RobertLantos Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's been 14 years since Mordechai Richler's adult fare made it to the big screen in 1985's Joshua Then and Now. (Before that, it was 1974 with the Richard Dreyfuss-starring The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.) It's been far from a quick book-to-screen process, but all these years later, we're finally getting a little more. Canoe reports that his 1997 novel Barney's Vision is heading for the big screen, and Paul Giamatti will star.

Producer Robert Lantos has been trying to get a good script since the book came out, and he now thinks he has "a screenplay that is worthy of Richler's magnificent book," written by TV scribe Michael Konyves. In fact, by nabbing Giamatti, Lantos even got the actor he was hoping for. The project, which will be helmed by Richard J. Lewis (CSI director), follows a hard-drinking rascally man named Barney Panofsky who decides to write "the true story of my wasted life," from adventures in 1950s Paris, to money earned through a TV company called Totally Unnecessary Productions, to three different wives. But ithe tale is unreliable, and footnoted with corrections from his son.

I'm not sure how they'll deal with the textual flairs from the novel, but a satirical social commentary led by Giamatti? It's like Sideways without the wine and dumb friend. Production kicks off in Rome, Montreal, the Laurentians, and New York on August 17.

It's been a few years since Atom Egoyan brought us his last feature film -- 2005's Where the Truth Lies. The uber-sexy film followed Alison Lohman as a journalist trying to uncover the long-hidden and mysterious story behind the breakup of a comedy team played by Bacon and Colin Firth, which ended years before when they found a dead girl in their hotel room. Now Egoyan is cooking up another film with Serendipity Point Films-head Robert Lantos, leaving the adult world for some adolescent fare, and straying from the carefully-laid out mystery plot of Truth. The new drama is called Adoration, and it will begin shooting on September 17, right after TIFF wraps up.

According to Playback, the film is a teen drama that "will examine how kids redefine themselves through the Internet," by focusing on "a high school student who claims to be a figure from recent history." Oh, vagueness! Is this kid channeling Lonelygirl15? While she's made waves, I wouldn't quite call her a figure of history, so your guess is as good as mine. The director will look into the ways that the Internet changes relationships between kids, when compared to classroom interaction. That's about all that we know about the film, but there might not be too much more to tell. Egoyan has a script, but it's one he's planning on changing as it goes: "What excites me is that the script...is open enough that I can change and modify based on what we find out as we're shooting it. That, to me, is the ideal kind of structure." Ah, film Playdoh!

[via CBC]