Well, this is a cataclysm waiting to happen, now isn’t it?  Seems that someone’s decided it might be a good idea to take a news story about some pirates in Somalia and make it a movie.

Meanwhile I’m out here clutching my head because from the feel of it my brain is trying desperately to escape my skull and hop a bus to go somewhere where they’ve never even HEARD of movies.  Maybe some underground bunker somewhere where it can hole up with some Chaucer.

So Billy Ray–and in case you were thinking Cyrus, no, but wouldn’t it have been hilarious if it had been?–is writing up a script based on next April’s memoirs of Richard Phillips, a ship captain rescued from Somalian pirates.  Billy Ray is actually responsible for writing State of Play, which we covered here some months ago, and if the Somalian pirates movie turns out anywhere near as good, we should actually be in for a bit of a treat for a change.

Of course, the down side is that Billy Ray also wrote Flightplan and Suspect Zero, so there’s a better than fair chance this is going to suck.