Will 'Ouija' go the 'Battleship' route?

By Sarah Sluis

In the past few years, it seems comic book adaptations have been supplanted by adaptations of brands that don't even have a story attached to them. It was as if action figures (Stretch Armstrong) led to board games (Battleship, Candy Land) which led to the technically-a-board-game adaptation Ouija, the rights to which are held by Hasbro. To my mind, the only successful non-book/play/comic book
adaptation wasPirates of the Caribbean. There were just a handful of references to the theme park ride, and the rest was straight-up Jack Sparrow with eyeliner. Based on what Universal's doing with Battleship, I'm not enthused about what they have in store for Ouija.

To refresh, Battleship is the two-person game involving shouting out numbers on your opponent's grid (A-7!, J-8!), and playing cat-and-mouse with your opponent until they have sunk all your battleships. With all that tension from constant evasion, it sounds like Crimson Tide all over again, right? Wrong. The Universal version is not about two boats chasing each other, but about ALIENS. An "armada" of aliens out for destruction, to be specific. It's almost as if the writer of the movie really wanted to make a sci-fi movie and just decided add some aliens. And it has pop singer Rihanna in it, a left-field choice that feels a little like a tone-deaf marketing ploy. Without a screen persona, it would have been better if she started out in something music-oriented to get audiences used to seeing her on screen.

The plot of Ouija isn't out on the Internet yet, but since it's also a Universal project I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to turn what obviously should be a horror film into a car-chase actioner or romantic comedy. In fact, after doing some more extensive Googling, I discover I'm actually on the right track. According to Newsinfilm.com, "Ouija will not take the expected supernatural horror angle � strange consider Michael Bay's horror house Platinum Dunes is producing � but will follow a more Indiana Jones type journey to discovery. " I am up in arms. Universal has had one flop after another, and it's decisions like these that prevent anyone over the age of thirteen from enjoying such misguided releases.

Hollywood makes another trip to the toy store

By Sarah Sluis

Toy-inspired movies have been the latest symbiotic relationship in Hollywood. Monopoly, Transformers, Clue, Candyland, and a plethora of action figures have all been picked up by various

studios, often with eye-raising by those covering them. Sure, there have been successes--who would have thought a movie based on a theme park ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, could have been so compelling? Or that the truly awful Transformers 2 could make so much money? While Hasbro has been the main seller for these toy-based adaptations, Mattel has just joined the scene, and one of the most iconic--and culturally contested--American icons will have her own movie: Barbie. No stranger to direct-to-video movies, the blonde, 39-23-33 doll will be played by a real person, since Universal has decided to make the movie live-action. No word on whether Barbie will be a doctor, cowhand, superstar singer, or any of her other chosen occupations. Since Columbia is also pursuing a deal to make a movie out of He-Man with Mattel, I decided to pick my top ten toy adaptations that haven't been made yet. In some cases, it's scraping the bottom of the barrel, while others might just show up in a new deal--I was about to put Hot Wheels on the list, but turns out back in 2003 McG put his directing dibs on the project.

10 Toy Adaptations just waiting for a buyer

1. Nerf
2. Easy Bake Oven: a modern adaptation of Hansel and Gretel

3. Tonka trucks
4. Chutes and Ladders: an adventure game, with kids trapped in a maze and required to use their smarts to break free.
5. Mr. Potato Head (a Toy Story spinoff?)
6. My Little Pony (this property may be firmly entrenched in direct-to-video)
7. Trivial Pursuit: like Inception, a thriller that takes place "in the architecture of the mind."
8. Operation: If botched surgery works on network television, why not in movies?
9. Play-Doh. Like the upcoming Lego adaptation, but with Play-Doh instead of Legos.
10. Strawberry Shortcake: this one could actually get made

When it comes to toy adaptations, you never know...

High school reading lists coming to a theatre near you

By Sarah Sluis

Turning high schoolers' required reading into easily digestible adaptations gave Hollywood a great deal of success during the mid-1990s. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet (1996), Clueless (1995), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, with Heath Ledger) and latecomer O (2001, from Othello) captivated teen audiences--and were frequently rented before midterms or shown as a treat in classrooms. Now, two projects are attempting to revive the classics-to-modern-classroom genre.

Emile Hirsch, who starred in Into the Wild, Milk, and The Lords of Dogtown, apparently pitched the idea to retell Hamlet, that high school Shakespearean staple, for the teen crowd. After being passed over for the Twilight sequel, Catherine Hardwicke will direct for Overture. Philadelphia screenwriter Ron Nyswaner will pen a script

that will star Hirsch as the young Hamlet. He must decide what to do after his father, the president of a small liberal arts college (another favorite place for teen suspense thrillers, a la

The Skulls), is murdered. The director and producers' vision is to turn the film into a suspense thriller and move some of the offstage drama on-screen.

The idea of adapting The Scarlet Letter to a high school setting seems tricky and slightly misguided, especially when teen films like Juno have de-guilted single motherhood. In that film, her classmates of Juno, while a bit mean, have better things to do than to bug her. How do you tell the puritanical story of a single mother ostracized from her community and forced to wear an "A" on her chest, while the popular village priest suffers from the guilt of his invisible "A," when high schools are probably the furthest thing away from puritanical? The ABC Family network has probably come the closest to tackling the subject in the series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," which got early dramatic mileage out of the fact that the unknown father was mega-popular (a.k.a. The Priest).

It seems that the teen film Easy A, which will star Emma Stone in the Hester Prynne-like role, struggled most with depicting the transgressions of the Hester Prynne character. In each version of the script, she never actually does anything. In the first version, she falsely spread rumors that she was promiscuous to gain attention (What?), but now it appears that other people will circulate those rumors about her (sounds more believable). Stone will then perform some expert PR and use the rumors to pit the conservative and liberal students and teachers against each other, not her. As if that wasn't enough, MTV Movies Blog warns, "Don't be surprised if you see Stone sporting pilgrim gear in dual roles," since a proposed parallel storyline involves Stone playing the actual Prynne. The last item makes me officially afraid. It's either going to be extremely heavy-handed, or an all-out parody.

Will Gluck (Fired Up) will direct the film, and a cast of familiar names lends support: Lisa Kudrow, Penn Badgley ("Gossip Girl"), Cam Gigandet (Twilight), Thomas Haden Church, and Patricia Clarkson have all been named. Compared to Easy A, the relative simplicity of Hamlet seems refreshing. With a classic work of literature on your side, there's a certain level of quality you have to begin with--easily destroyed in the adaptation process.