Last Oscar season, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's psychological, Roman Polanski-style sexually charged ballerina thriller Black Swan was challenging David Fincher's facebook origins drama The Social Network for Oscar supremacy and whilst in the end they both lost out to the maudlin monarchy biopic The King's Speech - both were genuinely considered by most critics and bloggers alike as the best two films of the year. Me included by the way, with The Social Network (1) and Black Swan (2) on my personal and never published top ten list. So why not mesh elements of both movies into one individual film? Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman has turned to the web phenomenon (and other social media vices) for his next project, 24 Frames reporting that he and Aronofsky are to team together on the awkwardly named XOXO about;
a twentysomething man who meets a female contemporary on Facebook and begins a digital relationship with her, only to find the object of his affections take the relationship to an obsessed and stalker-y place.
Heyman has wrote the script but this time Aronofsky, who is busy trying to get his religious epic Noah off the ground, is only going to produce this Fatal Attraction meets Catfish tale (sorry for stating the obvious but has an easier two movie comparison ever been made?). XOXO (which I had to ask someone what it means, apparently it's like a kiss in internet speak... did I just make myself look 50?) is currently going around town searching for financing which you wouldn't think would be hard given Black Swan's success but it's probably a little trickier when Aronofsky is only producing and isn't behind the camera. Presumably once financing is secured a director will be sought. As boring as two people sitting around a computer screen sending text speak to each other endlessly for two hours sounds like it could be (i.e. - what we expected The Social Network to be), Heyman has found a unique way of telling the story by constructing the digital interactions in stylized visual sequences" but I wouldn't expect anything quite like The Matrix. Thankfully a straight genre thriller has been written and this is not a cautionary tale about the dangers of the web per say, but more a Hollywood thriller about stalkers. Less preaching more thrilling is probably for the best.