A while back, the movie, titled "Puckface," sold to New Line and began coming together. Now the picture is getting a boost -- namely, an up-and-comer named Chip Hall, a longtime writer and producer on "King of the Hill" as well as the current Spike TV college-football satire "Blue Mountain State." Hall has been hired to write a new draft, picking it up from Stan Chervin, who also was an early writer on another high-profile sports movie, "Moneyball." Hall is a welcome figure on the New Line/Warner Bros. lot -- welcome the way Mike Bossy will always be welcome on Long Island -- with a gig already booked to write the sports comedy "Liam McBain: International Tennis Star and Proper English Geezer" for Warner Bros. He'll need all the skills he can muster for "Puckface," on which he'll have the unenviable task of making Sean Avery sympathetic, even likable. Avery, as hockey fans and general chroniclers of thuggery know, is renowned a little for his stick-handling and a lot for his goonishness (that's him on the right above, discussing Shakespeare with a player on the Montreal Canadiens). He's one of those NHL-ers who prompted the league to enact new rules after he tried some new moves (like turning his back to the play and waving his stick in the face of opposing goalies). And he was famously ridden out of Dallas and back to the Rangers after trashing other players -- he used a colorful phrase to make his point -- who had dated his ex-girlfriends. But Avery is also a more complicated soul (we're told), a self-styled fashionista and restaurant proprietor who, when he's not inventing new ways to get under the skin of other NHL-ers, is happy to opine on all things fashion. A few years back, he actually spent a summer interning at Vogue, and the movie is a romantic comedy of sorts about his time there. Think "The Devil Wears Prada," only in this case the devil is an actual devil (but not a Devil).
If this doesn't scream date night movie then I don't know what does. It's got the him and her factor written all over it. Think Armageddon. They gave you Ben Affleck and his little love shit going on with animal crackers for the ladies and then threw Bruce Willis blowing up asteroids at you for the fellas. The trick is finding the common denominator where both parties can relate. So what we have here is the shit talking Sean Avery by night and fashion loving guru by day. give him a female counterpart and you got yourself a romantic comedy for the whole family to enjoy. And if you add a couple more scenes I won't mention, it would be porn. The lines between romantic comedy and porn are very thin. You think you're watching Uptown Girl and then bow chicka wow it turns into Downtown Love.
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