The Three Stooges could almost be Penn, Carrey and del Toro

MGM and the Farrelly brothers are closing in on their cast for "The Three Stooges."

Studio has set Sean Penn to play Larry, and negotiations are underway with Jim Carrey to play Curly, with the actor already making plans to gain 40 pounds to approximate the physical dimensions of Jerome "Curly" Howard.

The studio is zeroing in on Benicio Del Toro to play Moe.

The film is not a biopic, but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts.

The quest by the Peter and Bobby Farrelly to harness the project spans more than a decade and three studios. They first tried at Columbia, again at Warner Bros., and finally at MGM, where Worldwide Motion Picture Group chairman Mary Parent championed the cause and bought the WB-owned scripts and made a deal with Stooges rights holders C3.

Production will begin in early fall for a release sometime in 2010. The Farrellys, who wrote the script, are producing with their Conundrum partner Bradley Thomas, and Charlie Wessler.

The project will get underway after Penn completes the Asger Leth-directed Universal/Imagine Entertainment drama "Cartel." He hasn't done a comedy since the 1989 laffer "We're No Angels."

The Farrellys have long had their eyes on Del Toro to play Moe. Del Toro, who's coming off "Che," showed comic chops in the Guy Ritchie-directed "Snatch."

The surprise is the emergence of Carrey to play Curly. Howard established the character as a seminal physical comedian, from the first time he appeared in the first Stooges short in 1934 until he suffered a stroke on the set in 1946.

Are you excited about this project? Do you think the three actors are the best choice for the Stooges?

Source: Variety

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Red Dawn remake and news on Robocop

The Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell tale of school kids fighting a World War III style invasion is apparantly going to be remade. Their cries of "Wolverines!" will once more echo in cinemas around the world (Wolverine was their school mascot, not the X-Man).

It's going to be scripted by Carl Ellsworth (he wrote Red Eye, co-wrote Disturbia and did a rewrite of the Last House on the Left remake). He has also finished an adaption of the comic series Y: The Last Man for New Line.

Dan Bradley will direct. He has worked on The Bourne Ultimatum, Spider-Man 3 and the Quantum of Solace as a second unit director / stunt coordinator so he has the chutzpah for a big action movie of this type.

The remake was announced at the Cannes Film Festival by Harry Sloan of MGM. Interestingly they also announced a big budget remake of RoboCop with rumours that Darren Aronofsky may direct .

"The tone is going to be very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we're in," says Ellsworth, who was 11 when the original was released. "As 'Red Dawn' scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again?"

Interestingly, the 1984 action drama was the first film released in theaters with the newly devised PG-13 rating because of its intense subject matter and violent content.