While it might normally seem appropriate to scoff at a multi-hyphenate powerhouse like J.J. Abrams and a name brand director like Ron Howard taking on a new adaptation of a foreign TV movie that’s nearly a decade old, producer Abrams and now-attached-director Howard have certainly picked a potentially compelling project to team up on. Vulture reports that Howard is now set to helm a remake of Israeli TV movie Kol Ma She’Yesh Li, to be titled All I’ve Got (per its English translation) that Abrams is producing through his Bad Robot shingle.
The original film was written and directed by Margalit Keren. If you don’t know who Margalit Keren is, that’s fine, but most other outlets seem intent to report that she also wrote “numerous episodes” of the Israeli show Be’Tipul, which Showtime ultimately adapted into its In Treatment. It’s okay if that bit of trivia doesn’t help you get a grasp on Keren and her work, because it hasn’t done much for us either.
Lucky for all of us, the film sounds compelling!
As Vulture tells it, the film sounds like “equal parts The Notebook and…Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life,” and we’d possibly throw in a smidge of Chances Are in there just for fun (and for the chance to talk about Chances Are). The project centers on a young couple who are deeply in love, but who are ripped apart at the hands (wheels?) of a “freak car accident” that kills the male half of the pair. The woman eventually moves on, gets married to another man, and has three kids with him – but when she dies fifty years later, she ends up in an afterlife that comes with some insane choices. She can wait around (in Heaven? Purgatory? God’s waiting room?) for her second husband to die and spend the rest of her (after)life with him or she can return to life with her boyfriend before the accident (a life where her boyfriend doesn’t die, or this is one hell of a dumb premise), a life that includes never marrying her current husband or having her three kids. Rough.
While there’s no word yet on who will script the film, our pals over at The Playlist throw out a wild and hopeful possibility – that Sarah Polley, who had been rumored to have been “courted to pen an unspecified remake at Bad Robot” could take on the project. As they rightly assert, Polley sounds like a perfect match for the film, so here’s hoping that piece of speculation comes to fruition.