Based on the best-seller Imperial Life in the Emerald City, it opens on March 12, 2010.

Take this with a huge grain of salt -- make that smelling salts. Sylvester Stallone has told Tele5 Germany that he wants to make Rocky 7, even though it might embarrass his family and himself. A German-language transcript of the interview is available at the site; translated by Babel Fish, my interpretation is: 'I know people would laugh at it, as I would if someone were making The Godfather Part 10. Enough! But I also know that if I succeed, it will be because this is a film about aging, not about boxing. I know it will provoke criticism. Even my wife said to me, Leave it. You'll embarrass the children. But I said, if I do not try, I an a very unfortunate man. One must do it. Artists must go again and again through the dark.'

On the one hand, Rocky Balboa and whoever else he wants to keep alive from that universe are Stallone's characters -- he created them and has the right to do what he wants to with them. On the other hand ... c'mon, Sly! Wasn't Rocky Balboa all about aging and the character, rather than boxing itself? Admittedly, that turned out better than most of us thought it would. But if you really want to tackle the issue of aging, especially from your perspective of a 63-year-old man, why not dream big and create a new character who's not a boxer or a weary war vet or a mountain climber or an updated Charles Bronson? After all, originality is what brought us Rocky.

UPDATE: Apparently all the hype is over nothing as Sly's comments here were in the past tense and about Rocky Balboa, not any new Rocky film. That's not to say he won't decide to make another one for the hell of it, but for now that franchise remains closed.

Brilliance and self-destruction go hand in hand in Tom Hooper's The Damned United, a portrait of English football coach Brian Clough and his decades-long obsession with the rival club Leeds United. But despite flashes of game play (from back when soccer was a "beautiful game, that needed to be played beautifully") and a brief, impressive bit of juggle-and-shoot by former player and star Michael Sheen, this is anything but the action-packed sports film you might expect. Rather, it's an account of a man desperate for recognition who burned a lot of bridges and made a lot of mistakes on the road to glory, the story of a legendary football coach before he ever became a legend and the personal demons that almost completely ruined him.

In his opening scene Hooper obscures Clough's head from view, the point being that Clough and his driving ambitions were a mystery to most. Why did Clough, an outspoken critic of the dirty tactics of the Leeds United club, take a job running it after the departure of his biggest professional rival, the celebrated manager Don Revie? As screenwriter Peter Morgan argues, it was Clough's desperate need for Revie's respect that drove him, and it all stemmed from one fateful 1967 match between Revie's league-dominating Leeds United and Clough's own Derby County.

In this week's Whip It, director-star Drew Barrymore shines a loving light on one of the most brutal and devilishly entertaining sports around: roller derby. If you've ever seen a derby match, you know what I'm talking about: 60 minutes of fast-skating, bruising action between players with names like Axles of Evil and Juana Beat'n. In celebration of the badass beauties of the roller derby world and their Whip It counterparts – including Ellen Page as "Babe Ruthless," Kristin Wiig as "Maggie Mayhem," Barrymore as "Smashley Simpson," and Zoe Bell as "Bloody Holly" – here's a Cinematical Seven remembering some of the scariest, fiercest movie characters to ever lace up a pair of roller skates.


1. Rollergirl - Boogie Nights


In Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, Rollergirl (Heather Graham) is a fixture in Jack Horner's porn family who's up for anything but never, ever takes off those skates. She's young, blonde, and always ready like Freddie for some fun – but don't cross Rollergirl, or you might get a face full of wheels in return. When one unlucky frat boy insults her – and her fine feature films – he gets a sidewalk beating from Jack (Burt Reynolds) before Rollergirl glides over to give him the business end of her silver '70s four-wheelers.

After an advance screening of Drew Barrymore's rollicking, entertaining, and heartfelt Whip It, which opens tomorrow, some real-life roller derby players were asked about the movie's realism. (Ellen Page plays a teenage beauty pageant contestant who gets involved in the sport.) They all chimed in: "We don't get to give anyone bloody noses!"

Yes, sports movies based loosely on real life and set in the modern era tend to take liberties with the levels of violence involved in their sport. But sci-fi movies tend to ratchet up the bloody-nosed action to incredible levels, taking murder for granted. Life is cheap in the future, I suppose. With images of Ellen Page in roller skates and a faux-Girl Scout uniform in mind, not to mention the thought of Drew Barrymore herself with a bloody nose, I set off in search of the very best future sports movies -- and discovered that relatively few of any quality have been made. Thus, consider this list a sketchy compendium of what's out there. What am I missing? What future sports are not properly represented?

1. Rollerball in Rollerball
An easy choice, featuring James Caan at the height of his hard-bitten, rueful stardom in the 1970s. Norman Jewison's film is a self-righteous sermon about the dangers of thrill seeking, and a broadside against sports and popular entertainment in general. But when you have such exciting action in a sport that combines a hopped-up version of roller derby with football, chaos, and murder, who's complaining?

Read the rest over at SciFi Squad

I would love to see Hugh Jackman in a boxing movie. It seems like he's long past due for one given his physical prowess, and he'd be a good fit for a Cinderella Man sort of tale. Unfortunately, he's decided to pursue the sport through robots and Shawn Levy, as Variety reports that he's in line for Real Steel.

Based on a story by Richard Matheson, Real Steel is probably best described as Rocky meets Wall-E and The Iron Giant. Jackman plays a professional boxer who has to hang up the gloves, and rearranges his life when human boxers are replaced by 2000 pound robots. Our obsolete fighter tries to go with the flow, and becomes a Robot Boxing promoter, but success constantly eludes him because all he can afford are crappy robot parts. Then one day, he discovers a discarded robot who has a distinct gift for winning. Wouldn't you know it, the ex-fighter also discovers he's the father of a 13 year old son, and they bond as their scrappy robot fights his way to the championship.

There's not going to be a lot of surprises with Real Steel (they'll be misfits who find each other, and build a family), and Levy's track record isn't particularly promising. Nor is Hollywood particularly good at adapting Matheson's work to the big screen. But with Steven Spielberg as executive producer (a job which reunites him distantly with Matheson), there might be some hope. Not much, but some. I really wish Jackman would take some time and pick another film like The Prestige or The Fountain, and steer clear of the goofy popcorn concepts.

Get ready for the sports waterworks, folks. Back in June, Jenni Miller wrote about the latest horse racing drama to cook up -- Secretariat, with Diane Lane attached to play the thoroughbred's owner, Penny Chenery. Now the major players are in place, and there's no doubt that Disney is prepping this is a big sports drama. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Dylan Walsh, John Malkovich, and Scott Glenn have joined the production, which began shooting this week.

Secretariat was the horse that broke a 25-year Triple Crown dry spell, setting world records and winning the final Belmont Stakes with an eye-goggling 31-length win (in other words, so far ahead that the horses behind look teeny). He's pretty much the horse amongst race fans, and is known for having the biggest recorded heart (22 lbs). But it all started with a coin toss.

THR says Glenn will play "a southern-bred aristocrat who loses the horse in a coin toss," although that's not quite how it plays out. Glenn must be Ogden Phipps, and as the story goes, there were coin tosses to discern who would get what horse. Phipps won the toss, but Penny Chenery scored an unborn foal in the deal who turned out to be Secretariat. Walsh will play Penny's husband, "a successful attorney who is accustomed to his wife being at his beck and call," and who is, undoubtedly, in line for a wake-up call. Finally, John Malkovich will play a trainer who underestimates the horse's power (Lucien Laurin?).

And they're off!

One thing you hear a lot about the great HBO series The Wire is some variation on "it ruined all other cop shows for me." And it's true. The Wire was so smart about policework, so painfully realistic without sacrificing drama, that it made damn near everything else, with the obligatory gun-and-badge-scene clichés and pat little whodunnits, seem downright silly; ridiculous. Creators and writers David Simon and Ed Burns called the bluff of an entire genre. They stripped away the Hollywood varnish and made their peers look goofy, clueless, like so many deer staring at headlights.

Michael Lewis's The Blind Side isn't quite like that, but it's close. Certainly I will henceforth have trouble restraining gales of laughter at the naiveté of football movies about scrappy underdog quarterbacks who overcome the odds and lead their teams to victory. Or about the glory of college football. Or about players who make it to the NFL through sheer pluck and determination.

Even more so than The Wire to lame cop dramas, The Blind Side is an explicit rebuke to such stories. Straight up, Lewis (who also wrote Moneyball) says: it doesn't work that way. First of all, the quarterback isn't even that important. A coach with a handle on strategy and talent elsewhere on the roster, can, within reason, make damn near anyone look good throwing the ball. Second: who makes it to the NFL is determined, 99% of the time, not by persistence and heart, but by genetics. Size. Much more than you might think, shape. Innate athleticism that cannot be taught or learned. Depressingly, the selection process for great football prospects often resembles a state fair where people admire the girth and gait of cattle and "hmm" and point thoughtfully.