Jonathan Demme to Bring Stephen King's '11/22/63' to The Big Screen

Many of Stephen King's novels have made the big screen jump.  Yesterday Warner Bros. and director David Yates were negotiating a deal for The Stand movies.  Now director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) plans to write, direct and produce the movie adaptation of King's upcoming JFK assassination centered sci-fi novel "11/22/63", Variety reported earlier.

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Movie Review - 'Rachel Getting Married'

Rachel Getting Married Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Debra Winger Directed by Jonathan Demme Rated R

In Rachel Getting Married, Anne Hathaway shows a lot of sides we've never seen her portray. I'll stop short of saying it's a command performance, but it's clearly the best acting she's ever done. There is something fractured in her portrayal of Kym that I highly suspect does not exist in the real Anne Hathaway.Kym is an addict. I have no idea how old she is in the movie, probably close to the actress' real age of 25, but she has been on the wrong side of drugs and alcohol since her early teens. We know this because most of the film's best and most devastating scenes deal with a family tragedy that occurred when Kym was a 16-year-old junkie.But it's supposed to be a positive weekend; after all, her sister Rachel is, as the title suggests, getting married. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is the good daughter. She's a year-and-a-half from her Ph.D. in psychology, she's marrying a wonderful man, and she's moving to Hawaii. Kym loves her sister but is a disappointment and Rachel loves her sister but is disappointed. So is their mother (Debra Winger), who is one of those movie characters that can say all you need to know about her just by making her first entrance.Director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) presents this film like a homemade wedding video, the sort of thing somebody pops into the VCR four years later, only to have the reality of the moment rain on their more positive memories. And Demme has made a lot of artistic decisions here you might not expect: Rather than explore the more dramatic elements in every scene and explode them onto everyone attending the large wedding, we see 15 to 20 minutes of a rehearsal dinner, with characters we never hear from before or again praising the couple. We hear the wedding band tuning up and going over their material for the following day. We become guests of the wedding ourselves rather than a movie audience.That Hathaway gives us a performance of this caliber is not a tremendous surprise, although her character is. There is one blistering moment between her and Debra Winger that might be seen over and over at awards shows this winter. I also very much enjoyed DeWitt's portrayal of Rachel, and was glad to see that she wasn't reduced to "the sister" here.In his review, Roger Ebert says he believes the film's real subject is the wedding and not how Kym does or does not come to grips with her many, many personal demons. He might be on to something. I viewed it the other way, that what makes this story worth telling isn't the wedding but Kym's often clumsy baby steps towards recovery. I think I would've enjoyed the film more watching it his way, but I think I learned more about the characters - and Anne Hathaway - watching it my way.

Scorsese Out, Jonathan Demme in as Director of Marley Documentary

Martin Scorsese has had to move out of the director's chair on the upcoming family-authorized Bob Marley documentary, and he's handing the baton to another Oscar-winning director who has experience working in non-fiction film. Jonathan Demme, who has in the past couple of years directed documentaries about Jimmy Carter and Neil Young, will take over for Scorsese, according to Variety. Marty drops out for scheduling reasons, and despite the fact that he made the quintessential concert film (The Last Waltz), this move does not indicate a serious drop-off even though it's easy to see why teaming Marley's legend with a director of Scorsese's talents would be exciting. Demme's rock n' roll history goes back nearly as far as Scorsese's ,however; he helmed Stop Making Sense, a very good concert flick featuring Talking Heads, as well as the Robyn Hitchcock performance movie, Storefront Hitchcock, plus a smattering of music videos along the way. Said Demme in a statement, "I am thrilled and humbled by this extraordinary opportunity to participate in fashioning a motion picture that can serve as a worthy vessel for the spiritual and musical brilliance of Bob Marley." The release of the film is set to align with what would have been Marley's 65th birthday, February 6, 2010.