Posy Simmonds’s critically-acclaimed, Eisner-nominated comic Tamara Drewe will be turned into a movie by director Stephen Frears, The Guardian reports.
The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk. Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam are also said to be attached to the project.
Simmonds’s strip ran in the Guardian’s Review section between September 2005 and October 2007 before being collected in a graphic novel. The tragicomic story was inspired by a piece of classic fiction – Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd; likewise her earlier serialised cartoon, Gemma Bovery, took Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as its template.
Frears’ most recent project was also based on a popular work of French literature: Colette’s Chéri novels, which he turned into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend.
Frears was nominated for an Oscar for The Queen and The Grifters and has shown admirable range as a director. Just another indication, I suppose, that the words “comic book movie” don’t have to be synonymous with “big dumb blockbuster,” but can also be linked to “serious film with art-house creds.” If The Dark Knight didn’t completely kill those stereotypes, perhaps a Tamara Drewe movie will put another nail in their coffin.
July 19th, 2009 at 2:23 am
Check Lying In the Gutters a year ago…
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?id=17322&page=article
July 27th, 2009 at 1:43 am
So Ghost World, American Splendor, A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, Wristcutters: A Love Story, and When the Wind Blows did nothing to prove that comic book movies can be linked to “serious film with art house creds”? Dark Knight is really so important it over shadows these? Really?