A couple of years back it was announced that Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink had been optioned for the big screen. Although Gladwell is a great storyteller, the fact remains that this is a non-fiction book about how our brains make snap judgments that are sometimes more useful and reliable than our conscious decision-making process. How the heck they can turn this into a movie if it isn’t going to be a documentary?

Since then we’ve had a few other non-narrative books turned into fictional films, most notably He’s Just Not That Into You which was a pretty big hit around Valentine’s Day. It appears that the Blink movie is also finally moving forward again, with Al Pacino signing on to play the lead role. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sounds like the spirit of the book is going to be preserved very well. In the movie, Pacino plays a man who reconnects with his estranged son, an idealistic drifter in his twenties who teaches at a school in downtown New York. When Pacino’s character realizes that his son has an innate ability to “size up people and situations on a dime”, he tries to persuade him to use his skills on Wall Street instead.

LAME. The only thing about this movie that interests me is the fact that Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) is writing and directing. The search is on for a hot young actor to play the son; meanwhile the movie will be looking for distribution at Cannes. If you ask me, they really should have done this as a documentary like the upcoming Freakonomics movie instead.