Harry Potter has got to end sometime, and by "sometime" I mean in less than three years when the second cinematic half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sees release. And some people would like to still have a career when that happens, thank you very much. To that end, Rupert Grint -- a.k.a. Ron Weasley -- has taken a role in an indie film called Cherry Bomb, which sounds about as far from Harry Potter as you can get without developing an erotic fixation on horses.

The film, written by acclaimed playwright Daragh Caville, focuses on three teens who set out for a wild weekend of drugs, sex and crime only to see it escalate into something far more serious than they imagined. It co-stars relative unknowns Robert Sheehan and Kimberley Nixon, and is set for release next year.

While Daniel Radcliffe has tried more extreme methods of branching out (mainly by taking that infamous role in Equus, which is coming to Broadway per the above link) and Emma Watson hasn't done very much at all (she voices a character in this year's The Tale of Despereaux, but that seems to be it), Grint has spent what spare time he has toiling away in indieville. Cherry Bomb was preceded by the reasonably well-received and much less racy Driving Lessons, about a troubled boy's friendship with a retired actress.

Before we get started, I just want to make it clear that in Hollywood nothing is ever official until you see the press release (and you should probably take the following news with a big grain of salt). Over at the Alice in Wonderland fan site, talk has surfaced that Tim Burton has finally cast Alice in his live-action version of Alice in Wonderland (not to be confused with the long-suffering American McGee creation).

According to the commenter, Ian B: "My brother is working on the movie and he said Alice has been cast. He is a music supervisor for the movie and said there will be a press release about it on July 9th. The role was originally supposed to be Evan Rachel Woods but she backed out. Alice won't be played by a child but a 23 year old. From what I was told it's her first Burton movie, and her first big role in a film that will be released world wide." So who's the lucky gal? Say hello to Ryan Nikole Parker. Parker is not very well known, and other than a few TV credits is a relative newcomer to the business.

Burton struck the deal for Alice with Disney back in November, and according to comments on the IMDB message boards, he's already finished casting. Luckily for us, July 9th isn't that far away, so we won't be waiting long for the official word.

Sound off below on who you would like to see go down the rabbit hole with Mr. Burton.

[via The Bad and Ugly]

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant cast just became a whole lot crazier. Variety is reporting that Val Kilmer and Xzibit are joining Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes in the much-maligned remake / re-imagining / re-something of Abel Ferrara's cult classic.

Kilmer will be playing Cage's police partner, presumably the straight arrow to complement Cage's cop-on-the-edge. This comes right on the heels of Kilmer being cast in Silver Cord, so I think it's safe to say someone's trying to make a comeback. (Am I the only one who laments the passing of years, and what it has done to one of my biggest crushes? Has it really been so long since The Saint?)

Xzibit, fresh off The X-Files: I Want to Believe, will be playing their nemesis, Big Fade.
Remember, folks, it's a re-imagining, which is why you don't remember any of these characters from the original.

If there aren't shockingly hilarious tales of egos and fistfights from the Lieutenant set, I'll be among the bitterly disappointed. While I suspect Kilmer has chilled with the passing of years, I'm thinking that combining him with Herzog is bound to be tempestuous. Is it too much to ask that Herzog just goes even further, and hires Sean Young and Gary Busey? Perhaps even Mike Myers? Throw the script out the window, and just film the production. I think it would be far more fun than any re-imagining.

And we thought that the shrinking gap was only between theatrical and DVD releases. Now it's how soon a project can get off the ground after someone passes away. Anna Nicole Smith had barely been gone a month when projects started to cook up on her life and death. Now Defamer has spotted that a super-respectful NINETEEN DAYS after Tim Russert dies of a heart attack, a telepic is already in the works with a casting notice up on Craigslist. The notice even says that Randy Quaid has already signed on to star.

When the news broke, did someone reach over for their phone, call up Quaid, and get this set up? Or, maybe they, you know, waited a few days so they wouldn't seem eager to capitalize on the man's death (and spent that time throwing together a script). So, this ad says that a New York-based film company is looking to cast an unknown actress in the role of Maureen Orth, Russert's wife, and that the film will follow the last 24 hours of his life. So, not only can they not wait a bit to get this going, but it's also centered on the man's death?

The casting is certainly appropriate, but that's about the only nice thing I can say about this news.

When films turn personal, there are a myriad of ways they can turn out. One way I never thought of -- out of body experiences that need soul saving. Variety reports that Val Kilmer, Shane West, Cam Gigandet, Eric Balfour, and Arielle Kebbel have signed on for a film called Silver Cord. James Ordonez will direct the feature, which he wrote with Ken Gord, and relive some personal experiences.

As Variety describes it, the film "centers on Ordonez's brother who came back to life after being declared clinically dead on multiple occasions. The brother died in 2004." But the summary up on IMDb says a whole lot more, written by James himself: "The story of a young man who is separated from the love of his life. To find her he has an Out of Body Experience but the silver cord that connects his soul with his body breaks and he is believed to be dead. In a desperate race against time his friends have less than 24 hours to save his soul before his body is cremated."

It's not every day you get so-called true life stories about people leaving their body to find paramours and then losing their body and being declared dead. Since he'd been declared dead a number of times, I guess the dude had a penchant for out-of-body travel.

After years of Beavis and Butt-Head, there was Office Space. But after red Swingline staplers and the need for flair, Mike Judge took a number of years off from directing -- until the largely ignored Idiocracy. This time around, however, we don't have to wait as long (as Eugene pointed out in April). Extract is on the way, and now EW's Hollywood Insider has shared more of the plot, and who's in talks to co-star alongside Jason Bateman.

The film will focus on a guy who owns a flower-extract plant -- the industrial sort, not the leafy sort. In typical, professional Judge fashion, the guy is having a bunch of bad luck, which includes "workplace issues and a cheating wife." EW sources say that Kristen Wiig is looking into playing the wife, while Mila Kunis might grab a role as a plant employee. That sounds like a set up for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, revisited -- the man can choose between his crappy partner and the wonderful nice girl right in front of him.

Between the possible murk of an actors' strike and Wiig's SNL schedule, the film is slated to start production in August.

The guy is all sorts of recognizable due to his time as James 'Sawyer' Ford on Lost, but do you know that Josh Holloway is also the dude who got his start in Cryin'? Yes, he played the jerky guy who smiled and then stole Alicia Silverstone's bag, and she had to chase him down and give him a good kick. (Watch it above.) He's come a long way since purse stealing! Now The Hollywood Reporter posts that he's joined the cast of Stay Cool.

This is the Polish brothers feature that Hilary Duff joined recently -- where a successful author (Mark Polish) goes home to give a high school commencement address, gets hit on by a high school girl (Duff), and has to face his unrequited teen crush (Winona Ryder). But now Holloway has been added to the mix as a former jock who used to date Ryder's Scarlet Smith. Production should begin soon in California.

When is the news of an actor you really like joining the cast of a high-profile new movie bad news? When you wish that actor were doing other things with his time, that's when. In the case of Thomas McCarthy -- whom you may remember from his masterfully detestable performance as weaselly reporter Scott Templeton in the final season of The Wire -- I wish he were writing and directing another film as brilliant and deeply moving as The Visitor, which at this halfway point is my favorite movie of 2008. I'd even settle for something with the wry, quiet charm of his lovely 2003 debut The Station Agent.

Instead -- ::sigh:: -- he's gone and taken a supporting role in Roland Emmerich's disaster flick 2012, playing Amanda Peet's boyfriend. C'mon, Tom: anyone can do that. Only a handful of people have your behind-the-camera chops. Quit messing around.

I'm being mean, and in this Hollywood Reporter piece McCarthy makes a valiant effort at defending the choice in terms of how working with directors who make different kinds of films helps him with his own work. (The article also mentions that McCarthy moonlights as an uncredited studio script doctor, which I didn't know, and which makes perfect sense given the natural, effortless flow of the films he's written.) Okay fine. But direct something else please.

Have a happy Canada Day with these casting bites!

When I heard that Gore Vidal was going to pop up in Shrink, I went into literary fangirl heaven, which quickly became a fan rant. The movie stars Kevin Spacey as a shrink who isn't able to deal with a personal tragedy and becomes a burn-out pothead. And now The Hollywood Reporter posts that some young blood is being injected into the indie. Jesse Plemons (Friday Night Lights) gets to co-star as a pot dealer named Jesus. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the shrink's drug connection.

Meanwhile, Doris Roberts, who became a household fixture as the overbearing mom and grandma on Everybody Loves Raymond, has picked up a new film gig. Variety reports that she's starring with Ernest Borgnine in a new film called Another Harvest Moon. She'll play "a relentlessly peppy septuagenarian in a nursing home." The film has got a pretty sweet cast that boasts the likes of Piper Laurie, Anne Meara, Cybill Shepherd, and Amber Benson.

Finally, there is Brian Baumgartner. Variety has posted that The Office star has picked up a gig in Into Temptation. This is the flick about the prostitute who plans to kill herself on her birthday, and the priest who tries to talk her out of it. Baumgartner will play a fellow priest named Fr. Ralph O'Brien.

Good heavens, do I ever love Gillian Anderson. Not just for her work as the iconic Agent Scully on a million seasons of The X-Files, either, though obviously that's a big part of it. Did you see her in The House of Mirth? Or making a cameo in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story? Or playing a small role in The Last King of Scotland? No on all counts? Well, take my word for it, then. She's wonderful. My heart leaps within my breast whenever I see her in anything. It could be arrhythmia, but I prefer to call it love.

She's about to star in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, as you know -- but what about after that? Well, Variety brings us word that Anderson's production company has bought the rights to a 2004 biography of Martha Gellhorn (whom you've never heard of, but hang on), and that Anderson will produce a film adaptation and play the leading role.

So who is this Gellhorn person? Only one of the most prolific war correspondents of the 20th century, that's all. She covered just about every global conflict between the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, a career spanning 60 years. She was married to Ernest Hemingway for a while and had countless affairs throughout her life, usually with married men. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. The U.S. Postal Service put her on a stamp earlier this year. Her life has all the makings of a good biopic -- war, romance, tragedy, Roosevelts -- and since Anderson already has plenty of experience playing skeptical women who must deal with difficult men, I say she's a natural. Of course, that could just be the heart palpitations speaking.