Anna Faris and Sir Ben Kingsley are set to join Academy Award-nominee Sacha Baron Cohen to star in The Dictator, Deadline and Variety are reporting.

The film will see Cohen working again with the Borat and Brüno director, Larry Charles, who is of course also well known for his work on Seinfeld and, more recently, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage.

Given the incredible success of the two earlier Baron Cohen films (Borat took $260m from an $18m. budget, Brüno took $138m. from $42m.), I think it’s a fair prediction to say that The Dictator will be another great outing for the Baron Cohen-Charles team.

The release date is set for 11th May next year, so we have just over a year to wait to see what will undoubtedly be both a shocking and enjoyable film on the big screen. The Dictator has been scripted by Baron Cohen and former Seinfeld writers Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer, all of whom have been working since on the ingenious Curb Your Enthusiasm  alongside Charles, with Schaffer also a part of the Brüno writing team. Knowing that the film has been written by people who clearly work together so well, it certainly sounds like something to look forward to this time next year.

The film will be,

“the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”

“Baron Cohen plays a ruthless dictator who heads to the U.S. for a meeting at the United Nations and finds that his number two has replaced him with an unsuspecting sheepherder lookalike. As the dictator wanders the city, he meets the owner of an organic food store. That’s the role Faris is negotiating. She turns around his dictatorial thinking, and there’s a little romance in it as well.”

The film is loosely adapted from the novel, Zabibah and the King, which is widely believed to have been written by Saddam Hussein and his ghost-writers, and was a best-seller in Iraq back in 2000.

Faris’ role is said to need a strong improvisational ability, and I think that she’s perfect for it. She was brilliant back in Scary Movie, all those years ago, and instantly made a name for herself. Her arc at the end of Friends a good few years ago was also excellent, along with the few episodes she was in in Entourage.

Kingsley of course is always capable of bringing something amazing to the table. He and Baron Cohen have been working together on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret, due out early December this year, so the pair will undoubtedly already have a great chemistry.

All in all, The Dictator is shaping up to be one to look forward to next year. With Baron Cohen playing both the dictator and presumably his lookalike too, we can look forward to seeing at least two sides of him in the film, and both should make for great entertainment. With such a great cast and director already confirmed, and a writing team that has already got a great track record, there’s lot of momentum behind the project and talent enough to make it work when it hits the screen.

Sacha Baron Cohen is reuniting with Borat and Bruno director Larry Charles to bring us a comedy inspired by the best seller Zabibah and the King, popular in Iraq due to its author being Saddam Hussein. Yeah…

Paramount Pictures were keen to tell us that the 11th of May 2012 will be the day we’ll all be able to enjoy the film, which has many of the Borat and Bruno creative team behind it.

Here’s how they are selling it,

The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.

It’s an odd move, but it could see a curious twelvemonth during which the rising star of Sacha Baron Cohen pulling on biopic trousers as Freddie Mercury as well as this intriguing new tale.

The modern Oracle Wikipedia has this as the book’s cover.

I’d buy that for a dinar.

The latest movie to be given to us by NBC Universal on iTunes to review is that of Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, Brüno. You may well have heard the hype about this movie when it came out 6 months or so ago. It caused another fuss as the premise of the movie seems to be to annoy as many people as possible, this time in the guise of Brüno, a gay Austrian talk show host who, after some unfortunates mishaps in his home country, decides that he wants to become a Hollywood megastar in any way possible.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first movie that Baron-Cohen did, Borat but you can’t deny that he does have balls. Some of the things he gets away with in this movie are completely absurd and what is brought to like again, is that this planet is full of all sorts of people, some beyond belief!

Watching what Bruno gets away with is probably why people get so into these movies. Perhaps the funniest scene is when he manages to get Paula Abdul along to his house for an interview. Realising that they have no furniture, they enlist the help of some Mexicans to become sofas, tables and even platters at which point Abdul’s manager decides to get out as quickly as possible leaving Bruno bemused, and the audience in stitches!

After becoming a US talk show host fails, Bruno decides to adopt a little boy called OJ from ‘Africa’ and takes him along to a talk show where he is shamed as a bad father and has his baby confiscated by the social services. Watching the faces of the audience who really believe that this is all legit are classic and again, made me laugh at loud. Brüno has so many tangents that trying to explain them all in this review would not only take forever but would spoil lots of parts of the movie.

Brüno is full of moments where you laugh out loud but it doesn’t maintain that throughout, at some points getting a little bored but always watching to find out what might come next. If you’re a fan of Ali G, Borat or anything else that Sacha Baron-Cohen has done, then you’ll love this movie and I recommend you check it out – one word of warning though, when you’re watching and they move to the focus group, it’s time to close your eyes and wait for the next scene! My eyes still haven’t recovered!

Brüno is now available on DVD, Blu Ray and download through iTunes.

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