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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Leonardo DiCaprio may have taken on a high profile biopic role or two before in his back – to varying success – but it seems as if the A-list actor is still keen to do more. After making a comment about retiring some months back, Leo seems to be as hardworking as ever and this time has set his sights on a Presidential biopic about the 28th American President, Woodrow Wilson. Most known for signing the Treaty of Versailles and helping form the League of Nations, Wilson just recently re-entered the spotlight due to a hotly debated biography from A. Scott Berg.

For all of his talent and the plenitude of captivating performances DiCaprio has put in, he’s only been nominated for an Academy Award twice. Once for his depiction of aviation tycoon Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator and once for his South African diamond-smuggling-antihero in Blood Diamond. Once thought to be an easy Oscar lock, his turn in Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar ended up avoiding any nomination and skirted around most award recognition at all.

But if Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln is any indication of the draw of a presidential biopic in the 2010s, it’s safe to say that the combination of a strong performance and good source material is sure to draw audiences in en masse. For now, nothing is set in stone. I figure I’ll gauge my interest going forward depending on what other talent ends up getting involved.