Back in April, Ryan Stewart alerted us to the twist in the new adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Celine Rattray, of Plum Pictures, had said: "Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we're really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don't want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide." Now I can sort of buy that -- not letting the story fall only into the realm of her problems. However, now they seem to be actively pushing the serious side of depression away. Julia Stiles, who will star as Esther, recently chatted with MTV and said: "I don't think it's depressing at all. It is ABOUT depression, but I think that Sylvia Plath writes with such awesome, beautiful, vivid imagery that is so perfect for film, that it's kind of a joy."

It's not depressing "at all." After a statement like that, I have little hope for the production. While there is humor in the novel, it is about depression and about all that the protagonist goes through as she suffers from it. They must be wiping out a good portion of the book if electroshock therapy and suicide attempts aren't depressing "at all." Or, will these be funny and humorous bouts of electroshock therapy, mixed in with a song and dance number? I'm getting a big Home for Purim vibe here, but I don't think this will be even half as funny as For Your Consideration. Furthermore, yes, Plath's suicide definitely influences the tone of the book, but why shouldn't it? It's loosely autobiographical, to the point that one classmate won a lawsuit for her representation in the book, so as much as her fictional self had her future open to her, Plath killed herself a month after the novel's first publication. I'm not sure why they're reacting so strongly against the serious elements of the book. It's as if they don't realize that humor and drama can work together.

This summer seemed like the end of an era for a lot of the big franchises. Sure, some might be back, but I just don't think they'll be the same. For one of the last big summer releases, The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal has launched an online game, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It was announced that studio has teamed with Google for a promotional game with the somewhat lame title The Ultimate Search for Bourne with Google. Players try to hunt down the elusive rouge agent, and at the same time the game takes you on a tour of You Tube, Google Maps and web searches. Participants will have to answer trivia, and find random clues buried on the net to compete for the grand prize of a 2008 Touareg 2.

So far, the marketing for the movie has been pretty typical; just a few posters and a couple of trailers, and of course the Bourne game is another attempt to fully integrate the web as a way of engineering some buzz. You can't blame the studio for wanting to cash in on a little hype, especially when you consider all the hoopla over those Cloverfield sites. The highly anticipated final film -- and it turns out it will be the final one in the series -- is bringing Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, Joan Allen, and Chris Cooper back for one last hurrah. Back in June, Jennifer had reported that instead of going back for more Bourne after this one, Damon was going to be working on the film version of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran with Bourne director Paul Greengrass. Bourne doesn't open for a few more weeks, so if you can't wait until August 3rd and you have a way with Google, you could always take a crack at winning that car.

A couple of new posters for The Bourne Ultimatum have been released, and I like the hard edge they're going for. I've never read the Ludlum books, so I can't speak to how well the screen character measures up to the book Bourne, but I know that as far as the movies go, it's long past time for the 'confused Bourne' to give way to a Bourne that knows which end is up and can get into a full-scale war with those Treadstone guys led by Joan Allen. The buzz on this one is actually pretty good -- Paul Greengrass is back, as is Tony Gilroy, who scripted the first two films, and Tom Stoppard also had a hand in the script. As for Matt Damon, he's been going around saying that this will be the trilogy capper and there won't be any more Bourne films after it, so hopefully the series is going out with a bang.

The plot involves Bourne coming out of hiding once again to make contact with a journalist who has gotten wind of his story. The journalist has some info about Treadstone, and David Strathairn plays the bad guy who gets wind of this new development and doesn't like it one bit. Strathairn sends Pam Landy back into the fray to find Bourne and take him out. Julia Stiles is back for the third time, but I doubt she'll have a more significant role than she's had in the other two films. The film, which was shot in a large number of international locales, from Morocco to Spain to France to Germany, and all over the U.S., will be hitting theaters on August 3.

The centerpiece of Express Stops Only, a short film program playing at Tribeca, is Raving, from first-time writer/director Julia Stiles. Starring Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin, the film centers around two possibly dangerous Manhattan misfits who try to figure each other out and end up engaging in an uneasy friendship, of sorts. Zooey is a street scammer, hustling people for drinking money with a song and dance about how she got hooked up with bad people and was left behind all alone, in the big bad city. Irwin's character is a straight-laced man who shows up at an office every morning, swipes a card at a security station and acts outraged when it doesn't work. We never learn whether he worked there or if he's just a complete lunatic who likes to show up at office buildings and cause a scene. Stiles shows a sure hand for offbeat comedy her first time around, keeping us engaged in the interplay between the two weirdos without ever tipping her hand as to where this thing is going. There's a nice musical finale.

Say Can You See is a creepy animation short that imagines 9/11 and its aftermath through the eyes of the those high-powered binocular stations on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. With the eye-holes already in place, it's an easy transition to anthropomorphize them as sad, contemplative watchmen who have a clear line of sight to see what's going on downtown but can do nothing about it. This isn't a talky short or something aimed at children, but a music-laden art piece that transitions from rain and sadness to a milieu of rebirth as birds and sunshine begin to return to the area. I wonder if the timing is off, however -- this seems like exactly the kind of thing that could have played three or four years ago at Tribeca and been very powerful, but the intervening years drain it of some of its power to inspire emotions through such a simple presentation. Still, its an intriguing little piece that puts one in mind of why the Tribeca film festival was created in the first place.

Bourne bait Julia Stiles has signed up to play Esther Greenwood in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's classic 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Tristine Skyler, a playwright and actress whose most prominent screen credits seem to be the Dominique Swain movie The Intern and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, is writing the thing, and Plum Pictures is producing it. Get a load of what Plum exec. Celine Rattray had to say about the project: "Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we're really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don't want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide." Wow. You might want to back up and read that again. This is a book about a woman (loosely based on Plath herself) whose struggle with clinical depression is so overwhelming that it drives her to madness and leads her to be subjected to gruesome, primitive shock therapy treatments. Throughout the course of the book, she attempts suicide several times. And they're going to turn it into, what, Mrs. Doubtfire?

The producers hope to get the project going next year, and no other cast members have been signed as of yet. Stiles will serve as a producer of the film, along with Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer. The story also notes that Stiles has been trying to bring this book to the screen for several years, but why? Here's hoping that either Variety or Rattray got it wrong about the whole "uplifting" angle, which is so laughable that I'm sure the Plath estate will go bananas when they catch wind of it. The last big-screen adaptation of The Bell Jar was back in 1979.

I should probably start by admitting that I'm one of those rare people who is not a huge fan of the Bourne series. However, I've still tried to like them -- after seeing The Bourne Identity, I still went to see The Bourne Supremacy. Unfortunately, the one thing that would keep me watching them no matter how indifferent I am to the product was infuriatingly killed off in the last one. With that said, I'm not entirely thrilled that this trailer starts off with a bunch of old footage, and reminds me of all the Franka Potente that is no longer there. On the other hand, I found myself strangely amped by the poster -- both for Bourne coming home, and for the mysterious, yet completely descriptive of the movie, pose.

But how is this trailer for fans of the series? As Erik Davis said in his news of the first trailer, "it looks just like the other two -- a bunch of government types are still chasing Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), while he's doing his best to allude the villains and figure out his identity before it's too late." Joan Allen is still tough and cool as Pamela Landy: "Trying to kill him [Bourne] and failing -- just pisses him off." Damon is still beating down whoever comes across his path, with wildly driving cars or sailing through the air as he jumps from one building to the next. And Julia Stiles.. Well, she looks a bit goofy with her new 'do, but she only gets a brief flash of screen time. And finally, the whole trailer lies around the end revelation. Is that really something you'd want to reveal? Is it obvious and okay, or does it kill the sense of mystery? Either way I might forgive the Supremacy shocker and see what ultimately happens to Bourne.

With increasing frequency, short films are connecting themselves with women's magazines -- at least, the shorts that cater to fashion, boyfriends and beauty are. Glamour Magazine has been in the game for a bit, grabbing big-name women like Jennifer Aniston and Robin Wright Penn for their Reel Moments series. While it might seem strange at first, it makes sense. Women's magazines love media bites and celebrities, and short films deliver both. In September, Erik Davis brought word that Elle was stepping on the bandwagon with Julia Stiles, who directed a short called Raving.

Now Elle has released a trailer for the short, which will premiere on the Sundance Channel on May 8, at 8:30 PM. Raving is the story of a girl (Zooey Deschanel) who is desperate and searching for money in NYC, and the lonely older man (Bill Irwin) who hires her to clean his home. The man is a widower, and in a bit of poor judgment the girl puts on a dress that belonged to his wife. Instead of getting angry, the man seems to use her to relive the past. This changes the girl's life, because, as Elle's byline for the film states: "Sometimes a dress can change your life." It looks like it is supposed to be a feel-good sort of film, but I don't see how that premise can be anything but creepy. However, it's got Zooey, and she excels at bringing extra quirk and depth to what could be superficial or run-of-the-mill.

It's not often that Variety reports on the production of a short film, but since we're talking Julia Stiles* here, I suppose that means it's important. According to the trade pub, Stiles will write and direct a short called Raving, based on a story featured in Elle magazine's Personal Style issue, due out in October.

The actual story (titled The Dress That Changed My Life) focuses on "the connection between a young woman and a lonely, disassociated older man after a chance encounter on a New York street corner." I assume this young woman will be wearing a special dress that, subsequently, winds up changing her life. Stiles was able to nab Zooey Deschanel and Bill Irwin to play the lead characters in the pic, which is sponsored by Elle and will be produced by Plum Pictures. Currently, there's no word on where we'll be able to catch the short, though I expect Elle will make it available on their website once everything is all wrapped up in a neat little bow.

*Am I the only one who thinks Julia Stiles and Erika Christensen are long-lost sisters?

"You know who I hate? Faggots. Because they hate women." When Glenna (Julia Stiles) says this, it's a casual admission; something tossed off in the down moments of a one-night stand. It's a confession to a near total stranger that presumably won't cause any ripples in her real life, or ever be mentioned again. But Edmond (William H. Macy) is way ahead of her. Before meeting Glenna tonight, he knocked the teeth of a black man all over an alley in Times Square, and considered it a victory not just for himself but for what he views as the long-suffering white race. What luck, that he's found a kindred spirit he can tell his story to, detail by detail! Edmond is David Mamet's contribution to that strange film genre that dates back to John Ford's The Searchers, in which a lonely anti-hero's expectations of how things should be racially-wise, sexual propriety-wise, and otherwise-wise, must be adhered to by the rest of the world, lest he go completely schizoid.

Despite the considerable violence Edmond eventually racks up, Mamet's motormouthed version of Travis Bickle ends up coming off more like the world's most annoying bar patron than someone truly menacing. His pathos is inherently comedic, even if the filmmakers don't want it to be. His bete noire, we find out, isn't really blacks or women or city life, but high prices! Repeatedly thwarted in his attempt to find a low-priced call girl, Edmond at one point becomes enraged when a peep-show stripper is unable to make change for ten dollars from behind her glass window. "Give me the ten dollars! Give me the ten dollars!" Edmond yells, exasperated at how he ended up at such a moment in his life. The arguing of these two characters is so absurd that it almost saves the rest of the film, which is plodding, labored, and ultimately too theatrically-grounded for its own good.

Friends have asked me why Hollywood would remake The Omen, a film remembered fleetingly, if at all, for a few images of terror, Gregory Peck, and the pulsing, moody Carmina Burana-like score, an Oscar-winner for composer Jerry Goldsmith. Their concern is a slightly embarrassed mix of indignation and curiosity: Their attitude is that if movies they remember fondly don't need to be remade, what justifies a return to The Omen, which wasn't very good the first time?

But remakes often happen to correct significant errors with original films, namely that they didn't make money for the right people. Why should Dr. Seuss's estate alone profit from How the Grinch Stole Christmas? Can't Ron Howard get some of that sweet Who-ville coin? And so, we get remakes -- even remakes of films as marginal as The Omen.

But then again, if pop culture is often a indicator of how people are actually feeling -- if there's a link between the stories on the front page of the New York Times and the books at the top of the Best-seller lists in the Book Review section -- then we can see that supernatural claptrap with one foot in the Dark Ages and the other somewhere around the End Times has been selling pretty good recently: The Da Vinci Code, the Left Behind book series. So at the beginning of John Moore's version of The Omen, footage from 9/11, Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami provokes plenty of long, serious looks from The Vatican's top men, who've met to decipher symbols from the Book of Revelation with a series of PowerPoint slides...