What Men and Boys and Chippendales Dancers Want?

Last week New Line announced a pitch for a new Selena Gomez project called What Boys Want, about a teenage girl who can hear what Mel Gibson is thinking. (SPOILER! It ain't pretty!)

Well, no, actually Mel isn't involved. The movie instead will take the premise of Gibson's 2000 What Women Want, flip it, and set it in high school. Gomez is, of course, part of the latest Disney crop of young stars (as Zac and Miley fly the coop). (And no, I would not know that if I didn't have a teenage niece who grew up glued to the Disney Channel. Oh, you should have seen the hi-larious battles for the remote when I was babysitting and High School Musical and Blade Runner were on at the same time.)

But no sooner had the ink on the Gomez Want news dried then rumors started swirling that Paramount has its own take on the Gibson film (the second-highest grossing rom-com of all time!) in the hopper: According to Pajiba.com's sources, a script is being written for a What Women Want sequel, to star Cameron Diaz and to be call, natch, What Men Want.

So it's going to be a live-action adaptation of every issue of Maxim magazine ever published and every beer or truck commercial ever aired? What do we want? We want to go fishing and drink beer and eat sandwiches all day then come home and grill things and watch movies and sports and play video games on wide-screen HD. (Says the guy who used to read books in the fishing boat and still takes a stack of them with him fishing in Canada--though for the cabin now, not the boat.) Men (and women) out there, what am I forgetting? Or rather, what am I forgetting that we can mention in a family-ish blog?

So we've got the teenage What Boys Want and the grown-up What Men Want. How about complete the trilogy with What Grumpy Old Men Want? (That's easy. To sleep all night without having to get up to pee.)

Finally comes the news that Tony Scott is planning to direct a film about the Chippendales dancers. That's right,  everyone who was clamoring for a male version of Showgirls, your prayers are finally answered. Actually, that may not be the worst comparison. Whereas Showgirls was directed by Paul Verhoven of Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Robocop fame, Scott of course is the director of Top Gun, True Romance, and most recently the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.

And the story Scott wants to tell is less glistening shaved chests and more gritty greed and paranoia. It will be about the creator of the Chippendales strip clubs, Somen "Steve" Banerjee. A Native American night club impresario, Banerjee became filthy rich off the men's revue. But consumed by success and excess, he eventually hired a hit man to kill his choreographer partner and two other former Chippendales dancers he felt were his competition. However the hit man was an FBI informant, the plot failed, and Banerjee ended up hanged to death in jail while awaiting trial in 1994. Wheee! So think more along the lines of Boogie Nights than the bare-chested joy of a Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley dance-off.

Comments

[Phillip layne]

Something about Mary. Minority Roeport. Being John malkovich.

[Phillip layne]

something about mary. minority report. being john makivoch. I want to saw they are all books before they were movies but i am not for sure.