
Actor Thomas McDonnell (The Forbidden Kingdom, Prom) has been tapped to play the lead in director Lee Toland Krieger’s (The Vicious Kind) adaptation of Tim Tharp’s novel The Spectacular Now. The project has been gestating for a few years, with Summer helmer Marc Webb working on it before he went off to work on the Spider-Man reboot. Variety reports that Shawn Levy (Real Steel) will produce, with the script being written by the writing team behind (500) Days of Summer, Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber. The story revolves around a wild, hard-drinking hard-partying high-school senior who starts dating a shy, insecure girl who ends up changing his life. Hit the jump to read the synopsis of the novel.

It’s been a few years since we’ve seen a “hip” take on a Shakespeare classic, so we were due. Shawn Levy, director/producer of Date Night and the upcoming Real Steel, has made a deal with Fox 2000 to produce an update of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, adapted from the novel Rosaline by Rebecca Serle . Deadline reports that “this is a contemporary version set in a high school, and the famed story is told from the vantage point of Rosaline, the jilted ex-girlfriend of Romeo.” Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber will be writing the screenplay for the film.
Neustadter and Weber also wrote the refreshingly original (500) Days of Summer, as well as the less than refreshingly original Pink Panther 2. Levy recently wrapped filming the Steven Spielberg-produced action/sci-fi flick Real Steel, with Hugh Jackman playing the lead. Hit the jump for a bit more on the film.

(500) Days of Summer is both a movie and a statement on the current independent film movement. The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as a couple who begin the film at the end of their relationship. It’s mostly over but there’s some slivers of hope, but then the film shows how they came together as it shows the end of the road. It’s a charming “quirky” low budget romantic comedy that found an audience over the summer of 2009, and my review of (500) Days of Summer is after the jump.

Sometimes it feels like I open ABC’s home page, and there’s a new show there to greet me, or more often than not, two. Well, now there are two new shows, and they’re not “Defying Gravity” or “Flash Forward.” Variety reports that ABC is toying around with pilots for Jerry Bruckheimer’s drama “Hopscotch” and David Dobkins (“Wedding Crashers”) comedy “Friends With Benefits.” More on the two shows and the various names attached to them after the jump.

As the narrator of “(500) Days of Summer” tells us in its opening, “This is not a love story.” That may be but it’s certainly one that’s in love with its own storytelling. The biggest frustration is that while that storytelling is phenomenal, the story it’s telling is thin, unemotional, and isn’t worthy of Marc Webb’s brilliant direction.
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