Bloggers and magazines and cable news and, well, just about everybody has been trying to make the recession hip, coining phrases like "fashionistas" and talking up habits like gardening and mending clothes as if they're some crazy new trend and not, you know, what our grandparents did to survive. Now Hollywood has gotten on board too, hiring screenwriters Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse to write an untitled family "event movie" based on columns by W. Hodding Carter about teaching his family to live within their means.

Carter, like so many journalists and writers these days, put his life through an experiment for the sake of writing a book about it-- according to THR, he decided that his family could live on $550 a month after mortgage payments, which resulted in turning their front yard into a garden, eating roadkill, harvesting their own maple syrup, and bartering for goods with neighbors. The book, A Year Of Living Within Our Means, is being written as we speak.

Fox is developing the movie as a comedy, and if we've learned anything from their past family-friendly efforts we should expect a lot of on-the-nose jokes, screaming fights resulting in pratfalls, and lessons learned at the end. I imagine Carter's real-life experience of weaning his family off material things was fascinating and profound, but I'm not holding out hope for the movie version to reflect it. Sorry to be a skeptic, but Fox, you've burned us too much in the past.