Mona Lisa Smile
Release Date:
December 19, 2003
Academy Award-winning actress Julia Roberts has been consistently putting out one box office hit after another. It looks like the holiday 2003 season will keep that steak alive with this release. To ensure the success of this film, they've put other pieces of the puzzle in place.
Director Mike Newell will helm the picture. After a long career directing television series and movies in England, Newell made the jump to the big screen and has had a successful transition. Among the features he has directed are Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pushing Tin and Donnie Brasco.
The writing team of Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner has been tapped to do the screenplay. Included among their past works together are Planet of the Apes (2001), Mercury Rising, Mighty Joe Young (1998) and The Jewel of the Nile.
The film's story has been compared to the award-winning movie Dead Poets Society. Roberts will play Katherine Watson, a free-spirited Berkeley graduate in 1953 who takes a teaching position at Wellesley, a women's college. While there, she teaches the girls in her class that it's okay to aspire to be something other than a housewife. If marrying a man and settling down is actually what a woman wants to do, that's fine. If, however, they want to be a a doctor or a scientist and live out their own dreams, Watson teaches them to understand that they no longer live in a world which would prevent that. The female empowerment message clearly defines this as a chick flick, but it's a likely awards contending chick flick. (Marty Doskins and David Mumpower/BOP)
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