Four years after her breakthrough screenplay for Juno, and two years after her follow-up film Jennifer's Body failed to win too much love, Diablo Cody is finally writing for the screen again this fall, retiming with her Juno director for the dark comedy Young Adult. Now that her TV show The United States of Tara is finally, officially cancelled though, she's got even more time to devote to movies, and has carved out enough time to make her feature directing debut. According to a press release from Mandate Pictures (via Coming Soon), Cody will direct her own original screenplay, Lamb of God, which is indeed as religiously themed as you'd assume from the title.
Here's the actual plot description as provided in the press release:
The comedy follows a young conservative religious woman who loses her faith after a plane crash, decides to go to Las Vegas to live the life of a sinner, and on her journey finds her way back to her faith.
There seem to be about half a dozen hot-button issues in that plot description alone, from all the cinematic possibilities of "the life of a sinner" to the entire notion of a screenwriter who made her career with a story about teen pregnancy tackling all the thorny ideas of conservative religious faith. Maybe Cody knows it's tricky material and thinks she's the only person who can properly handle it. Or, as we all pretty much know by now, maybe she's just a woman who's always up for a challenge.
In addition to this fall's Young Adult, which will have the always-interesting writer out on the publicity circuit for the first time in years, Cody is still working on a movie adaptation of the Sweet Valley High book series, something that I, as a child of the 80s, am dying to see. There's no word on when that film might actually get made, though, and given all the nostalgia wrapped in with the stories about Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, it might been an even trickier project than Lamb of God. Either way, it's been two long years since Jennifer's Body, and I'm at least looking forward to having Cody's distinctive voice back at the movies.
