Thanks to someone called Graham Linehan, whose name sounds somewhat familiar but I don’t know why, for bringing this to my attention: PT Anderson’s new film ‘There Will Be Blood‘ about the early days of Oil prospecting. A story about ‘family, greed, religion, and oil’, it seems.

Paul Thomas Anderson is also responsible for Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love, as well as a few others I never heard of before.

Moriarty on Aint It Cool News says it’s one of the best scripts he’s read recently, and the teaser trailer above certainly peaks my interest as it looks like a real old style western. And hey, who doesn’t like watching Daniel Day Lewis acting? Looks like he’s doing his De Niro impression too, which he perfected in Gangs of new York:

A few weeks ago I heard on the radio about a reality TV show in Holland called The Big Donor Show, featuring “a a terminally-ill woman who selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys when she dies.”

I was shocked by it all, but it turns out I needn’t have been as it was all a hoax. I’m not sure that makes it any better really. No matter what they say about highlighting problems, at the end of the day they used a very serious illness to create publicity and profit for themselves. That’s just wrong!

The Galway Film Fleadh have announced their Masterclasses and are taking applications until 5pm on the 29th of June. Among them is an Actor’s Masterclass with Jeremy Irons and a Screenwriters Masterclass with Terry George, writer of In The Name of the Father and Hotel Rwanda, amongst others.

The programme of films will be announced soon.

While all the attention seems to be going to The Joker these days, Batman must have been wondering what he’d have to do to remind people that he was The Dark Knight. The answer was a simple one. Have a picture taken.

Credit to AICN once again.

I’m not a fan of reality TV. I try not to watch it if I can possibly avoid it because it makes me feel horribly depressed about the state of us.

Nonetheless, here is an RTE reality TV show that I thought about applying to for at least 2 seconds.

RTÉ Television and Sideline Productions in association with Red Pepper Productions (what a mouthful) will fly ten young actors to LA, put them in a house together, and give them 80 hours training with ‘world-renowned acting and audition coach’ Margie Haber who, it seems, coached Brad Pitt for his Thelma and Louise audition.

As part of their training, the ten chosen actors will receive over 80 hours of on-camera instruction at the Margie Haber Studio, intensive work in the Haber Phrase Technique, sessions with dialect coaches, advice from working actors in Hollywood, managers, agents and casting directors working in Hollywood. They will also get the chance to network at film screenings and theatre events, tapings of television shows and VIP studio tours and to shine at industry parties.

There is no mention of evictions, or of televoting or of cruel judgements from a panel of has-beens, however bear in mind that auditioning itself can be humiliating, and I can’t think of anything worse than having your audition technique scrutinised by anyone with a telly.

However, it has to be said that the training sounds pretty good - and hey, you get flown to LA!

All the details are here.

Thanks to MovieExtras.ie for the heads up.