A very busy day and technical problems conspired to keep me from posting last night, so I’m back with what I hope will be the Reader’s Digest condensed version of one of my more typical Friday news dumps…okay, maybe not so much.
* Taylor Lautner, who is apparently playing second fiddle these days to his own abdominal muscles, is nevertheless being thought of as the next big action star and he’ll start out in a video-game adaptation. I’m so excited, my mind is already wandering.
* The popular comic heavy-metal documentary, “Anvil!,” has picked up an award.
* Believe it or not, I once tried to write a screenplay set in Las Vegas using Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, a film with a cast of outstanding indie stalwarts led by Steve Buscemi and Sarah Silverman, is just taking Dante’s Inferno (the first third of the long work) to Vegas. Better to keep things simple, though I’m totally up-in-the-air about what I think of JoBlo’s trailer.
* I’m not a particular fan of Roger Friedman‘s reporting, and I think it’s a bit less than intelligent to try to make a scandal of a “Precious” being left out of the National Board of Review’s top 10 without some kind of actual evidence or even an indication. As our own Jason Zingale shows, not everyone loves or even likes the movie. Mileage will always vary. On the other hand, any look into the somewhat shadowy organization’s membership is always of interest. The only member I ever met or even heard about before recently, was this man.
* Roman Polanski is still seriously incarcerated, but in a house now. I’m starting to not care at all. I just want to finally see “Cul-de-Sac.”
* What suggestion among Hollywood movement conservatives is so dumb that not even the mega-moron-friendly Big Hollywood is carrying a defense of it, more than two days after it first came up? As reported by a resident climate skeptic at the L.A. Times, Roger L. Simon of Pajamas Media wants to take the Oscar away from “An Inconvenient Truth” and his buddy, the actually not-a-complete-douche conservative writer-director Lionel Chetwynd, wants a truth (but not a reconciliation) commission. This is, of course, because of the vastly overblown so-called “climategate” controversy. Of course, not a single film has ever been de-Oscared and both Simon and Chetwynd know that, but it’s something to talk about for ten minutes.
The main reason I actually kind of like Chetwynd is he made a really good, though perhaps not indisputable, documentary about the making of “High Noon” and the blacklisting of its writer, Carl Foreman. He is one conservative who is sometimes willing to depart from right orthodoxy, just apparently not on the issue of climate change, where we’re supposed to believe that a few scientific outliers and a bunch of people whose only qualification is being rightwing over the vast length and breadth of the scientific community. Most laughable of all is the assertion that money is a motivation for those sounding the alarm on climate change. Yes, we all know having a successful documentary and maybe selling some books is far more lucrative than, say, running the oil and gas industry. Yes, if you want the really big dollars, join Greenpeace, young person!
Anyhow, as the sensible person in this BH-pimped video points out, who are you going to believe, a bunch of movement conservatives, or literal rocket scientists?
* Speaking of wacky politics, yesterday was the great but often maddening filmic genius Jean-Luc Godard’s 78th birthday. I do love this quote which certainly seems to have been a watchword for a certain inglourious younger filmmaker:
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.
