Taylor Lautner’s Teen Abs Inevitably Meet Gus Van Sant

Taylor Lautner is, at this point in his life, the very definition of a Wooden Actor, but we caution those who want to define him too strictly. Not because we've seen flickers of artistic madness behind his eyes -- we most certainly have not -- but because he is only 19 years old, for crying out loud. At 19 we couldn't use a can opener. As we cautioned in our review of "Abduction," right now he's a commodity being "advised" by those who might not necessarily have his best interests in mind. Let's cut him some slack. He's 19.

Following the collapse of "Abduction," Lautner has decided to go in a new direction, and apparently he's about to announce this week that he'll star in a "Gus Van Sant indie film based on a New Yorker story." That is an amusingly vague description, to the point that it almost sounds satiric; if you were an agent trying to come up with a caricature of a "career shift" for Lautner, you might say, "Hey, get me an indie movie, with, like, Gus Van Sant or somebody. And base it on a fancy story in a smart-guy magazine."

The "Twilight" boys, with their "Twilight" days in their, er, twilight, are swimming in deeper waters than one might necessarily find them prepared; Robert Pattinson just finished filming David Cronenberg's adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel "Cosmopolis," a sentence that boggles our mind just to type it. Lautner clearly has taken a cue from that and from the failure of "Abduction." The Hollywood Reporter story says Lautner "is determined to work only with top directors and writers from now on as he strives to define himself as an actor," and that has to just make John Singleton, Oscar-nominated director of "Abduction," just feel fantastic.

By the way, a theory: Gus Van Sant himself doesn't know about any of this yet.

Taylor Lautner to Star in Gus Van Sant Indie Film [The Hollywood Reporter]
Review: "Abduction" [The Projector]