Atole Blog's

After years of play­ing a vam­pire, it’s fit­ting that Robert Pattinson’s next role should be a trader. (It was either that or a squid.)

Accord­ing to the Wrap, Robert Pat­tin­son just stole the lead role in the movie, an adap­ta­tion of 74-year old post­mod­ern author Don Delillo’s book, Cos­mopo­lis, from Colin Farrell.

The details:

Described as a study of cap­i­tal­ism in a slightly futur­is­tic metrop­o­lis, the drama will find Pat­tin­son play­ing Eric Packer, a finan­cial wun­derkind who risks his entire for­tune to bet against the yen on a tumul­tuous trad­ing day. The young man’s deci­sion back­fires and he becomes a pos­si­ble assas­si­na­tion tar­get dur­ing a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan.

If the movie is any­thing like the book the movie’s based on, it should be awe­some. First of all, the lead is a 28-year old bil­lion­aire who enter­tains “highly sexed women” while his wife is merely an extra he sees out­side the limo he’s rid­ing around in all day (one thing we hope they change — please don’t let this be another Phonebooth).
His bet against the rise in the yen appar­ently “par­al­lels his own fall,” as he loses his clients mil­lions of dol­lars, and inter­est­ingly, he enjoys it; “rel­ish­ing being unbur­dened by the loss of so much money.”

This brings us to another rea­son why we like the idea of this movie. The book is writ­ten as a mod­ern re-interpretation of Ulysses, so it could be smart. Also, John Updike wrote a scathing review of the book in the New Yorker, and Wal­ter Kirn (who wrotethe book, Up in the Air) had an equally crit­i­cal take in his New York Times review.

Their crit­i­cism is pri­mar­ily that:
* “barely cor­po­real cere­bral enti­ties occupy the pages” (Kirn)

* “the sounds they pro­duce are so monot­o­nous… that it’s a mys­tery why they’re even both­er­ing” (Kim)

* “DeLillo’s sym­pa­thies are so much with the poor that his rich man seems a mad­man” (Updike)

Good books almost never turn into good movies, so this bodes well. They bet­ter change that last bit though. Oth­er­wise, this’ll just be another Wall Street 2.

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