Books-to-Film Wowing ‘Em in Toronto, Venice

Reports are coming in from the Toronto Film Festival, and Lloyd Grove is one of the many attendees who’s just wild about the film version of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking–which, he reports, proved so popular that Buckley himself couldn’t get into the screening. The Hollywood Reporter is less impressed, calling Jason Reitman’s feature-length debut as a director “amusing and clever but only skin deep.” A literary movie that’s getting even stronger buzz is Shopgirl, Steve Martin’s carefully orchestrated adaptation of his own novella. Co-star Claire Danes reveals there’s a real shopgirl behind the tale, but Martin would clearly rather trade dieting tips with Grove than talk about it.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, over at Venice, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain gets the Gold Lion. The long-anticipated homoerotic cowboy romance, starring Heath Ledger and Gyllenhaal, is based on an Annie Proulx short story published in the New Yorker in 1997.

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