By Martin Scorsese is a busy guy. Last week I wrote about a film that he and Lars von Trier are working on in the vein of The Five Obstructions,* and with a new week comes a new potential project. This film, The Comedian, has already been written and financed and is basically just waiting for the acclaimed director to sit at the helm. The film is about an insult comedian, presumably played by De Niro, described as “Don Rickles meets Joan Rivers,” which proably means something to people from another generation. This wouldn’t be a huge stretch, though, because De Niro and Scorsese worked together on a similar film in 1982 called The King of Comedy, which is apparently quite good.
I like Scorsese’s work, so I think this could be pretty good if he’s on board. My opinion of De Niro varies wildly from film to film, but no one has ever been able to pull performances out of him like Scorsese has. That being said, it hasn’t even been guaranteed that Scorsese is interested. He’s got a lot on his plate at the moment, so it remains to be seen whether anything will come of this.
[Via IGN]*I have seen The Five Obstrutions since that initial write-up, and I recommend it if (and only if) you like films that are pretentious, foreign, experimental, semi-documentary, and remake-heavy. Here it is on Netflix Instant.