Image Credit: Jordan Strauss/WireImage; Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage
• Drew Barrymore is set to re-team with Adam Sandler for a new comedy about Jim and Lauren, who go on a blind date and then somehow get stuck at a resort with children from previous marriages. The two starred together in 1998′s delightful Wedding Singer and 2004′s could-have-been-worse 50 First Dates. Despite Sandler’s recent slate of films, Barrymore does have a solid track record of bringing some heart to his comedies, so we’ll remain cautiously optimistic about the still-untitled project. Frequent Sandler collaborator Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer) will direct. [Variety]
• Lynne Ramsay’s Jane Got a Gun had some major casting shifts Tuesday. The highly anticipated Western stars Natalie Portman as Jane Hammond, who has no choice but to ask an ex-lover to help defend her farm from the gang out to kill her husband. Originally, Michael Fassbender was set to play Hammond’s ex, with Joel Edgerton as the villain. The latest news is that Fassbender has left the project, Edgerton will now play the ex-lover, and Jude Law (who starred with Portman in Closer) has stepped into the villain role. The X-Men: Days of Future Past shooting schedule is reportedly why Fassbender had to exit the project, but if you were really hoping to seeing him and Portman share the screen, you still have that Terrence Malick project to look forward to…assuming neither of them end up on the cutting room floor. [THR]
Roller derby chick flicks aren’t novel. I have fond memories from the ’70s of catching endless TV replays of The Kansas City Bomber, with its vaguely kinky girl-on-girl aggression (it starred Raquel Welch, who wasn’t quite an actress but knew how to get mad). So I was primed to see Whip It, the first movie directed by Drew Barrymore, with Ellen Page as a 17-year-old small-town Texas high school student (Page, with her elfin girlishness, will probably be playing 17-year-olds when she’s 37), who lies about her age in order to join the Hurl Scouts, a roller derby team based in Austin. Barrymore is such a nice, sweet person that you may wonder how she could possibly have directed a movie about demon women on wheels whose primary athletic activity consists of bashing each other’s bodies.
Here’s how. Whip It is a nice, sweet roller derby movie. There’s no edge to it, and not much originality — it’s like A League of Their Own with tattoos and knocked heads. Page plays Bliss Cavender, a milder, softer version of one of her alienated outsiders, who auditions for the Hurl Scouts in order to feel, you know, empowered. But the women she’s skating with — they have names like Bloody Holly and Eva Destruction; they’re played by (among others) Zoë Bell, Kristen Wiig, and Barrymore herelf — are beer-spitting bruisers in Dee Snider makeup who get off on bringing the pain. Ellen Page looks as if she’d be crushed, if not eaten, by these people. On a fundamental physical level, I never bought that she could survive for a minute inside their sadomasochistic sisterhood. 
