JamieLinden Tagged Articles at Cinematical

They've both been Mean Girls, both acted for Nick Cassavetes, both appeared in wedding movies and now both Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried will have shared the honor of being the leading lady in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. For McAdams, it was 2005's beloved weepy The Notebook; for Seyfried, rising fast after starring in the hugely popular Mamma Mia!, it's Dear John. According to Variety, the 22-year-old has been cast as Savannah, a virginal college student who falls in love with a soldier on leave (and named John, of course) immediately prior to 9/11. Kind of like Pearl Harbor but with more letters than explosions.

The soldier is being played by Channing Tatum, who will be fresh from G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra when Dear John hits theaters, likely a year from now. Meanwhile, Seyfried will have costarred in the third season of HBO's Big Love, which begins airing in January, and opposite Megan Fox in the Diablo Cody-scripted Jennifer's Body. Dear John is being directed by Lasse Hallström (Chocolat) from an adaptation scripted by Jamie Linden (We Are Marshall). Shooting begins next month in South Carolina.

OK, stay with me here. The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst, is a novel about a man whose wife dies under what he considers mysterious circumstances, though the police ruled it an accident. The only witness to her death was the couple's dog. The bereaved husband's solution? Teach the dog to speak so he can hear the pooch's eyewitness account. And it's not a comedy, it's a drama!

I read the book a few years ago and thought it was a terrific examination of the grieving process, obsession, and learning to face reality. I had no problem buying the basic premise of a guy wanting to teach his dog to speak. But how will all this translate to the big screen? That question is about to be answered, as Variety reports a film adaptation has been fast-tracked.

The director will be John Crowley, a Tony-nominated stage director who also made 2003's Intermission (starring Colin Farrell), and the current Miramax release Boy A. The screenplay is being written by Jamie Linden, who wrote We Are Marshall and the upcoming Nicholas Sparks adaptation Dear John. The Dogs of Babel has some complex subject matter that's going to be hard to pull off in a visual medium, and I'm guessing the Nicholas Sparks book, um, doesn't -- so we'll see how Linden handles the transition. Crowley seems to be a capable director, at any rate, and Boy A (about a man who committed a murder as a child being released from prison) deals with sensitive subjects, too.

Anyone else read Dogs of Babel? What do you think of a movie version? Can they pull it off? If your dog could speak, what would it say to you? Mine would say, "I wish you didn't walk around the apartment naked so much." My dog is a total bitch (in the zoological sense).

As much as I would love to see the Judd Hirsch sitcom turned into a movie, New Line's Dear John is not based on a television show. As you can see from the headline, the movie is an adaptation of the Nicolas Sparks novel. And as we told you a few months ago, it's about a doomed long-distance romance between a college student and a U.S. soldier. The actress playing the student hasn't yet been revealed, but the soldier will be played by Channing Tatum, an actor who I'd like to see become more recognized and celebrated (if you haven't seen him in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, do yourself a favor and queue the film up). As far as Sparks adaptations go, I hope Dear John is Tatum's Notebook instead of his Walk to Remember, because the former helped shoot Ryan Gosling to stardom while the latter did nothing for Shane West's career.

Dear John doesn't have a director, but producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey (The Nativity Story) have just hired a screenwriter: Jamie Linden, who penned We Are Marshall and an upcoming adaptation of Carolyn Parkhurst's novel The Dogs of Babel, which is about a man attempting to teach his dog to talk. All three stories deal with loss, although as far as I know Dear John doesn't deal with a tragedy like those dealt with in both Marshall and Dogs. It does center around 9/11, however, so I guess it doesn't need any more deaths. Of course, I do imagine the weepy irony of Sparks' novel to be that Tatum's character dies in the end, just as the student decides to retract her 'Dear John' letter. If this is what happens, don't spoil it for us. We can go into the theater prepared to cry, but that doesn't mean we want to know why we're going to cry.