Natalie Portman is attached to star in Aronofsy's film Black Swan, about an aging ballerina who's locked into a competitive situation with a rival dancer — who may be real, or a supernatural entity, or a figment of the ballerina's imagination. Black Swan has been in development hell at Universal since early 2007, but now that Aronofsky's scored a big hit with the Wrestler and Portman's on board, studio insiders see it going into full swing as soon as this year. (Also, the script got a needed lick of paint from development exec Mark Heyman.) Apparently, it's a "spine-tingler" along the lines of The Others, the Nicole Kidman movie where you don't know what's real.

As for RoboCop, it's not sounding good. The Hollywood Reporter's sources refer to it as not "ready to go," which means it's probably on the back burner for now. Which, as I said, is good news if you hate remakes. Although I have to admit, I'd way rather see Natalie Portman play a one-woman cyborg SWAT team than see her as a neurotic ballerina. [The Hollywood Reporter]

An MGM spokesman told us the project is still on track — though not for a 2010 release, as reports initially suggested. The rep said that the studio had told distributors at an event a couple weeks ago to expect the movie in 2011. He said director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Fountain) and screenwriter David Self (Road to Perdition) were still working on the script, and that no casting had been completed.

The new Dynamite Comics Robocop title announced this week is only the latest of many Robocomics, so Robologists shouldn't pore over its pages expecting details about the plot of Aronofsky's movie, the MGM spokesman said, though he added that he wouldn't be surprised to see another comic tie-in once the movie is released. He didn't have anything else to add about the movie, only that "Darren and David are working on it now, and we look forward to seeing it in 2011." And so do we.

Of course, plenty of original movies do get turned into books - but they're usually rushed novelizations, written in a month by someone who's juggling ten other deadlines and adding speech tags to the movie script. If you're lucky, you get a few extra insights into the characters and one or two scenes that the adapter added, or which were cut from the movie before or after filming. Plus, of course, the movies that get their own book adaptations aren't usually ones which could benefit from a really smart dose of storytelling. Movie adaptations of books, meanwhile, are usually disappointing for a whole different set of reasons.

But every now and then, a movie comes along down the pike that actually cries out for a smart, interesting book that brings out the ideas simmering below the surface. Here are ten movies that I'd love to see a really smart book version of, and the authors who would write them in my fondest dreams.

Twelve Monkeys. Cole (Bruce Willis) travels back in time from a plague-ravaged future to try and discover the source of the virus, but he ends up tangling with his own past in unpredictable ways. I was torn between listing this one and director Terry Gilliam's other dystopian epic, Brazil. But of the two movies, I think I'm more desperate to read a really thoughtful novel of Monkeys, preferably written by someone who watched the film with Gilliam a few times. There's so much confusing stuff in this movie, especially Cole's causal loop - is he creating his own dystopian future, or is he simply trapped in the logic of already-existing events? Did the scientists send Cole back on purpose to make sure their plague-ridden timeline "happens," as some have suggested? (In which case, why would they be worried about that, given that it's already happened?)
Who should write it: Marge Piercy, author of Woman On The Edge Of Time. She knows all about time travel, madness and the long reach of dystopia.

The Fountain. Meredith suggested this one - there's already a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's original screenplay, the one he never got to film. But there's no prose novelization of the actual movie, which I found to be a huge let-down despite its sprawling, ambitious plot. Judging from the results of our recent poll, many of you consider The Fountain an underrated masterpiece. Maybe a book could flesh out some of the confusing stuff about the present-day cancer cure and just what's going on with that weird tree-in-space sequence.
Who should write it: I'm going to go with Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn. He might be able to ground the present day stuff and add some life to those lifeless characters, and when he's channeling Philip K. Dick, he does weird-and-fantastical quite well. Maybe it would all feel epic and personal, the way I think the film was supposed to.

The Brother From Another Planet. John Sayles' story of an escaped slave with weird feet who lands up in present-day New York is one of my favorite films, although I haven't seen it all the way through in a decade. Joe Morton is fantastic as the mute escapee, who has a strangely close relationship with technology.
Who should write it: Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose, has dealt with themes of slavery and alien cultures in a lot of his writing.

Sleeper. Wikipedia claims this film is loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes, but I would say "loosely" is the operative word. And this is such a crazy slapsticky subversive novel, complete with humans impersonating robots, Orgasmotrons, a fake utopia and nose-cloning. And so much more.
Who should write it: Douglas Adams, if he was still alive? Actually, I'm going to go with io9 contributor Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible), just because I think he could nail the neurotic Woody Allen tone, while doing a lot to flesh out the absurdity of this freaky dystopia.

Possible Worlds This little-known film stars Tom McCamus as a man who keeps journeying through different alternate universes and having a relationship with the same woman (Tilda Swinton), which always seems to end badly. And then there's a twist, which I won't reveal here but which we gave away in a found footage.
Who should write it: Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife.

S1m0ne. Andrew Niccol's most disappointing film totally deserves a novel told from the point of view of Al Pacino's character, a third-rate movie director who creates a virtual actress to save his troubled movie - and then has to deal with her becoming a superstar. A novel might be able to make the movie's premise more believable and dispense with some of the VFX problems that dog the movie, and a tight focus on Pacino's POV would allow us to probe the psychology of a man who brings to life an irresistible virtual avatar, in a cross between Pygmalion and Cage Aux Folles.
Who should write it: Amy Thompson, author of Virtual Girl, who manages to make that novel's skeezy programmer who creates a gynoid and then tries to enslave her actually sympathetic.

The Matrix Trilogy. No, not just the first movie. I want to see the whole trilogy as one sprawling, insane novel about cyber-avatars. I want all of the lame discussions about free will in the second movie and all of the lame everything in the third movie to be beaten into submission, and the whole disappointing mess transformed into a seamless whole, the story of humans trapped in a virtual world rising up against their machine overlords, while a virtual man-in-black becomes a megalomaniac.
Who should write it: That's the hard part. There are so many cyberpunk authors I'd like to see try their hand at it. But in the end, I'm thinking Charles Stross.
He does sprawling post-human stories really amazingly well, and might add a whole extra conceptual layer to the Wachowskis' somewhat facile world-building.

Primer. This knotty time-travel movie actually stands on its own remarkably well, but I'd still like to see a smart, thoughtful novel that deals with all the of the intersecting timelines and unraveling protagonists.
Who should write it: David Gerrold, author of The Man Who Folded Himself, still possibly the weirdest time-travel novel of all time.

Slither. You might think this is just another over-the-top body horror movie, about alien parasites who infect a town's residents. But this movie goes so much further, showing how a woman can't escape her abusive husband. The parasite infects her husband first, and then all of the people whom it infects afterwards speak with the husband's voice, so she's constantly trapped. It's up there with Society and Dead/Alive in the disturbing horrific social commentary sweepstakes.
Who should write it: The great d.g.k. goldberg, if she was still alive. Otherwise, I would say Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl In The Ring.

Sunshine. The screenplay is available in book form, but there's no novelization. I loved this film, but many people don't seem to agree, and maybe a really strong novelization could help win over the doubters, especially if it made the slasher-movie third act feel like it grew naturally out of the rest of the story.
Who should write it: I'm thinking maybe Stephen Baxter, who's shown a talent for writing madness as well as planetary disasters and space exploits.

Note: I was going to include Galaxy Quest on this list - but realized it already has a novelization, by Terry Bisson. Who, by amazing coincidence, is probably exactly who I would have chosen to novelize that movie. Has anyone read Bisson's Galaxy Quest novel, and is it as good as it ought to be? It's only one cent on Amazon (plus a few bucks' shipping, of course.) Also, did you know that Christopher "The Prestige" Priest has novelized David Cronenberg's Existenz?

Talking to reporters recently, Aronofsky said that the planned remake of Paul Verhoven's 1989 classic was still in such early stages that it almost wasn't worth talking about:

We have a long way to go... [U]ntil there's a screenplay, there's nothing to really talk about. Until we're going, it just doesn't exist for me. It's just like we're trying to get something good, and we'll see what happens.

When it does get going, however, the director of such movies as Pi and The Fountain plans for the movie to investigate the way in which we're all already cyborgs:

Before you get an MRI, they give you a list of like 38 different things, how you can have metal in your body... From a shutter in your eyelid to a pacemaker, screws and all this stuff you can have in your system. I realized, 'Wow, we are cyborgs.' I mean, everything's not inside us, but the way we're connected to the technology and everything is right there.

Does this mean that we can expect the newest version of Murphy to have to stay away from microwaves? Only time will tell.

The Robocop remake is tentatively scheduled for 2010.

Aronofsky Aims For Hardcore RoboCop [Scifi Wire]

Talking to Empire Magazine, Aronofsky called the new movie

...[A] real reinvention... Me and David Self are working on the screenplay. He's a great, great writer and we're trying to do something new and fresh.

You may recognize Self's name from Road To Perdition - and he's also rumored to be working on two Marvel movies, Ghost Rider 2 and Deathlok - which suggests that he'll have the right kind of comicky take on this particular Judge Dredd rip-off. But don't take Aronofsky's talk of a fresh take and reinventing the movie to be any kind of slam on Paul Verhoven's original movie:

I'm a big fan of the original. It still holds up as an amazing film, and I think it's more just looking at that same type of material in the 21st century and seeing where it leads us.

Such a fan of the original, in fact, that he's already hinting at a Peter Weller cameo. Personally, my fingers are crossed that Nancy Allen will manage to make an appearance.

Darren Aronofsky Talks RoboCop Remake[Empire]

MTV asked, presumably, about the setting of the movie in the hope of discovering just what it means for the new movie to be "not a direct sequel" to the original series. Aronofsky offered the following meaningless explanation:

We’re deep in it, [b]ut there’s not much to say until there is a screenplay... I don’t think it’s set anywhere that’s recognizable.

So, wait. Does that mean that Detroit will be unrecognizable because it's the future, that it'll be in some generic, probably Canadian, city altogether? Or that Aronofsky's just going to film it in such a crappy way that you won't be able to tell where anyone is at any point?

Darren Aronofsky Hints ‘Robocop’ Will Take Place In ‘Unrecognizable’ City [MTV Movies]

Bloody Disgusting uncovered the plot of our Robo hero's latest outing, it's set in “Present day Los Angeles — 20 years after the termination of the RoboCop program. The city decides to reinstate the program.” So will this movie be denying the existence of RoboCop 2 or any of the other robo sequels? What about Murphy? Is he going to come back as the old-timey robot that trains LA's new robo recruits?

And just to throw to add more exciting news to the future RoboCop movie, director Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) is still being tossed around as a potential director for the film, and may be close to signing. Which means it could be an actual think piece... or ponderous and confusing, depending on which of Aronofsky's films it takes after.

[Bloody Disgusting]

D.E. Shaw & Company has just announced the completion of a massively parallel supercomputer nicknamed Anton, which is designed expressly to model biological processes. Specifically, it will carry out fast simulations of protein folding, modeling how protein molecules fold themselves into the unique shapes that allow them to interact with cellular structures or other proteins and keep your body running smoothly. Being able to model protein behavior quickly will help speed up research on medicines that change the way proteins are folded — fixing ones that fold incorrectly and make you sick, for instance. Though Anton hasn't gone for a test drive in a lab yet, it's been written up in scientific journals.

The New York Times' John Markoff writes:

The new supercomputer is distinguished from other molecular dynamics computing tools like I.B.M.’s BlueGene/L supercomputer and the Stanford Folding@home distributed computing project in that the machine is designed to simulate a very narrow set of problems on biological processes that take place over a millisecond or longer. Molecular simulations are now done as a series of tiny intervals that may be as short as a femtosecond, one billionth of one millionth of a second, and may last no longer than a microsecond, or one millionth of a second.

By looking at time scales that last several orders of magnitude longer than today’s simulations, the Anton team is hoping to discover new kinds of biological processes that would not otherwise be observable. “If you can do 1,000 times longer, real proteins come into play,” Mr. Shaw said in a technical lecture in 2006 at Stanford describing his work.

If only the guy from Pi had known he could have turned his work to something awesome like this, he might not have met such a miserable end. Sometimes life is more hopeful than fiction.

Herculean Computer for Molecular Mysteries [New York Times]

Famous names: The first film by Darren Aronofsky, who would go on to heretofore untold levels of squick with his followup, Requiem for a Dream.

Crunchy goodness: 5

Memorable product tie-in: Every techno DJ alive has the soundtrack.

Sights you'll never unsee: Drill plus cranium equals super happy mirror splatter!

Design breakthrough: Many pre-DV indie films were shot in black and white for budgetary reasons, but Pi's gorgeous, high-grain chiaroscuro cinematography is vital to the mood; though it's never mentioned in the dialogue, I've always suspected the character is color-blind, as it feels like we're seeing the world through his eyes.

Official Pi site