• Whether you watch Entourage or not, you've probably heard that the show's premise is loosely based on Mark Wahlberg's own experiences as he stepped into the movie business. Now he's finally getting into the action. Mixed in with his upcoming work with The Fighter and The Brazilian Job, Ace Showbiz reports that Wahlberg has filmed a scene with Jeremy Piven for the show where they go at it. There's no word on who Wahlberg will play.
  
• Louise Linton, who played a Skin Care Consultant in Lions for Lambs, and Katie in The Echo, is now going sporty. Variety reports that the actress has signed on for a role in the indie comedy The Wiffler: The Ted Whitfield Story. She'll play a woman called Shannon Storm in the film, which focuses on the MLB strike in 1994, that let the nation turn its eyes to wiffle ball.
• Finally, Alex Pettyfer, who you might remember as Alex Rider in Stormbreaker, is getting ready to be Tormented. Variety reports that the actor will topline the horror film, which centers on "a bullied teen who comes back from the dead to take his revenge." And people think they just have to fear karma... He'll be joined by the likes of April Pearson, Larissa Wilson, Mary Nighy, and Dimitri Leonidas.

I'm not partial to overtly subjective reviews, yet I can't seem to find any better way of relating my response to Isabel Coixet's latest film, Elegy, an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal," which follows the romance between a college professor and his much younger former student. First, though, a note of appropriateness: early in the film, this professor, the Roth regular David Kepesh, who previously appeared in the novels "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire," is lecturing about how literature, specifically Tolstoy's "War and Peace," will be appreciated differently by a reader at different points in his or her life. In ten years, for example, it may seem like a new book entirely.

Perhaps in ten years, then, or more likely in thirty, I will be able to watch Elegy again and have a new perspective. Maybe I will be able to relate to Kepesh, here portrayed by Ben Kingsley, when I am in my sixties and have similarly lived and experienced as much. Yet the fact that Coixet's film is so depressing makes me almost hope that I never actually live so long to find out. I should have known, what with the filmmaker's past films, such as My Life Without Me, with their gray atmospheres and dreary dealings with illness and death. While appearing on the outside to be a sexy drama about how one lecherous old man discovers love, Elegy is on the inside really just a slow, uninteresting depiction of a selfish fool who possibly too-late realizes that he's grown old before he's actually grown up.

What with the Olympics and the Batman and the pineapple express and the pants, you might be a little overloaded with things to watch this weekend. On the other hand, maybe you've seen all that and want something different. In that case, hooray for the Indie Spotlight! It's our weekly roundup of what's opening beyond the multiplexes, designed so movie fans can keep an eye out for those less-publicized titles.

There are eight indie films for you to examine this week: Beautiful Losers, Beer for My Horses, Bottle Shock, Elegy, Hell Ride, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Red, and What We Do Is Secret. Here's the skinny on each of them.

Bottle Shock
What it is: A fictionalized account -- very heavily fictionalized, it would seem -- about the plucky California winery that managed to beat French wines in a blind taste test in 1976.
What they're saying: The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are almost evenly split down the middle. My own take: It's the Two Buck Chuck of wine movies.
Where it's playing: Various places throughout Northern and Southern California, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.
Official site: Take a sip.

Hell Ride
What it is: Executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, it's Larry Bishop's homage to the sleazy biker movies of the early 1970s.
What they're saying: They're saying they hate it. Ten of the 12 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are negative, and that includes the two from Cinematical, by James Rocchi and yours truly.
Where it's playing: Quite a few cities, actually; check out the map here.
Official site: Hop on, easy rider.

When Stephen Frears' The Queen came out in 2006, all the buzz emphasized Helen Mirren's icy performance as London's reclusive royal highness. The ubiquitous praise lead to her Oscar win, but it overwhelmed recognition of the movie's secret weapon: Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, quietly pressuring his Majesty to face the public in the wake of Princess Diana's untimely demise. There's a reason why Sheen conveyed the nuances of Blair's role in the event, which transpired a mere three months after the Prime Minister rose to power -- he had practice. The Deal, a fantastic made-for-TV movie Frears directed in 2003, tracked Blair's cunning (and morally questionable) instincts in the years leading up to his position at the top of the Labor Party.

Sheen played Blair in The Deal first, and it's both a superior performance and a superior film. Whereas The Queen had a tabloid hook and only tangentially explored the deeper political ramifications of a reclusive national leader, The Deal delves into precisely how Blair managed to emerge at the top of British politics with a series of calculated maneuvers. Political drama at its finest, The Deal hit DVD in the United States last month, where it has been touted as "the prequel to The Queen." That's not quite fair; The Queen is the sequel to The Deal, and the two movies ought to be seen as a single, wholly fascinating package depicting British politics in the 1990s.

If there's one movie descriptive that can actually get my jaded heart racing, it's "in the style of L.A. Confidential." Sure, it's glib, and probably sells the potential film and its source material short, but I can't help it, it's a magical phrase. And The Hollywood Reporter (by way of Lakeshore Entertainment) used it to describe Barry Levinson's latest movie.

Levinson is set to direct an adaptation of Peter Dexter's novel Train, a story set in 1950's Southern California. It centers around Miller Packard, a white sergeant in the San Diego Police Department, who has little time for the hypocrisy and racism of his age. An avid golfer, he befriends a troubled young African-American caddy named Lionel "Train" Walk, who harbors knowledge of an unreported murder that haunts his past. The city politics and racism of the 50's surround the murder investigation, and threaten their friendship.

Dexter's books have been popular in Hollywood recently -- he was the pen behind Mulholland Falls and The Paperboy is currently in production with Paul Verhoven and Jan de Bont. Unlike with Falls, he won't be penning the script this time around. That job falls to Allison Burnett, who's a pretty popular writer at Lakeshore, adapting Fame and penning Untraceable for them.

Hopefully, a Cinematical reader or two can chime in on the book. From its reviews, the source material sounds pretty enticing. Here's hoping this can not only be a comeback for Levinson, but a noir rival for L.A. Confidential.

If you pay attention, you can learn a lot from movies, even ones you haven't seen. For example: No one dragged me to see Sex and the City and I wasn't inclined to spend money on a dialogue-heavy show that played just fine on TV. Oh, boy, did I miss out! The movie sparked raging debates, both pro and con, and became a rallying cry for neglected female audiences. What I learned: It can be enlightening to expand the range of movies you watch.

Determined not to avoid the next chick flick phenomenon, I hustled out to see Mamma Mia! The audience was overwhelmingly female and mostly as old or older than (middle-aged) me, and it was great to see almost everyone enjoying themselves. Too bad the movie itself was shrill and poorly-directed; even Meryl Streep floundered at times. What I learned: Abba's songs are incredibly catchy; it's OK to have sex with multiple partners within a few weeks time, as long as you can retreat to your own hotel on a gorgeous Greek island to raise your child on your own.

The audience for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was younger but more racially diverse, though I didn't understand the message of sisterhood that was supposed to be underlying everything. What I learned: You can neglect your friends' obvious emotional needs for weeks at a time as long as you have access to millions of frequent flyer miles and can retreat to a gorgeous Greek island to reconnect.

What have you learned from the movies lately?

Over the past few weeks, movie ratings have been a popular topic for discussion. While Kevin Smith's upcoming Zack and Miri Make a Porno appealed an NC-17 rating (and won), The Dark Knight was enjoying a record-setting box office take and a pretty controversial PG-13 rating. Once again, we ask: Why is sex more inappropriate than violence? Should raunchy language and a few "thrusts" be condemned while a dude with half his face falling off and a psychopathic, murderous clown get off practically unscathed? And are there other issues at work here? Does a film with a giant budget and an all-star cast get it "easier" than a smaller film with a lesser-known cast and a director who chain smokes profanity?

No doubt there are shady politics at play here (as is all over this fine country of ours), and over the years there have been a number of films that deserved a different rating. Over on OMG Lists, they currently have up a list of six wrongly rated movies; films that, for one reason or another, deserved either a lower or a higher rating. It's a weird system, for sure -- these days, if you're a comedy, you kinda want that 'R' rating because your box office take will most likely be higher. However, if you're a horror flick, you want to try for a PG-13. Strange world we live in ...

But anyway, among the films featured on their list are Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which, at the time, received an R-rating because of a few profanity-laced scenes, but totally could've gotten away with a PG-13. Or what about Jaws ... with its PG rating! Hey, it's a film about a giant shark that devours people -- bring the whole family!

Here's some top casting news for Thursday, August 7:

• The office used to be the perfect prep work for a life of filofaxes, stale coffee, and covert games of freecell. Now it's the perfect training to become one of the Inglorious Bastards. The Hollywood Reporter posts that B.J. Novak is in talks to play one of the soldiers in Quentin Tarantino's long-in-coming film that suddenly got a jolt of caffeine. Should Novak's talks work out, he'll play PFC Utvich, "a soldier of slight build who comes from New York."
• Meryl Streep, meanwhile, is looking to get more romantic comedies under her belt. I guess she's really digging the lighter fare. Variety reports that she is in advanced negotiations to star in an untitled romcom that will place her in a romantic triangle with two men. This project comes from the pen of Nancy Meyers, who has brought us Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences, Father of the Bride, Something's Got to Give, and The Holiday. But who will play the lucky leading men?
• Finally, Max Thieriot has scored the title role in a new sci-fi action film called Prodigy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Playing a kid named William Cooley, he gets to be "a rebellious student at an elite boarding school producing world leaders with the help of pharmaceuticals. Three days before graduation, several of its alumni are murdered, and William is implicated." The valedictorian begins to investigate the poor kid, and the two become reluctant allies in the fight against the bad guys. Dave Kalstein adapted the story from his own novel, and production is slated to begin in October.

When Demetri Martin joined the cast of Taking Woodstock, it was set to begin production in late August. In a nice change of pace, the movie is still on schedule, and will begin shooting at the end of the month, SAG strike be damned. But that isn't the only reason to anticipate Ang Lee's project. Variety reports the ensemble cast has been set, and it's insanely good. Get ready for a film that includes the likes of Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Eugene Levy, Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Dan Fogler, Mamie Gummer, Henry Goodman, and Jonathan Groff.

Martin stars in the memoir adaptation as Elliot Tiber, a closeted gay man and aspiring interior designer who gives up his Big Apple dreams to run the family business in a Catskills motel. In 1969, he offered the hotel as home base for Woodstock organizers while his neighbor Max Yasgur (Levy) offered his farm. Staunton and Goodman play Tiber's parents, Groff will be festival organizer Michael Lang, Hirsch will play a Vietnam vet just back on American soil, Schreiber is in talks to play a transvestite named Vilma, Morgan will be a closeted married man having an affair with Tiber, Dano and Kazan play a hippy couple going to the concert, Fogler will be the head of a local theater troupe, and Gummer will take on the role of Lang's assistant.

I have a feeling this will be so very, very good.