Natalie Portman could star in noirish cheerleading "Dare Me" film

Natalie Portman is being pursued by Fox 2000 to star in the film adaptation of Megan Abbott‘s novel Dare Me, a story involving high school cheerleaders, suicide, mystery, and presumably lots of drama. The film will center around two high school seniors, Beth Cassidy and Addy Hanlon, who have a Heather Chandler/ Veronica Sawyer type relationship, and how their world changes for the more mysterious once a new, young cheerleading coach enters the mix.

Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal, friends and co-stars in "Brothers" (2009)

The idea of a story that mixes elements of Heathers and Fight Club is definitely appealing, and I can see how the two could be combined into a twisted story with a strong but sadistic leader in a way that has the potential to be very interesting on the big screen.

Hopefully, if Portman does agree to be in the film, she brings some dark energy with her from roles like Black Swan. We may even get a successor to Heathers and Mean Girls if we’re lucky. Source: www.themarysue.com

Kirsten Dunst as cheerleading team captain Torrance Shipman in "Bring It On" (2000) directed by Peyton Reed

“What's exciting about Dare Me is how it makes that traditionally masculine genre [noir] feel distinctly female. It feels groundbreaking when Abbott takes noir conventions — loss of innocence, paranoia, the manipulative sexuality of newly independent women — and suggests that they're rooted in high school, deep in the hearts of all-American girls.” — Entertainment Weekly


Extract from "Dare Me" (2012) by Megan E. Abbott: "After a game, it takes a half hour under the shower head to get all the hairspray out. To peel off all the sequins. To dig out that last bobby pin nestled deep in your hair. Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.

After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it's just you there, and you look like no one you've ever seen before. You don't look like anybody at all.

"There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls." Coach said that once, one fall afternoon long ago, sharp leaves whorling at our feet. But she said it not like someone's mom or a teacher or the principal or worst of all like a guidance counselor. She said it like she knew, and understood.

All those misty images of girls frolicking in locker rooms, pom-poms sprawling over bare bud breasts. All those endless fantasies and dirty boy-dreams, they're all true, in a way.

Mostly, it's hard, it's sweaty, it's the roughness of bruised and dented girl bodies, feet sore from floor pounding, elbows skinned red. But it is also a beautiful, beautiful thing, all of us in that close, wet space, safer than in all the world. The more I did it—the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collar bone, neck held high.

It was something. Don't say it wasn't. And Coach gave it all to us. We never had it before her. So can you blame me for wanting to keep it? To fight for it, to the end?

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I'd only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.

There I am, Addy Hanlon, sixteen years old, hair like a long taffy pull and skin tight as a rubber band. I am on the gym floor, my girl Beth beside me, our cherried smiles and spray-tanned legs, ponytails bobbing in sync. Look at how my eyes shutter open and close, like everything is just too much to take in.

I was never one of those mask-faced teenagers, gum lodged in mouth corner, eyes rolling and long sighs. I was never that girl at all. But I knew those girls. And, when she came, I watched all their masks peel away. We're all the same under our skin, aren't we? We're all wanting things we don't understand. Things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions on our hearts." Source: www.meganabbott.com