Courtiers to the King.

It seems Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, and Mark Ruffalo may be joining Sean Penn (Willie Stark) and Jude Law (Jack Burden) in the forthcoming remake of All the King’s Men. Streep is apparently set to play Sadie, Willie’s long-suffering right-hand woman, which must make Winslet and Ruffalo Anne and Adam Stanton respectively.

Joey and the Bat / Gary vs. the Empire.

In the fanboy bin, Bruce Wayne’s girl-of-the-moment Katie Holmes talks a little about Batman Begins, and Gary Oldman opts out of Revenge of the Sith due to its being a non-SAG production.

Sea of Sin.

Some extended footage from Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City makes it online. Got a very strange, stylized look to it, to be sure. But I’ve been underwhelmed by everything Rodriguez has done since El Mariachi, and, let’s face it, graphic novels and film are two different mediums. As one AICN talkbacker noted, this could very well end up looking a “Max Fischer Stage Production of Frank Miller’s Sin City.”

Gertie 2.0.

Uh-oh. Dakota Fanning is cast as the daughter of Tom Cruise (soon to reunite with Michael Mann for a Battle of Britain film) in the upcoming War of the Worlds remake. It’s nothing against Fanning — she actually seems like a relatively talented child actress. But the combination of cute kids and Spielberg have been a recipe for real schmaltzy trouble in the past.

Law will tear us apart.

There’s talk about that Jude Law will play Ian Curtis of Joy Division in a forthcoming biopic. That’s pretty good casting (better, for example, than Ashton Kutcher as Flash Gordon), although after 24 Hour Party People I’m not sure a Curtis biopic is really necessary (but cast Paul Bettany as Bernard Sumner and we’ll be getting somewhere.) Also in the Jude department, the trailer for Mike Nichols’s Closer is now online, and it looks pretty solid, if you can buy that anyone would actually leave Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts.