Diablo Cody's Romantic Venture to ABC

A year and a half after Showtime canceled the United States of Tara, the Oscar-winning Juno scribe has sold a comedy to ABC, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Alex + Amy, from Warner Bros. Television and Amblin TV, is described as a romantic comedy revolving around a millennial guy and a Gen X woman in love. ABC has given a script plus penalty order to the single-camera comedy.

Cody will executive produce alongside her manager, Mason Novick, and Amblin TV's Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank, who both produced the scribe's Toni Collette starrer Tara when the company was known as DreamWorks TV.

Showtime axed Tara, Cody's first TV series, after a three-season run that saw the series earn Emmy wins for actress in a comedy (Collette) and its main title design. Cody won an Academy Award for penning the screenplay to the 2007 Ellen Page starrer Juno.

Cody is repped by WME, MXN and McKuin Frankel.

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For more information about a wonderful romantic comedy please visit What Would Meg Do?

Warm Bodies: A Romantic Comedy Film for Zombies

 
As a genre, the zombie film is pretty thoroughly mined at this point. There has even been a zombie romantic comedy (or zom-rom-com) that made a few fans. You’ve probably seen Shaun of the Dead four or five times by now.

But Warm Bodies, from director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) might not be as redundant as the idea of another zom-rom-com might seem. It plays with the tropes of rom-coms and zombie films even more, creating an exaggerated “wrong side of the tracks” romance where, in this case, the “track” in question is actually the line between life and death.

See, Nicholas Hoult is a zombie, but when he meets Teresa Palmer, his heart starts to beat again. Her father, John Malkovich, isn’t too keen on this. Eventually, it seems other zombies are edging back towards life, too, but in the meantime there’s some weird comedy and romance to play with. Two trailers for the film have hit today, and through them you can start to get an idea of how the mix all works.

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For more information about a wonderful romantic comedy please visit What Would Meg Do?

Silver Linings Playbook: A Crazy Romantic Comedy Film

 

Deep down I know that "Silver Linings Playbook" isn't going to work for a lot of people because it follows people who have more screws missing than they have in place.

I'm not particularly sane myself, so I found these characters lovable and relatable. But these characters have serious, serious mental issues and display aggressive antisocial behavior that will turn off some viewers.

Screenwriter/director David O. Russell successfully employs the same strategy that worked so well in his 1999 masterpiece "Three Kings:" start fast, stay funny and suck the viewer so far in they won't know what’s about to hit them. "Playbook" is much simpler than "Kings," but is just as effective -- 20 minutes into both movies I was laughing too hard to notice the heartbreaking moments that loomed around the corner.

"Playbook" follows Pat (Bradley Cooper) as he is discharged from a court-mandated eight-month stay at a mental hospital. His mother (Jacki Weaver), a sweet woman who's obviously nervous about his return to society, picks him up from the hospital. And his father (Robert DeNiro) is generally more concerned about the fate of the Philadelphia Eagles than his son’s plight.

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For more information about a wonderful romantic comedy please visit What Would Meg Do? 

Romantic Comedy Dates Back to 1950's

In Mary Moody Northen Theatre’s latest production, anything goes and anyone is welcome at Grace’s Diner, where the bus stops and passengers stay during a March snowstorm outside Kansas City, Mo. “Bus Stop,” written by William Inge, tells the story of a group of stranded strangers who find friendship and love, but more importantly, fresh coffee and cheese-less sandwiches as they wait for the storm to pass and the roads to clear.

The show starts with the wind whistling throughout the house as the air rings with the sound of Grace’s cynical sass and sweet Elma’s naïve declarations as the pair prepare the diner in anticipation of customers seeking shelter from the storm. Equity guest actress Sarah Gay and junior Meredith Stein, Grace and Elma, respectively, complement the roles of the disenchanted and seasoned waitress alongside a wide-eyed and trusting server conceivably well.

The theater-in-the-round provides an intimate experience without a bad seat in the house — so fight the urge to reach out and clean the dirt off brash cowboy Bo Decker’s blue jeans or brush the snow out of wannabee cabaret singer Cherie’s hair. Costume Designer and alumni Austin Rausch dressed the characters to a T, the only complaint being that Dr. Gerald Lyman’s suit lacks the suede elbow patches that adorn every tweed suit ever owned by a male professor. Then again, actor George Stahl’s performance as the charismatic but somewhat perverse drunkard Dr. Lyman is pretty convincing in that it has been a long time since Lyman has seen the likes of a college campus, thereby giving up his rights to elbow patches.

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For more information about a wonderful romantic comedy please visit What Would Meg Do? 

Rome Review: 'Hand In Hand' Is A Lovely Comedy That Would Make You Fall In Love

Whimsical and high-concept, and featuring a standout performance from our new boyfriend Jérémie Elkaïm, who has just won Best Actor at the Rome Film Festival for this role (clearly the jury was crushin' on him too), "Hand in Hand" ("Main dans la Main") is a gentle, quirky take on the mystical and somewhat random power of attraction and love. By contrast with the artifice of the other French rom-com we reviewed in Rome, "Populaire," writer-director (and supporting star and Elkaïm's wife) Valérie Donzelli's lightness of touch evokes more the sensibility of a loved-up Miranda July in its attention to off-kilter but grounded detail. Or maybe it's just that lead actress, well-respected French thesp Valérie Lemercier, also excellent, here reminds us of July. It's the hair. Whatever the case, the film bubbles along nicely, with our two appealing leads bringing nuance to an idea that in the wrong hands could have become cutesy (we'll leave that for the bound-to-happen Reese-Witherspoon-starring U.S. remake), right until even that magic wears off and the film runs out of steam with about 15 unnecessary minutes to go.

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For more information about a wonderful romantic comedy please visit What Would Meg Do?