Taylor Swift Cast in THE GIVER to the Excitement of No One

In a move to delight the singer’s tween audience, enrage readers of books, and generally boost box office returns, Taylor Swift has been cast in the movie adaptation of The Giver, Lois Lowry’s Newberry Medal winning 1993 children’s novel about a frightening dystopian future disguised as a utopia where pain has been eliminated along with emotional depth and memory. Although given that subject matter, Swift’s casting would seem to make sense. Director Phillip Noyce and The Weinstein Company have probably chosen Swift to boost box office returns and slowly chip away at a pillar of your childhood.

The seminal work, heralded ignorantly by Teen Vogue as “the original Hunger Games”, stars Jeff Bridges as the titular character, a community’s living receptacle of all emotion and memory as he trains a precocious youth to take over the role, Jonas (Brenton Thwaites, who will also star in Disney’s upcoming film Malificent in 2014). As you can imagine, things go wrong and the boy and his mentor fight the system in a tale with themes – Contentment vs. Integrity, the Great Society vs. Individual – meaty enough for most middle schools to assign the book to their students. Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Odeya Rush, Alexandar Skarsgard and Cameron Monaghan round out the cast.

Harvey Weinstein said of the production that, “We could not have assembled a more impressive cast for this project behind Lois Lowry’s beautiful novel and the directorial talents of Phil Noyce, and are tremendously excited to commence production,” set to begin on October 7th in Cape Town, South Africa.  Neither Weinstein or Noyce, who’s directing credits include Salt and Patriot Games, have commented on whether Swift will show up in the soundtrack as well, although the rumor mill is giving it pretty good odds.
           

It’s pretty ironic that in a work, which is opposed to sameness and uniform contentment, Noyce and his producers have made no breaks from the norm casting-wise to make this film. Whether it’s contempt for the tween audience The Giver adaptation is marketed to, or the producer’s blatant attempt at raking in the dough at the cost of the source material’s integrity, there are plenty of reasons to dislike this move. Given that it’s part of an increasing trend of pillaging school reading lists for movie ideas, it makes you hope that Weinstein & Co. don’t discover “Animal Farm”, “Lord of the Flies”, or any more childhood favorites to sell to today’s young adults.
 
The Giver is directed by Phillip Noyce and stars Jeff Bridges, Brenton Thwaites, Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Odeya Rush, Alexandar Skarsgard and Cameron Monaghan. It hit theaters August 15, 2014.

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