David Mamet is writing and directing a new movie based on The Diary of Anne Frank—"for Disney, no less," said Katey Rich in Cinema Blend. Sounds like a "joke," right? Unfortunately, "this production is very, very real." Mamet's script will be culled from the 13-year-old Holocaust victim's diary, and Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich's stage adaptation of it.
This match-up seems a bit strange, said Ben Child in the London Guardian, especially considering Mamet's "recent credits as writer and director include the 2008 sporting drama Redbelt, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as an idealistic ju-jitsu instructor." But Mamet's parents were of "Russian-Jewish extraction," so this choice isn't completely out of left field, and he reportedly hopes to "reframe" the story "as a rite-of-passage tale."
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