Diablo Cody is back with 'Young Adult'

By Sarah Sluis

Screenwriter Diablo Cody soared with Juno and then crashed and burned with Jennifer's Body. Her next project will re-team her with Mandate Pictures, the folks that made Juno. Young Adult will center on a divorced writer of YA (young adult) books who goes back to the Heartland to stalk her ex-boyfriend, who's now married with a kid.

Charlize Theron is in contention to play the lead female role, and Jason Reitman, who showed he could translate Cody's tone in Juno, will direct. According to The Playlist blog, which read the screenplay, the script "largely [dispenses] with the annoying slang she's been tagged with and is refreshingly unhip." It also reveals that there's a third main role that needs to be cast. While she's chasing down her ex, she befriends a high school classmate who was beaten and crippled by jocks who thought he was gay, and now is overweight, disabled, and stuck in the town. It's a pretty gutsy backstory for a supporting character, almost as if a little piece of Boys Don't Cry is thrown in another movie, but for some reason I'm imagining this character as Damian in Mean Girls, who has a sense of humor about being bullied (not crippled, though) for being chubby and gay by his fellow classmates.

What's compelling about Young Adult is that the premise will once again invert audience expectations. Juno gave us a character who handled teen pregnancy in a manner against type, turning what's usually framed as a melodramatic, Lifetime TV movie situation into something upbeat and light-hearted. In Young Adult, Cody appears to do the same thing. Many a romantic comedy heroine has gone stalking and remained endearing to the audience, but Cody apparently makes her anti-hero unhinged, selfish, and not particularly likable. How refreshing!

Cody has a compelling, unique style, and I believe she has another Juno in her. Young Adult may be it.

'Sweet Valley High' will get the Diablo Cody treatment

By Sarah Sluis

Today's film news brings a project that is almost too good to be true for nostalgic twenty and thirty-something women. Diablo Cody has announced that her next project will be an adaptation of the

"Sweet Valley High" novels. In response to a skeptical Twitter, Cody responded, "You have no idea how many bitches I took down to do this project. I went 'full Jessica.' Believe it."

Indeed, Diablo Cody and the "Sweet Valley High" books could be a match made in heaven--a female version of a comic book film. Read by late elementary and middle schoolers, an audience now in their twenties and thirties, these novels were The Babysitter's Club older, cooler cousin, with characters that were less sheltered and more independent, and focused on romance and getting out of trouble. The series, which spawned over a hundred titles, centers on two "size six, blonde, 5'6'', tan, dimpled" twins who live in a "split-level" home--attributes repeated, in detail, at the opening of every book. Elizabeth is the practical, brainy twin who works at the school newspaper, whereas Jessica is more concerned with makeup, boys, and emulating the lifestyle of her wealthy friend Enid, whose clothes and car she covets. The novels are genuine, but I think many of the people who read them acknowledged their cheesiness, yet liked them anyway. Cody's take, according to her Twitter, will be "Sharp comedy/satire, plenty of 'sincere' SVH moments too. No werewolves. Plenty of Todd." Todd is the basketball player Elizabeth pines for, who I assume will be the major love interest in the book.

I think adapting this book will be tonally tricky. Jennifer's Body took the horror film genre and made it original and a feminist statement, but in the process alienated horror fans as well as those who would have seen it had critics agreed that it was "something more." Could the Sweet Valley High movie alienate fans of teen comedies, while failing to be something more for twenty and thirty-something fans of the book, who have now outgrown them and need satire?

Jennifer's Body, however, might not be the best comparison. It could be considered more of a marketing failure, since the movie, arguably, should have been handled by Fox Searchlight after Fox

Atomic shuttered, but instead was passed to 20th Century Fox to fill a hole in their schedule. Also, the "Women in Hollywood" blog noted that female critics gave the movie higher ratings than male critics, which she suspects hurt its overall critical reception.

Diablo Cody's choice to make an adaptation, as opposed to an original screenplay, reminds me of director Wes Anderson's choice to make an adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Many felt Anderson needed to break away from his overly familiar style, and applying it to stop-motion animation did just the trick. In fact, his next project, a screenplay (which he could direct), is also an adaptation of the French movie My Best Friend. Sure, Cody's only two films in, but her screenplays are so distinctive that their best use as this point may be punching up an existing, tired but beloved, series.