ONCE Director John Carney to Direct DOGS OF BABEL; Guy Pearce, Ben Foster, Kelly MacDonald to Star in Steve Buscemi's QUEER

Once is one of my all time favorite musical films. It's one that I can watch over and over and still be moved. Carney is making his move stateside now as he directs the dramatic comedy Dogs of Babel. Steve Carell is set to star as a linguistics professor who finds his wife dead in their backyard. Filled with grief and unable to accept the police's ruling that it was an accident, the professor attempts to teach their dog to speak in order to discover the truth. While this is a much different film than Once, Carney showed he's able to blend both the comic and the melancholy to beautiful effect, which leaves me feeling confident that he was chosen to direct this film. After the jump, find out what's going on with Steve Buscemi's adaptation of Queer.



Steve Buscemi is a name I'll always follow. Anything he acts in, I'll attempt to see it. But with him directing a movie, well this is something I'm excited for. Buscemi will be adapting the William Burroughs novel Queer, which was written in 1952, after Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife. The story, which mirrors the emotional and psychological state of Burroughs at the time, centers on an american named William Lee living in Mexico City, weighed down by drugs, guilt, and lust. According to Vulture, Buscemi was able to get Guy Pearce, Ben Foster, and Boardwalk Empire co-star Kelly MacDonald to star in the film. As far as the script goes, director Oren Moverman (Rampart, The Messenger), has had the script written for 10 years, and says that the film is planning to shoot during Buscemi's net hiatus from Boardwalk Empire.

Here's the synopsis for Queer:

In an introduction, Burroughs observes that he wrote this heretofore unpublished picaresque novel in 1951, well before Naked Lunch established his reputation. He reveals that the book had its genesis in a terrible event: his accidental shooting to death of his wife, Joan, a tragedy that released the black wellsprings of his talent. The narrative recounts the hallucinatory life of William Lee, an American in Mexico City in the 1940s and his journey to Ecuador with his reluctant lover, Eugene Allerton, in search of the drug Yage. Lee is Burroughs after the killing, weighed down by guilt, drugs, lust and despair; seeking lethe. Admirerers will find an early exposition of Burroughs’s later themes here, as well as a strain of gallows humor. The work is almost cinematic as it unfolds; the author is not yet experimenting with the meaninglessness of language, and, indeed it is thin in both thought and expression.