The PEN15 Club

As you read this, vaguely familiar British actress Lena Headey is totally on pins and needles. It’s her weekend. Her coming out party. Two-big budget Hollywood thrillers are opening on thousands of screens across the country tomorrow, and she’s in both of them.

Headey, whose IMDB profile rather optimistically lists her date of birth as 10/3/76 (sure honey, you were 16 when you filmed your snogging scene behind the bushes with Hugh Grant in The Remains of the Day - riiiiiiight), may think this is the moment when she can remove the pins from her Rachel Weisz-shaped voodoo doll and bask in the hard-earned limelight. Unfortunately, her “moment” is riding on the fortunes of The Brothers Grimm and The Cave, two late-summer flicks so D.O.A. that you don’t buy tickets to see them, you make a charitable donation in their name.

Grimm is yet another long-shelved Miramax dump case that has director Terry Gilliam wanting never to work in Hollywood again. He even told Entertainment Weekly that he only cast Headey after Bob Weinstein declared that first choice Samantha Morton’s arms were too flabby.

The Cave is one of those deadweight August programmers in which a team of attractive scientists, usually including Morris Chestnut, travels somewhere and gets systematically eaten by something. Last year, this was called Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.

One thing that won’t threaten Lena’s quest for box office supremacy this weekend is Ashlee Simpson’s film debut in Undiscovered. The film, which stars Broken Flowers’ Pell James as an aspiring actress, features Asslee in a supporting role that was originally written as a lesbian, until daddy-Christian-metrosexual-Svengali-manager-Antichrist Joe Simpson vetoed the depiction of his less-beloved daughter as a muff-diver. Lions Gate has barely promoted the film and will release it at less than half as many locations as Miramax is releasing Grimm.

No, seriously. Is August over yet?

Lena Headey [IMDB]