The annual fall festival season is well underway, and with it, we always get some "prestige" movie announcements (just like at Cannes in May, for example); it's safe to file this story in that category. Bill Murray has signed to star in the independent comedy Rock the Kasbah, which will be directed by Barry Levinson, whose impressive filmography includes The Natural, Rain Man, Bugsy, and Sleepers. Mitch Glazer (cowriter of The Recruit and 1998's Great Expectations) wrote the screenplay about "a burned-out music manager who goes to Afghanistan on the USO tour with his last remaining client... when he finds himself abandoned, penniless and without his passport, he discovers a young girl with an extraordinary voice who stows away him back to Kabul to compete on the popular television show The Afghan Star, Afghanistan's equivalent of American Idol." That premise might be a bit lengthy, but this writer's hunch is that all of that information will be conveyed in the movie's eventual trailer. As long as one can forgive the title's possible social studies flub (do they really have kasbahs in Afghanistan?), the combination of talent and premise here sounds like this could be a future prestige release ala Slumdog Millionaire or Life of Pi.
