Monday, June 22, 2009

Best Casting News of the Year

My days as a hack movie news reporter are long past me, but you must be told: Abel Ferrara is making a modern re-imagining of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent in the lead roles. Is Lorne Michaels producing this or something? What's going on?

In other Abel Ferrara news, Werner Herzog is doing a remake (an extremely loose one it would appear) of Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" that looks NUTS.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

I'm in a Slumberous Reverie of Grain

We've been all out of cow milk for the past three days. We've got Rice Dream, but I can only drink it in shots, and my face when it's down is pretty similar to the one I wear after scotch but with more shuddering and less rugged bravado.

Monday, June 1, 2009

The Tonight Show with a Wax Sculpture of Conan O'Brien


I'm looking forward to seeing Conan's first show tonight. There's been some naysaying as far as whether or not he can be as edgy or absurd at 11:35, but I tend to think as long as he's using most of the same bunch of writers and performers who've served him this well this long, the proverbial chuckleboat should be sailing on smooth gigglewaves. Until of course the writers get into their 50s and lose touch with contemporary issues, technology, and the ever-renewing touchstones of youth pop culture. So I figure we've got at least five years until that really kicks in.

That said, the banner ads (click the image for larger picture) that NBC has been using to promote the new Tonight Show are terrifying. Surely an actual photograph of Conan couldn't have been the basis for that illustration. It looks like carefully molded plastic with a few laugh lines at the sides of the eyes to humanize it up. Thoroughly weird-looking.