Hmmm ... well, file this one under "this could be an interesting casting decision." Variety reported yesterday that Ellen Page, who's been one of my favorite young actresses since I saw her in Hard Candy, has signed on to play one of classic literature's greatest (and most adapted) heroines, Jane Eyre, in an adaptation for BBC.

On the one hand, I can see Page physically in the role -- she looks very like the waif-like Jane in the ancient hardcover edition of the book I inherited from my great-grandmother, all narrow-faced and doe-eyed. And she's certainly proven that she has the acting chops to take on a serious role (see her performances in both Hard Candy and An American Crime).

Of late, though, she's become so identified with the snarky, wise-cracking teenagers she played in Juno and Smart People, that it may be a bit hard now to wash the modern, smart-mouthed teen out of our collective viewing palettes. I say this as a fan of both Page and Juno -- and Lord knows, I've taken enough crap here and elsewhere for loving Juno over the last year -- but I'm trying to wrap my mind around Page as one of the most depressing heroines in literature (all right, Wuthering Heights' Cathy is perhaps more depressing, but until the very end of the book, Jane Eyre isn't what I'd call cheery and uplifting).

After seeing Juno, the first thing my friend and I did was speedwalk back to my neighborhood so that I could scour my local open-late music store for the soundtrack. (Even after Diablo made me feel really frakking old by referring to "Superstar" as dated.) It was the first time in eons that I really wanted a soundtrack (I used to be addicted to them), and annoyingly, it wasn't out yet. After a bit, the disc was finally released, and now, quickly on the heels of soundtrack #1, Ace Showbiz reports that we're about get more great Juno tunes in Juno: B-Sides Almost Adopted.

Sure, there might not be a technical B-side, but it still works. In the liner notes, Reitman wrote: "None of these songs made the movie, but they are all essential members of the Junoverse." There's more Kimya Dawson, some Yo La Tengo and Buddy Holly, and even a new Diablo Cody-penned tune. The song is called "Zub Zub," and was performed by Page in a cut scene, one that I imagine will pop up in the DVD. Just as a teaser, it contains the lyrics: "He filled me with baby batter/then we ate some orange tic tacs after." Oh, how I love catchy tunes with strange lyrics.

The collection will be available on iTunes next week, April 8, but so far, there are no plans for a disc.

First we reported that Ellen Page would be starring in Sam Raimi's first horror flick in many a moon: Drag Me to Hell is what it's called. Then a few days ago, we learned that Ms. Page's schedule was way too booked with other stuff, so the horror flick is what had to go. Oh well, Page's loss looks to be Alison Lohman's gain.

According to Variety, production on Drag Me to Hell will be delayed only two weeks, which gives Ms. Lohman a little time to learn her lines. Alison's actually 28 years old, but dang she looks a lot younger than that -- which is good since she'll soon be playing a high school student. (Or maybe Mr. Raimi will move his story to college?) The good news is that not only is she very pretty, but Alison Lohman has proven to be quite the fine actor. (You'll remember her stuff from White Oleander, Matchstick Men, Big Fish, Where the Truth Lies, and Beowulf.)

So while I definitely look forward to Ellen Page's new flicks, it's cool to see Alison Lohman snag a starring role ... in a horror flick. Production begins in L.A. at the end of the month.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Tracey Fragments will be coming to U.S. theaters in May by way of ThinkFilm. Based on a novel by Maureen Medved, the movie stars Ellen Page of Juno, Hard Candy, and X-Men III as a self-loathing teenage girl trying desperately to find her lost nine-year-old brother who thinks he's a dog. The film uses a non-linear narrative and split-screen to present the main characters thoughts. Director Bruce McDonald has several intriguing credits, including the punk rock faux documentary Hard Core Logo, as well as episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation and the ultra bizarre science fiction series Lexx.

No doubt the success of Juno spurred ThinkFilm's decision to distribute The Tracey Fragments. They will release the film in New York City on May 9, to be followed by a presumably limited release (given the film's unconventional nature) to other cities. The film is nominated for six awards at next month's Genies (Canada's big entertainment award), including best actress for Page. It also won the Manfred Salzgeber Panorama Jury Prize, for a film that "broadens the boundaries of cinema," at last year's Berlin fest. It also garnered positive reviews from Cinematical's own James Rocchi and Erik Davis.

For those curious about the film, the official website is definitely worth a look. It offers the trailer which provides a glimpse at McDonald's intriguing approach, a downloadable Tracey Fragments comic book in PDF format, and a fascinating bit called Tracey: ReFragmented (which Monika first posted about here) for which McDonald made all the footage shot for the film available and held a contest inviting anyone and everyone to remix it. The contest is closed but you can still view the entries.

For the horror freaks there are few headlines more potentially exciting than "Sam Raimi to Helm New Horror Flick," but this story just got a little cooler. Not only will Mr. Raimi return to direct his first horror film since ... damn since Evil Dead 2, I guess (Army of Darkness is barely a horror film), but he'll be bringing the adorable Ellen Page with him!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mr. Raimi will settle into the director's chair in mid-April, and the flick he'll be helming is something called Drag Me to Hell. Given that THR offers nothing in the way of a plot synopsis, we can assume that Raimi and his Ghost House Pictures are aiming to keep the details under wraps for now. What we know for sure is that A) Ms. Page is definitely on board, B) the script comes from Sam Raimi and his big bro Ivan, and C) a whole bunch of horror geeks across the globe just started clapping their hands in glee. (Universal chiefs Marc Shmuger and David Linde apparently agree: "Sam Raimi's return to horror is a cause for celebration for horror fans and movie lovers everywhere.")

Given that we love horror flicks, Sam Raimi and Ellen Page a whole lot at this blog ... you can expect a lot more news on Drag Me to Hell as soon as it becomes available.

According to Variety, David Slade will now direct Unthinkable, the story of a nuclear bomb in the United States. Tarsem Singh, director of the visually spectacular but dramatically weak 2000 thriller The Cell, was originally attached to direct (we brought you that announcement over a year ago). He has moved on, and no reason is given, but I'm sure it's something along the lines of "creative differences." Peter Woodward (Closing the Ring) penned the script, and Oren Moverman (co-writer of I'm Not There) is now listed as a co-writer.

Unthinkable centers on "investigators who push the limits of interrogation as they seek a suspect's knowledge of an impending nuclear attack on the United States." The film is budgeted at $15 million, so it will likely be a pretty small affair. No casting announcements have been made at this time. Slade made his feature debut with Hard Candy. That sharp, entertaining 2005 thriller starred a pre-Juno Ellen Page as a young girl who turns the tables on a pedophile. He followed that with 30 Days of Night -- last year's vampire flick that was chock full of beautiful camerawork...but not much else. Slade is definitely a director to watch though, and I'm excited to see what he'll bring to this project. Miss this one? Unthinkable! Damn, I'm good.

A lot of my colleagues seem to be practically empurpled lately over the fact that Juno is being feted as not merely a success, but an indie/crossover success. This seems like a moot argument to me -- more on that in a second -- but first I will say that whether you think it is or isn't, you shouldn't overstep and give the PR machine too much credit here. Any studio shingle PR team worth its salt obviously has a 'media manipulation/other shenanigans' Trapper Keeper ready to be opened at a moment's notice if the clouds part and a movie actually connects with the public, but that's the point -- it has to connect first. Juno is a quadrant pimp and Once isn't -- that's why EW isn't piling on the plaudits for Once, even though it's currently enjoying 98 percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. If your response to this is "Um, yeah, I'm sure Once would love to have Fox Searchlight's Scrooge McDuck-swimming pool of money to buy some ads with" I would say, first, it does, and second, I'm increasingly of the opinion that most of that money is wasted on an ad-saturated public anyway.

All the marketing in the world and a bevy of A-list stars couldn't push a big movie like The Golden Compass even to $70 million, nor keep a crazy-hyped film like Cloverfield from swan-diving in its second weekend, so Juno clearly has legs, which is a rare commodity these days for any film, big or small. And to suggest that Juno's success rests on its popularity with teens, as some have, is wishful thinking. The scary reality is that today's 16 year-olds would probably like to see Step Up 2 in the Oscar race, not a Jason Reitman movie.

In one of Smart People's many funny (yet real) scenes, several beers have loosened the inhibitions and tongue of bright, highly motivated teen Vanessa Wetherhold (Ellen Page). As she staggers out of the bathroom, she pauses to ask a bottle-blonde, denim-clad woman "How's it feel to be stupid?" The woman snaps back: "How's it feel to eat lunch alone every day?" Vanessa's drunk enough to be honest: "It f***in' sucks." And that scene, in a nutshell, is what Smart People is about -- how it's one thing to be bright and aware and clever and perceptive, but it also sucks to eat lunch alone. Vanessa's dad Lawrence (Dennis Quaid) is a burly, bearded professor in the English department at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University - sluggish and surly and sleepwalking through his days. It's established -- carefully and well -- that Lawrence lost his wife not that long ago. His son James (Ashton Holmes) is attending Carnegie; his daughter Vanessa busies herself as Lawrence's right hand woman -- preparing meals, thinking of new titles for his book, advising him on office politics. This has two advantages for Vanessa; she gets to help her dad with his problems, and it keeps her too busy to think about her own.

The Wetherholds don't have much of a life, but at least it has some order to it -- order that's disrupted by the arrival of Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), Lawrence's adopted brother. Chuck is a slow-motion wreck of a man, a financial and professional failure, but he knows things his brainy brother and niece don't. Chuck wants to crash with Lawrence for a while, but Lawrence isn't very interested in that; when Lawrence has a seizure that means his driving license is revoked for six months, Chuck leaps in that window of opportunity headfirst. Chuck, by his very presence, destroys the status quo at the Wetherhold home. What we come to grasp is that maybe that status quo needs destruction.

Three clips have popped up online for Miramax's comedy Smart People. The film stars Dennis Quaid as a sullen academic who is trying to improve both his professional and personal situation -- on the family side of things, there's Ellen Page as his daughter, Thomas Haden Church as his adopted brother, and Sarah Jessica Parker as his love interest. James Rocchi recently interviewed the cast, and said that the film was "funny, yet never forced; rich, but always real." (Stay tuned for his review.)

And if you need more proof, these clips look pretty darned good, if I do say so myself. Hearing about this project, I was most drawn to Page's involvement, but now I'm really digging Quaid. I've always loved the guy, and there's just something about these clips that brings me back to the golden age of Quaid -- granted, with much more hair and much less devilish grinning. Check out the one clip above, and the other two after the jump.

[via Ace Showbiz]

In Smart People, Dennis Quaid plays a lonely, semi-broken academic trying to re-connect with his work, repair his relationship with his fractured family (including his daughter, Ellen Page, and his adopted brother, Thomas Haden Church) and conduct a tentative romance with Sarah Jessica Parker's E.R. doctor -- who used to be one of his students. The feature-film debut of award-winning commercial director Noam Murro, Smart People's warm and winning script, by novelist Mark Poirier, is funny, yet never forced; rich, but always real. Parker, Church and Quaid spoke with Cinematical at Sundance about Murro's unexpected directorial choices, the film's surprising sense of stillness and grace ... and less noble topics, like dueling and character hair cuts, too: "One of the added benefits of doing a movie with Sarah Jessica Parker," Church explains, "is that you also have access to her hair and make-up people. ..."

This interview, like all of Cinematical's podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you'd like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:

In line for the world premiere of Smart People -- a new comedy-drama starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Dennis Quaid, Thomas Haden Church and Ellen Page -- at the Eccles center last night, some fellow line members were frustrated by how Sundance was handling the waiting process. Why, they asked, were ticket-holders outside in the cold, while the people hoping to get on the wait list were in a heated tent? It seemed fairly obvious to me: If you have a group of people who you're probably going to disappoint, it is kind to let them be warm. It's not just a way of avoiding hurt feelings -- it's probably a way of avoiding a riot.

My review of Smart People will be coming in a bit, but just to whet your whistle, I really liked it. The film is a committed and smart take on material that other films have handled with less brains and heart, and it also features Ellen Page in a great performance as a real teenager, not just as Diablo Cody's doppelganger-mouthpiece. Parker, Quaid and Church are all terrific, too. Director Noam Murro knew the score (and mocked how hype-happy Hollywood counts the points) when he was thanking his cast before the film: " ... and Ellen Page, Juno Schmoono ..."

A new interview over at FilmSchoolRejects.com throws some light on Whip It, the upcoming film based on the Shauna Cross novel Derby Girl, about a young girl who finds herself through excelling at roller derby. Cross tells the site that Drew Barrymore wants to take on directing the film and is gearing up for a March start. "It wasn't until after I turned in the script that Drew really fell in love with the idea of directing it," Cross says. "And I'm so glad she did because I think she will do a really lovely job. She's got that whole smiley-sweet persona, but she's one smart cookie with a lot of soul and great creative instincts." And exactly who is Barrymore after to play Bliss, the lead in the film? This is what Cross has to say about that: "Rumor is the lead could be played by an actress whose name rhymes with 'Shmellen Shmage.' But what do I know? I'm just the writer."

When asked about how autobiographical the story is, Cross says that "Like my lead character, Bliss, I grew up just outside Austin and was a pretty precocious teen, full of sarcasm and wit and hijinks (as were my friends, most of whom were older.) But I was also really sensitive, hiding that vulnerability with humor. And of course, I play roller derby." Sounds like Ellen Page material to me. As of now, Page has only a couple of projects in the pipeline -- she seems to be holding off on using her newly-minted credibility from Juno to cash in on something high-profile. Would she want to risk doing something Juno-esque this soon? Should she try to immediately start playing twenty-somethings and get away from teen-roles? Luckily, she has an agent so we don't have to answer these questions.

[via Slashfilm]

Best Actress (Musical or Comedy)

Nominees:

Amy Adams -- Enchanted

Nikki Blonsky -- Hairspray

Helena Bonham Carter -- Sweeney Todd

Marion Cotillard -- La vie en Rose

Ellen Page -- Juno

Predicted Winner: Ellen Page -- Juno

Although screenwriter Diablo Cody is clearly the "breakout" star of the Juno story, I'm sure she'd admit that without Ellen Page, the movie wouldn't be quite so special. Movie fans first took note of the diminutive gal's talents in the chilling Hard Candy, and the blockbuster fanboys fell for her hard in X-Men: The Last Stand -- but it's pretty safe to say that Juno is her "star-making" role -- and it couldn't happen to a cooler girl. We predict a Globe win, an Oscar nomination, and ... well, let's not jinx the woman!

Now it's your turn to vote ...

What is the proper etiquette one must employ when interviewing Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody? Are you allowed to ask her about her time as a stripper and a phone-sex operator? Is that crude or off-topic? There's no question how she (and Fox Searchlight) feel about the issue -- sitting down with Cody for a one-on-one interview last month (for another outlet) was one of the oddest experiences of my life, since Fox insisted on having a senior publicist actually be in the room and stand near me during the interview and occasionally even interrupt my questioning -- a first. I later found out the same treatment was given to others, and this thinly-disguised attempt to intimidate the journalist out of asking any potentially non-PG questions was really out of line and unnecessary. However, Cody can't control television interviews as successfully, as evidenced by her upcoming appearance on Peter Bart's AMC show, which apparently turned into a cringe-fest.

On Cody's MySpace page, she says Bart "was full of condescending questions. Wait until Sunday -- you'll see him asking when I plan to be a normal woman and have children!" I can't wait to see that, since it would seem to be a new contender for the stupidest thing he's ever said, and that's saying a lot. In the meantime, AMC is hosting some teaser clips from the interview, and you can see Cody's face drop into a pained grimace when Bart asks "Were you ever a stripper?" and moves on to other questions like "Were you writing at the time that you were stripping?" and "Where did you strip?" Some bloggers have taken the position that it's invariably creepy and unnecessary to ask Cody these kinds of questions, but I still say when someone writes a whole book about something, it's sort of fair game.

The Klingon death blade you see Diablo Cody wielding here is what she used to slay the other box-office contenders over the weekend. Juno leapfrogged from number ten -- already respectable for such a small film -- to number five, coming in just behind Charlie Wilson's War and I Am Legend with an impressive $10.3 million. These numbers were enough to cause Fox Searchlight to press the big button -- Juno will now expand to 2,000 screens next weekend. So far, the film about a wise-ass 16 year-old who becomes pregnant and decides to carry the baby to term and give it up for adoption, has brought in a total of $25.7 million. This puts it well on track to blow Little Miss Sunshine, its equivalent from last year, totally out of the water -- LMS only brought in $59.8 million domestic total.

In other box office news, Cage continued to hold the top spot with National Treasure: Book of Secrets bringing in $35.6 million. In nine days, the film has pulled in $124 million. Meanwhile, although I Am Legend slipped down to the number three slot this weekend, it still pulled in $27.5 million and is just on the verge of breaking the $200 million mark. It will be interesting to see if National Treasure can gain ground on Big Willy over the next few weeks -- it seems to be the film with the most staying power at the moment, but Legend has a big head-start. Sweeney Todd also stayed strong this weekend, bringing in $8 million for a ninth-place finish. Atonement, on the other hand, has yet to find its audience, which will hurt its Oscar front-runner status.