Paul Weitz is the director responsible for unleashing Little Fockers upon the world, and yet I can't really blame him for those 90 minutes I'll never get back-- that movie had a hundred problems before Weitz ever stepped behind the camera, and no director, especially one as relatively unpowerful as Weitz, was going to stop that runaway disaster train. So really, despite everything, I'm rooting for Weitz as he moves on to direct Another Night, based on Nick Flynn's memoir Another Bullshit Night In Suck City and already set to star Fockers actor Robert De Niro.

Now Paul Dano has arrived to crash the Little Fockers reunion, giving people other than me reason to have faith in the project. According to Variety Dano will play Flynn, a young man who volunteers at a Boston homeless shelter only to find his long-missing father a resident there. Weitz adapted the script from Flynn's book and will also producer the film, along with De Niro's own Tribeca Productions, plus Corduroy Films.

Though it seems Dano hasn't been acting a lot since his big breakthrough as an adult actor in There Will Be Blood., he's been doing a lot of work you just might not have seen, in somewhat large flops like Knight and Day and Taking Woodstock, in little-seen indies like The Extra Man and Gigantic, and in Where the Wild Things Are, where he was the voice of a giant monster. He'll be around a lot in the coming year, though, first in Kelly Reichardt's spring release Meek's Cutoff, then summer's Cowboys & Aliens and Rian Johnson's Looper, which shoots in the next few months. Who knows where Another Night will fit in among all of those, but Weitz is probably anxious to get it out there and make it good so we can forget he had anything to do with Little Fockers at all.