Reese Witherspoon will tame her image with 'Wild'

Reese Witherspoon has long been a favorite star of mine. As a teen, I followed her through her performances in Cruel Intentions, Election, and Legally Blonde. She's since won an Oscar for Walk the Line, while appearing in romantic comedies like Sweet Home Alabama. Then she got arrested for arguing with a cop while her husband was pulled over for a suspected DUI. Her star image took a bit of a hit, although compared with the Lindsay Lohans and Amanda Bynes of the world, she's barely done a thing. Back in the early days of Hollywood, studios carefully controlled a star's image, but Witherspoon's crew of handlers must be taking a cue from that era's meticulous management with her next role. It can't be a coincidence that Witherspoon will be playing a messed-up woman in search of redemption by starring in Fox Searchlight's Wild.

Wild, based on a book by Cheryl Strayed, recounts the author's trek up the Pacific Crest Trail when she was in her mid-twenties. Strayed's mother had recently passed away, she and her husband divorced after her numerous infidelities, and she had even been dallying with heroin, thanks to her drug-addicted new boyfriend. She's outdoorsy, but no hiker, which made her relatable, frank account of being sore, lost, and exhausted skyrocket to the top of the bestseller lists. For Witherspoon, it's perfect casting, mirroring (albeit in less extreme ways) the star's own need for redemption from the public.

There's one minor quibble. In the book, Strayed is just 26 when she hikes the trail. Witherspoon is 37. She does look young, and the level of drama (mother's death, divorce, drugs) in Strayed's life at 26 could easily be believable at 37, but it's worth pointing out.

Witherspoon is also producing the feature. Her team hired Nick Hornby, who wrote a number of books that have been adapted into movies, including About A Boy, and also penned the screenplay for Carey Mulligan's breakout movie, An Education, to do the adaptation. If all goes well, it looks like this movie will pick up a director sometime between now and fall, when the production will begin filming.

 

Coen Brothers to write script for Angelina Jolie-directed 'Unbroken'

I feel a little protective over Laura Hillenbrand's nonfiction tour de force, Unbroken. She works with amazing material--the endurance against all odds of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic track star who survived first in a lifeboat for 47 days and then in a Japanese POW camp--but it's what she does with that life story that makes it special. In her hands, Zamperini's story is about his will to
survive. In the face of complete and utter hopelessness, he summoned and directed that will, and that's what helped him make it through. Powerful stuff.

Angelina Jolie wouldn't be my first choice for director of this movie, but she's taken an interest in the Universal project. Even more curiously, she and her fellow producers hired Ethan and Joel Coen to write the script for the adaptation of the 496-page novel. It's a bold decision. The Coen Brothers' works often have a style that distances the work from reality (see: Raising Arizona), turning their main characters into darkly comic figures with distinctive accents. But they also have works that, absurd as they are, feel intensely real and true to their genre, like Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Although not particularly
prominent in the book, there is plenty of ambient dark and gallows humor. How else can one survive without food on a lifeboat, or while under the thumb of fickle and cruel wardens of POW camps? I imagine that the Coen Brothers' screenplay will bring these elements to the forefront.

As adaptations go, this one has a number of major challenges. First, there's the length of the book, 496 pages. Then there's the fact that there are four distinct parts: Zamperini's childhood (likely to be elided) and time as an Olympic track star, his work in the army, his plane crash and survival in the lifeboat, and his years in the POW camp. The latter two are the most important, but couldn't be more different. It will be like watching Life of Pi and then seeing the same characters segue into Schindler's List. Seriously. Apparently, Universal has been trying to adapt the Zamperini story for decades, even before Hillenbrand's book came out. Her take on events combined with the Coen Brothers' script may be enough to finally crack this incredible tale that you would never believe if it hadn't actually, in fact, happened.

 

Assembling the cast for 'The Book Thief'

Like many kids, I was fascinated with the Holocaust and World War II growing up. Newbery Award-winning novel Number the Stars, which features a girl whose Jewish friend is threatened by Nazis, was required reading. Orphans have always been literary favorites, because these novels give their child protagonists independence that's uncharacteristic for kids. Combine that with living in a
secret hiding place, and the blend is absolutely thrilling--which is not to say that kids don't understand the gravity of the historical fiction or non-fiction they're reading. In recent years, enthusiasm for the genre hasn't died down. Now The Book Thief, which tops the "Amazon Best Sellers for Children's Holocaust Fiction" (yes, you read that category right, and it only covers the top 100) is being turned into a movie.

Sophie Nelisee (Anna Karenina, War Horse) will star as the title character, The Book Thief. The Munich-based foster child finds comfort and salvation in books during a time of war. Her foster parents, who will be played by Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson, also take a Jewish man (Ben Schnetzer) into hiding. Tonally, the movie has the potential to be more Inglourious Basterds than The Reader. The book by Marcus Zusak is narrated by Death, and is filled with dark comedy that has drawn in adults and young readers alike. That may be enough to set this story apart from the large pack of novels covering the same topic.

Brian Percival of "Downton Abbey" is directing. Now that the leading cast is assembled, the Fox 2000 project will begin shooting next month in Berlin.

Hot novel 'Fifty Shades of Grey' may be turned into a movie

Forget Twilight. The latest female-driven literary sensation is Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic romance novel that has sold 250,000 copies to date--most of them in discreet e-book form. Now the literary agent of the property is having meetings with major Hollywood studios in preparation for a rights auction. The novel centers on the sexual relationship between a young entrepreneur and a college student who interviews him for her school paper. The novel has become particularly popular among mothers, where recommendations and discussion of the book have become a hot topic. But could Hollywood make an adaptation of a book that's so racy? Twilight, after all, had just one kiss in the first book in the series. The same can't be said for Fifty Shades of Grey.

A friend who loves to download romance novels on her Kindle reports that Fifty Shades of Grey is actually one of the tamer novels in that genre, which may explain why the New York Times describes the book as a crossover success, luring in readers who typically don't read erotica. In its favor, the novel has been something of a viral success. This isn't something that has been forced on readers, but rather something they have embraced and recommended to their friends. It's only recently been picked up by a more mainstream publisher. Shockingly, the original novel started out on a a Twilight fan fiction site. It was spotted by a small publisher, reworked, and was turned into a trilogy. Boding well for the series' success, it's already getting tons of hype with only the first novel published.

Bestselling books don't always catch on at the box office. Another "mommy" film of quite a different variety, Sarah Jessica Parker's I Just Don't Know How She Does It, fell totally flat onscreen. For many busy people, finding time to squeeze in a little reading is a lot different than finding time to see a movie. Could the romance scenes work better on the page rather than on the screen? Whatever studio picks up the property will be moving into less-charted territory. Sexually explicit movies tend to be the province of the arthouse, not the multiplex. Even then, they aren't very common. With so much of Hollywood stuck in the rut of the same-old, I applaud the studio that takes a risk and bets that Fifty Shades of Grey will be a sensation as it steps from the privacy of e-readers to the big screen.

Miley Cyrus eyes a 'Twilight'-like role in 'Wake'

By Sarah Sluis

Miley Cyrus has already gone from being a tween superstar to a household name among all ages. Now she's doing something harder: aging up and into more mature roles. Cyrus may star in Wake, the first in a series of young adult novels about a girl who gets caught up in other people's dreams. It sounds like her character

has a similar talent to Leonardo DiCaprio in this summer's Inception, but her gift is more supernatural and less sci-fi. Because the book has horror and suspense elements, the tone will be edgier without being sexier. She's gotten a lot of heat lately for provocative performances at recent concerts, but the seventeen-year-old's first non-Hannah Montana feature was comparatively tame. She played the lead in The Last Song, a Nicholas Sparks adaptation that was written especially for her and thus certified to be Cyrus family-friendly.

Wake is the first in a series that now encompasses three books, the latter two entitled Fade and Gone. The girl, Janie, has the ability to go inside other people's dreams if they are physically near her. She also discovers that she can direct their dreams, turning the fears expressed in nightmares into something more manageable. She can give people closure. She drops in on the dream of a burnout named Cabel, and discovers that there's a lot more there than meets the eye--he becomes her boyfriend and later her sidekick as she tries to figure out who dreamed one horrible dream she cannot forget. The movie will be distributed by Paramount and MTV Films (which passed on Twilight) is developing the project. Christopher Landon (Disturbia) will write the script, and whether or not Cyrus gets on board will depend on the quality of the script.

So kudos to Miley. The project's supernatural overtones put it in the trendy Twilight territory without being directly vampire-related.Also, although the heroine has a boyfriend, it's not a romance, so Cyrus isn't going the rom-com route--thank goodness. She's still stuck in a hard game, and there's plenty of popular young actresses popular in the tabloids but unable to make the switch to adult roles. Lindsay Lohan crashed and burned her way out of Disney movies, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have more success now with fashion than they do on movie sets. Cyrus has never appealed to me--she has a kind of awkward demeanor that's inconsistent with being a movie star without being charming in its own way. While she has hordes of young fans, it's possible that her grown-up fans may want to cast her off instead of growing up with her. Just one more note to Miley about her image: stop slouching!

Movie geeks rejoice with comedy-infographic book 'Movie Charts'

By Sarah Sluis

I'm a big fan of infographics, which have taken off in recent years thanks to the democratizing effects of the Internet and Photoshop. I especially love it when infographics are used in nontraditional ways, which is exactly what Paul Copperwaite's Movie Charts, the book that showed up on my desk this morning, does. With over one hundred sometimes easy-to-get, sometimes more eclectic references to popular movies, this is a nice coffee table book that your friends will laugh at as they look through it. I scanned in some of my favorites below:

Oh, the irony. Oh, James Cameron...

Breakfast at Tiffany's vs. Carrie vs. Abigail's Party vs. The Godfather:

For those that need a little brush-up on the below (or want to re-live the magic), here's a link to the famous speech. "You was my brother Charlie, you shoulda looked out for my a little bit..."

It appears that the title, published by Spruce, is for sale at Amazon, and is part of a series that includes Pop Charts, graphic takes on movie lyrics.

No one wants 'New Moon' to end

By Sarah Sluis

The success of New Moon has brought the Twilight franchise to a whole new level. Among franchises, there are the ones that do better the second time around (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) and then there are the ones that do worse. By amassing a two-week total that exceeds the gross of the first film, New Moon is firmly among the franchise winners. Predictably, Summit is trying to stretch out the amount of Twilight movies it can make, and supernatural romances are in hot demand.

Today, for example, Warner Bros. picked up a series of five books in the "supernatural romance" category--the first one was just released today. Richard LaGravanese (writer/director of P.S. I Love You) is set to write and direct the first in the series, entitled Beautiful Creatures. An extension of Harry Potter and Twilight, the novel is told from the perspective of a popular high school boy in the South who secretly wants to get out of his small town. He has dreams of a girl, who suddenly arrives as a transfer student. They go through all the usual motions of falling in love, but she is the heir to a terrible family curse (not revealed in synopses) that gets in the way of their love. It sounds like a winning plot, but the success of Twilight and Harry Potter over, say, The Golden Compass has to do with fanbase. Is this project going to remain in a holding pattern until it ignites among young adult audiences? Or will it be moved swiftly into production before (or even if) the series turns into a phenomenon?

The other news on the supernatural romance front is Summit's proposal to extend the success of the Twilight series by splitting Breaking Dawn, the 756-page finale to the series, into two movies. That would bring the total amount of movies to five. It's an expensive move that will require raises among cast and crew (the Harry Potter series went through the same series of renegotiations), but the payoff could be big. Summit has already made a smart move by releasing the movies in quick succession. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse will come out not next Thanksgiving but this summer (June 30th). While the Twilight series, like the Harry Potter series, is strong enough to bring in new fans as older ones age out of the series, holding onto an audience is always a concern. Teen girls are only teen girls for so long. I've heard of kids who were into Star Wars but lost interest by the time the third film was released. As for myself, after seeing the first five Harry Potter movies on opening day, I missed the sixth one in theatres (though I'm anxiously awaiting its DVD release). It just wasn't as much of a priority anymore. Summit will be counting on the "Twihards" to retain their fanaticism for at least a few more years.