Word first came in Sunday afternoon that actress Brittany Murphy was found dead after going into cardiac arrest. TMZ was the first to report that Murphy was delivered, D.O.A. to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California.

Brittany Murphy appeared in several television roles, but she is most remembered for her breakout role as Cher’s nerdy friend Tai in the 1995 film Clueless.  The movie also featured Paul Rudd, Alicia Silverstone, and Donald Faison.

Murphy went on to star in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), Girl, Interrupted (1999), Sidewalks of New York (2001), Riding in Cars With Boys (2001), Spun (2002), 8 Mile (2002), Sin City (2005), and Happy Feet (2006), in addition to other movies and shows.

She co-stars in the upcoming Sylvester Stallone movie The Expendables. She married screenwriter Simon Monjack in 2007. Murphy died of cardiac arrest on Dec 20, 2009 at the age of 32.

The release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has reopened discussions about what makes a good book to film adaptation. The Potter series often divides fans, and the latest chapter is no exception. I’ve heard from a number of fans of the book series who are  disappointed with the current film’s adaptation, while I’ve also talked to fans who are satisfied. Brad Brevet from RopesofSilicon reflected on some of the more negative fan reactions and he asks, “how faithful should film adaptations be?”

Adapting a book into a film is not an easy process. Squeezing a 300-page novel into a 120-minute film is difficult, especially if the book has lots of exposition or other elements that are not easily cinematic. For books that are rich and deeply characterized, like the Potter books, adaptation is almost always going to mean losing some characters or the minute characterizations that many fans hold dear.

That said, making an adaptation that is too close to the original work can often be just as problematic as making an unfaithful adaptation. Brevet mentions this spring’s Watchmen as an example of a film that while remarkably true to its graphic novel counterpart, still didn’t end up endearing itself to even diehard Watchmen fans. I would argue this was because despite getting the character and plot details correct, Watchmen didn’t effectively bring enough of its own cinematic virtues to the project. In contrast, Frank Miller’s Sin City was a tremendous adaptation of various vignettes from the graphic novel series, and it managed to be both accurate and bring in its own voice.

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Yes, you read that right. Directly from the “please don’t ruin my childhood. . . again” department comes word, via MTV Movies Blog, that director Robert Rodriguez will begin filming a live action adaptation of the classic 60’s Hanna-Barbara cartoon The Jetsons sometime next year.

According to Rodriguez, he will be pushing forward on his sequel to 2007’s Grindhouse with Danny Trejo in Machete and he’s also working on the sci-fi thriller Nervrackers for the Weinstein Company set for release next April. No word on where this fits in with Rodriguez’s reboot of the Predator franchise or what this could mean for a sequel to Sin City, but the Texas native says that filming for Jetsons could start as soon as 2010.

The director has already stated that he’s dropped a remake of Barbarella due to the amount of time he’d be away from his family, so doing a remake/reboot of the classic 60’s cartoon family from space may just fill that sci-fi void that the scantily clad vixen could have.

Given Rodriguez’s track record with both kid-friendly adventures (Spy Kids, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl) and adult-friendly horrors (Planet Terror, From Dusk til Dawn), what could this mean for our favorite childhood cartoon? Will his on-again off-again partner and friend Quinten Tarantino come aboard in any way, and will this be under the helm of Rodriguez’s long-term distributors, the Weinsteins? With production starting before 2011, these answers probably aren’t far behind.