Movies

Gemma Arterton Teams with Frears for Graphic Novel Adapt

By  · Published on July 17th, 2009

Most of us either met Gemma Arterton in RocknRolla or, most likely, as Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace. Now, she seems to be all over the map – showing up later this year in The Boat That Rocked if it ever actually gets released, and working currently on The Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I suppose she didn’t want to have a lull in her work schedule, so she’s already signed on to reprise her roll in the sequel St. Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold alongside David Tennant.

And now, we have one more to add to that list.

According to Production Weekly, Arterton is signing on to play the titular role for Tamara Drewe, an adaptation of the Posy Simmond’s comic of the same name being directed by Stephen Frears. The comic, just in case you don’t happen to live in the UK where they publish it, is a sort of modern retelling of Thomas Hardy’s immortal novel “Far From the Madding Crowd.” I don’t have to tell our super-literate audience what that books about, I’m sure.

Alright, fine. It’s a book about being a woman’s best friend for a really long time even though she keeps going out with other guys, but in the end, she realizes that she should marry her best friend. So it’s definitely fiction. Anyway, that’s what I got from it. I mean, I’ve read smart books like this one, “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” And, for the most part I understood what they were about.

They were about girls, right?

I have to confess that I’ve never seen panel one of “Tamara Drewe,” so it’s impossible for me to know whether it’s more of a traditional British book or whether the modern take spices things up a bit. Anyone out there that has read it should definitely enlighten me. On the flip side, Stephen Frears seems to be drawn in recent years to a dry style of story-telling. It’s usually good, but his involvement might signal a pretty dry tone for the film.

Still, I always hold out hope that he’ll make something as brilliant as High Fidelity again one of these days.

What do you think? Will you watch Gemma Arterton in anything?

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