SORRY FOR OUR RECENT ABSENCE.  
ALMOST  EVERYTHING IS STILL ACCESSIBLE WHILE WE  ARE UNDERGOING RECONSTRUCTION.

FORMULA WON!

Felicity. Stunning. Always.

Felicity Jones, who we all cherish from Rogue One (the finest Star Wars spin-off) is producing a “family drama series” called, simply, One. As in Formula 1, you see. The project puts her in production bed with two Hollywood heavyweights: Tony To, one of Spielberg’s Band of Brothers co-producers, and True Detective exec producer Dan Sackheim. Plus she has won a co-prod deal with Formula 1, itself: ”The high stakes world of F1 continually delivers edge-of-your-seat drama,” she comments, ”and to have the opportunity to create a show based in this world is a thrilling prospect.” Succession on Wheels?  It could even end up with walk-ons from the latest guys in the Grand Prix pits, the new motor sport investors Ryan Reynolds and Michael B Jordan.

Felicity Rose Hadley Jones is always working. She has knocked off 42 screen roles in 27 years, working with George Clooney, Daniel Craig, Ralph Fiennes (twice) Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, Liam Neeson, Bill Nighy (three times) Eddie Redmayne (twice, including her Oscar nod for The Theory of Everything). She was a dying mother in A Monster Calls, totally improvised her way through her amazing Like Crazy and shared a Last Letter from Your Lover with Joe Alwyn. Plus, of course, her superb work in On the Basis of Sex, the biopic (inherited from Natalie Portman) about US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg... Jones spent the Spring shooting The Brutalist in Budapest and Tuscany (with Alwyn again). Well, few actors are content with just a single movie with Felicity. She is, after all, the finest British screen actress we have. Sorry about that, Olivia Colman.

(I’ve just done the impossible. Two paragraphs on Felicity without mention of, oh here you go, Emma Grundy and The Archers…!)

BARBA

Now this is better… A Barbarella re-make is bejng promised. Yes, OK, based on a French comic book. (Although it was more oggled than read as it was based  on Brigitte Bardot).  Various new versions were announced since 1967 when Jane Fonda played the curvaceous outer space outlaw because Bardot and Virna Lisa fled, Sophia Loren was pregnant and Raquel Welch was Myra Breckenridge. Fonda’s husband (and Bardot’s ex) Roger Vadim directed. After the divorce, he attempted a cheekily named sequel, Barbarella Goes Down, with Drew Barrymore or Sherilyn Fenn. Later, Robert Rodriguez tried with Rose McGowan.

RELLA

Now Sydney Sweeny (super savvy) has done (without realising it) what another actor-producer, Margot Robbie, was doing with Ms Pink – getting a major studio keen on a blonde heroine with box-office potential. For the moment, the rest is silence.  First, Syd