The Road, the troubled adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel that was bumped from its original fall 2008 release date, has been announced as part of the lineup of the 2009 Venice Film Festival. It’ll screen alongside new films by (take a deep breath) Jacques Rivette, Abel Ferarra, Werner Herzog, Michael Moore, Claire Denis, fashion designer Tom Ford, Joe Dante, and Oliver Stone. The full lineup is here.

Because We Were Born’s co-director Jean-Pierre Duret began his career in the mid-80s as a boom operator and sound assistant on the films of Louis Malle and Jacques Doillon, and more recently, he’s led the sound work on the films of Francois Ozon, Agnes Jaoui and the Dardennes Brothers. This pedigree surely helped Born, Duret and Andrea Santana’s thrid nonfiction film set in Northeast Brazil, land a premiere slot last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a placement that even the Variety review admitted “may have minimized the attention it garnered as it may have gotten lost among the large number of films showing there.” After moving on to Rotterdam and opening theatrically in France, Born’s future festival schedule is currently somewhat up in the air. It’s hard to say what the ideal showcase for this game-changing work of neo-verite might be — it’s probably not the pizza-and-beer Alamo Drafthouse atmosphere of SXSW, nor the “issues only, please” doc programs of some, well, less fun festivals –– but if it ends up in your town, you’d be well served to run toward it as fast as you can.

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• Former New Line heads Bob Shaye and MIchael Lynne have announced their first project under their new deal at WB. They’ll adapt Foundation from Isaac Asimov trilogy about “a society that has figured out how to predict the future based on a method called psychohistory and sets up a foundation devoted to scientific research to protect itself and ensure its survival.”
• Jennifer Lopez will attempt to return to the thematic site of past glories, playing a preternaturally sophisticated servant who falls for her boss in The Governess, a new film for her Maid in Manhattan director Kevin Wade.
• New films from Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Demme and Kathryn Bigelow will join the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading at the Venice Film Festival. And these are just the Americans––Barbet Schroeder, Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano are among the international auteurs to show work in the competition.
• Meanwhile, due to “unforeseen events and personal reasons,” Anjelica Huston has backed out of a planned appearance at the Locaro Film Festival, where her film Choke will screen and where she was to accept a special award.
  

• Wanted opened to $51.1 million over the weekend, which is, you know, a fantastic boost for Angelina Jolie’s live-action bankability, but it wasn’t enough to beat Wall-E‘s $62.5 mil for first place. Speaking of boosts: The Last Mistress made $17,596 on each of its screens, which is roughly $17 for every time Asia Argento shows her debatably authentic boobs in it.
• SAG says they’re not going on strike and any suggestions in that vein coming from the AMPTP are merely “scare tactics.” The AMPTP says SAG is responsible for The End of Hollywood As We Know It. Or, more accurately: “The industry is shutting down because SAG’s Hollywood leadership insisted on 11th-hour negotiations and dragging these talks into July so they can continue attacking AFTRA.”
• Prince of Broadway and Loot took the big narrative and documentary prizes, respectively, at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the weekend. The Wackness and Man on Wire won the audience awards. In other fest news, Wim Wenders, director of the most maligned competition film last month at Cannes, will head the jury at the Venice Film Festival.

• Though they’ve been carefully tasteful about the use of grotesque images of Heath Ledger in the marketing of The Dark Knight domestically, Warner Brothers execs say the actor’s death “had not altered the marketing of the pic internationally.” The film had an Imax premiere at CinemaExpo this week.
• When Dreamworks inevitably splits from Paramount later this year, there’s a possibility that they’ll exist as a stand-alone inde...bankrolled on a billion dollars (yes! Literally!)
• Silvio Berlusconi is taking away government-sponsored subsidies for Italian filmmakers. In response, Italian filmmakers are threatening to take their films away from the Venice, Turin and Rome Film Festivals.
  

• The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, which made some snippy headlines last month after Focus gave the film an undesirable September release date, has been selected to open the Venice Film Festival. For those keeping track: the last film Focus landed in that slot at that festival was Atonement; three years ago, they used the ame method to launch Brokeback Mountain.
• There’s a long piece in this morning’s Hollywood Reporter on Sex and the City––the show, the movie, the brand––as a New York City tourist attraction. Says Michael Patrick King, director of the film: “The amount of girls coming to New York to have a $17 cosmo — everybody benefited in a great way.”
• 2929 Productions have bought in to two projects from producers Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti and Ben Mezrich––AKA the creative team behind the hit 21. Brunetti sums up the appeal of working from a Mezrich literary source: “Guys that normally aren’t readers will dive into a Ben Mezrich story and read it quickly, and then pass it around to other guys. It’s chick lit for men.”

I’ve been so consumed with Mumblestuffs and the upcoming double-onslaught of Telluride and Toronto that I totally forgot about the Venice Film Festival, which begins today. Here’s a look at some of the better preview pieces floating around today:

• It’s the festival’s 75th birthday, and Reuters has an historic timeline.
• “Following recent wins for Vera Drake and The Queen, four out of the 22 films competing for the festival’s main award, the Golden Lion, have British directors,” writes Helen Pidd for The Guardian.
• One of those directors is Peter Greenaway, whose Rembrandt biopic Nightwatching marks a return to something resembling narrative filmmaking after almost ten years spent on experimental video work. Pidd’s colleague Peter Bradshaw hasn’t seen it, but thinks it should win the Golden Lion anyway. “[F]or sheer shake-up value, giving Greenaway the Golden Lion would probably be the most gratifying.”
• Bradshaw also reviews Atonement, another homegrown production and Venice’s opening night film. “It is clever, sophisticated: though perhaps multiplex audiences might find it a little too tricksy. Time will tell. Atonement will certainly provide food for thought and a colossal sugar-rush of romance for Venice festivalgoers tonight.”
• Filing a report on Glenn Kenny’s blog (the Premiere critic says he’s skipping the Lido because he’s “a Toronto guy, and only the most peripatetic of critics can do both fests”), Mark Salisbury has great praise for Atonement’s lead performances. Keira Knightley gives “yet another fine performance that should silence her detractors…But even she is outshone by [James] McAvoy. So good in The Last King Of Scotland (and so overlooked, too, because without his counterpoint, Forest Whitaker’s Amin wouldn’t have been half as effective) McAvoy asserts his position as Britain’s brightest male star with a performance of such range, dignity and humanity that it should, if there’s any justice, find recognition come awards season.”
• For Reuters, Mike Collett-White notes that Venice programmers have amped up the Hollywood star factor this year, perhaps in an attempt to stave off competition from other festivals. Most of the must-sees at Venice (Lust, Caution, I’m Not There, The Darjeeling Limited) are world-premiering there before hitting festivals like Toronto and New York in the coming month.