Aronofsky Off Again

Time to utter a loud hurrah because one of the best young directors around, Pi and Requiem for a Dream's Darren Aronofsky has got his next project up and running. And to make you feel even more optimistic, it sounds like a goody. Burned by Brad Pitt's last-minute exit from his ambitious 'post-Matrix, metaphysical sci-fi movie' The Fountain last year, Aronofsky has bravely put those 'creative issues' behind him and got cracking on a conspiracy thriller called Flicker. Adapted from history professor Dr Theodore Roszak's novel of the same name, the film will take a disturbing and revisionist look at film history through the eyes of a Los Angeles film student who starts to research a long-forgotten film director of the '30s. Becoming obsessed with the kitsch filmmaker, the student becomes convinced that his B-movies hold hidden secrets, dark, flickering moments that seem to be part of a plot to destroy life on Earth. Empire Online hates to think what apocalypse the chap would have foreseen had he inadvertently wandered into a Pluto Nash screening instead. In a detail that makes the weird and wonderful tale even more intriguing, Aronofosky's also going after Fight Club scribe Jim Uhls to adapt the prof's febrile words in a project that might well make even the Brad Pitts of this world go green with envy.