Is April Fool’s here a week early? Or are Sean Penn, Jim Carrey, and Benicio Del Toro really hunkering down to play Larry, Curly, and Moe respectively in the Farrelly brothers’ Three Stooges? “The film is not a biopic, but rather a comedy built around the antics of the three characters that Moe Howard, Larry Fine and [Jerome] Howard played in the Columbia Pictures shorts.”
Month: March 2009
Into the Wild.
“I didn’t want to wake you up, but I really want to show you something.” The teaser for Spike Jonze’s long-awaited adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are appears on the Interweb (after debuting on Ellen this morning.) Along with Max Record, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ruffalo, WTWTA includes voice-work by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose, and Chris Cooper.
Let’s Stick Together.
“There didn’t seem to be any general consensus among my listeners. Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn’t particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up.” On the official site, Bob Dylan talks about his new album, Together Through Life, due out April 28.
Scions of Eire.
“Then we raised a glass to JFK, and a dozen more besides.” A very happy St. Patrick’s Day to you and yours. Be sure to wear green and have a Guinness or three, or Leo’s comin’ over.
Game Over, Man! Game Over!
Move over, dogs-playing-poker. A New Zealand ad company promotes the airing of the weaksauce AvP movies on SkyTV with some classic-yet-forgotten Alien v. Predator duels of yore. (See also the tetherball and chess matches — Hopefully table tennis, foosball, and poker will get their day as well.)
And They Have a Plan?
With the final episode airing Friday (I’ll be visiting friends in CA, so probably won’t catch it until next week), the cast and writers of Battlestar Galactica visit the UN to “discuss issues such as human rights, children and armed conflict, and terrorism. Also on the agenda: dialogue among different civilizations and faiths.” Uh…so their advice to leaders would be, what. exactly? Meander about with no plan and little-to-no-purpose, retcon thorny individuals into line with your newest idea whenever necessary, and, when faced with an intractable situation, throw someone in the brig and/or stage either a show trial or a weepy, teeth-gnashing breakdown?
Perhaps I’ve been ruined by meticulously planned out shows like The Wire. Nevertheless, this last half-season of Galactica has been operating at about 3:1 filler-to-good-episode ratio, and that’s being charitable. As I feared, imho, the show’s been going down the FTL tubes ever since the ill-advised Dylan 5 reveal. Ah well…we’ll always have New Caprica.
The Haddocks go Thompson.
In honor of the character’s 80th birthday (or 560th, if we’re talking about Snowy), fans and future trilogy directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson brandish Thompson hats and umbrellas while talking Tintin. Now that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen has come and gone, I suppose it’s Tintin that’s the next “I can’t believe they’re really making a big-budget film version of this” beloved property of my youth. (Which probably means that, sometime around my 40th birthday, David Fincher’s Mr. Men will be hitting the multiplexes as well.)
The Patron Saint of Mediocrity (and the NCAA).
“And now a madness began in me. The madness of a man splitting in half…I began to see a way — a terrible way — I could finally triumph over God!” Well, ok, I’ll settle for winning a few of my pools. Yes, it’s March Madness time once again. I’ll post my bracket here once I’ve consulted the oracles (and the ghost of Leopold) further.
Update: And, after all that, I forgot to post my bracket. It’s here. After the first weekend, I have 12 of the Sweet Sixteen and a possible seven of the Elite Eight. Final Four: UNC over Memphis, with Louisville and Pitt watching.
Dead-End Street.
“Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis.” Following in the footsteps of the Chronicle of Higher Education and various academic blogs, the NYT delves into the horrible job prospects for newly-minted humanities PhDs these days. “‘This is a year of no jobs,’ said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, ‘like planes hovering over La Guardia.’“
Even before the downturn, it was clear to me and my cohort that, even coming out of a prestigious Ivy, our prospects for a remunerative and rewarding academic job in the Age of Adjuncts was rather slim. The historical analogy I liked to use then to describe our situation: It’s 1840 and, after years of apprenticeship, we can all make really nice, quality, hand-crafted shoes. But, you know what? They’ve got factories that make those now, for much, much cheaper.
And now, in this economy? Heh. The TLDR version for all of these links, courtesy of Marge Simpson: “Bart, don’t make fun of grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.“
The Summer Contenders.
“I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life, this day of reckoning.” Some choice offerings from the rest of the Watchmen trailer bin, which are now online: Harry digs deep into the memory hole to Anakin up He-Who Must-Not-Be-Named in the second preview for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (To be honest, I think I might’ve missed the first trailer from last November (at the same link) — that one’s not bad either.) Iowan ne’er-do-well James Tiberius Kirk straightens up and flies right in a preview for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek of epic scope. Hugh Jackman dons the claws once more in another look at Gavin Hood’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. (Meh, bub.) And an animated Ed Asner braves floating houses, boy scouts, and talking dogs in the newest trailer for Pixar’s UP. Pixar will go wrong someday — this doesn’t look to be it.