Cinematical

I guess it's been a while since Elephant -- time for another movie about a school shooting, right? Luckily, we've got Bloom to fit the bill. Based on Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes, the movie will be directed by Vadim Perelman (of House of Sand and Fog fame) and tells a story Variety describes as that of "a woman whose idyllic life crumbles when she survives a shooting spree at a school." Reading about the book at Amazon, however, reveals more details about the plot, and makes the whole thing sound a whole lot more disturbing. Assuming the movie follows the book's plot fairly closely, it will show the woman (to be played as an adult by Uma Thurman) as a teenager surviving the shooting -- but she survives it only because one of the killers decides to kill her friend instead of her. The story then jumps forward two decades into the woman's great adult life. Needless to say, things are not as blissful as they seem, especially when the flashbacks start.

I wonder how they're going to tell this story in the movie -- it's hard to imagine a thriller (which is what production company 2929 is calling the film) getting its suspense entirely from flashbacks, though I suppose if the movie starts in the present day and everything about the shooting is a surprise, that could build some tension. Filming starts this summer, so we should see how Perelman handles the story sometime in 2007.