Despite
the fact that Daniel Craig moved on from his upcoming film Blindness, Fernando
Meirelles is moving full steam ahead and in directions you might not expect
given his rather grim filmography thus far, which includes The Constant Gardener and
City
of God (and Blindness is every bit as bleak). After that onslaught of
onscreen heaviness – which, if we were talking musical heaviness, would be the
equivalent of a new Napalm Death platter – Meirelles has decided he doesn’t
quite distrust humanity as much as it seems, and will try his hand, indirectly,
at Shakespeare.
Loose or
restaged adaptations of the Bard are nothing new. We’ve had a pretty healthy subgenre
of those types of movies ranging from the ambitious (Titus) to the manic (Baz
Luhrmann’s take on Romeo and Juliet) to the just plain stupid (the “Dim Summmmmm!”-afflicted
Romeo
Must Die). Meirelles will be adapting from Love’s Labor Lost, which
is not the original text, but rather a Brazilian novel that set the story
amidst international students in
and
According to the man himself, "I like comedy a lot and I have done some
for Brazilian television, but somehow my films like City of
all these very dark subjects. I should probably talk to my psychologist about
that." I believe this was from an interview with No Duh magazine, but I’ll
check to be sure.
Anyhoo,
this is going to be a little ways off being that he’s still finalizing casting
for Blindness.
Right now, the plan is to start shooting this at the end of 2009, which means
he’ll be making his movie among the true life events that inspired Freejack.
I just know McCandless better not fuck with this.