The first goofy Episode 3 rumor making the rounds (Remember when Christopher Walken, Gabriel Byrne, and Jimmy Smits were all supposed to be in Attack of the Clones? Ok, the last one actually happened.) has Scott Glenn boarding the Death Star for the final installment. I’ll believe it when I see it. In other Ep. 3 news, is this drawing of a staff-wielding warrior Chewbacca what we can expect in 2005? All I gotta say is Lucas will have to knock this movie out of the park to erase the bad taste of the past two prequels and Yoda’s speech last night, which was as stilted and embarrassing as Gollum’s was funny.
Month: June 2003
The Left Strike Back.
The Democratic candidates find out there’s more to the party than the DLC at the Take Back America conference. Good to see an uprising against the Lieberman Republicrats, and that the rest of the Dem field now – thanks in part to Howard Dean – has to take progressive discontent seriously.
No, not yet.
The State gets caught with an extended Strom Thurmond obit on their servers. You gotta wonder how long they’ve a Thurmond obit in the can…I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody wrote one before the days of the web.
More! More!
Like a junkie looking for another fix, Ashcroft takes time away from putting down gay pride events to beg Congress for increased powers in fighting terrorism. If the death penalty doesn’t even work as a deterrent in “normal” crime, why would it stop terrorists?
Freaks of the industry.
Dobby?! Dobby’s a $#%ing $&*@! Maybe it’ll only appeal to fanboys and fangirls, but I thought this pottymouth Gollum bit from the MTV Movie Awards was the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. Sounds like Smeagol’s been reading the talkbacks at AICN.
Summer Molting.
Design’s in flux again. Sorry if you tried to check the site sometime between changes, when it was virtually unreadable.
Lone Star.
Mama, take this badge off of him – He can’t use it anymore. Two New Mexico lawmen aim to find out if Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid or the wrong man in 1881. Does this mean James Coburn should’ve shot Dylan at the end of the movie instead?
The “Browbeaters.”
Is Paul Wolfowitz in a 12-step program? A week after confiding to America about the “bureaucratic” thinking that motivated the WMD casus belli, Wolfowitz opens up to an audience in Singapore, telling them “we had no choice” in our Iraq policy because “the country swims on a sea of oil.” (Via High Industrial.) And now it turns out Cheney and co. were leaning hard on the CIA to come up with the “right” intelligence about Iraq’s WMD capabilities (and an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.) Hmm…looks like it’s getting grim at WMD Search Central. Update: Jake Tapper of Salon points out that Wolfowitz’s alleged Singapore statement is based on a misquote – Wolfowitz was talking about the efficacy of sanctions, not the reasons for war.
The Recycle Bin of History.
Fred Kaplan wonders aloud about the perils of writing history in the e-mail era. I see what he’s getting at, but this argument cuts both ways. If in fact someone is saving administration e-mail correspondence (a big if, I know, but consider folks like Harold Ickes and Sidney Blumenthal in the Clinton White House), then there should be plenty of e-mails of conversations that would have been held on the phone throughout most of the twentieth century. Plus, so much more of government (at the highest levels, at least) is televised now, from subcommittee hearings on C-SPAN2 to Dubya’s 4pm photo-op with the Boy Scouts. Historians of the future should have their hands full.
Simpsons, meet the Watchmen.
One of the many highlights of Finding Nemo over the weekend (exactly the type of smart, fun, and beautiful entertainment the world’s come to expect from Pixar) was this teaser for The Incredibles, the newest project from Pixar and Brad Bird (the mind behind The Iron Giant.) Should be grand.