Savage Popcorn

First, check out this rather strange Inochi video.

Then go and read James Gunn’s Dead Squirrel Story.

The Mark Kermode video blog. How very Kermodian.

Twitch has been following the career of Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo for… well, for a very long time. Most recently they have been getting excited about the prospect of an English-language remake if Vigalondo’s 2007 SF film, Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes).

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences

Suddenly things have become very interesting indeed with the news that David Cronenberg is in the running to direct the remake. Nothing is anywhere near being signed yet, but a Cronenbergian take of time travel disasters would be spectacular.

In the meantime, check out Vigalondo’s Oscar nominated short 7:35 In The Morning.

Towel Day happens every year on May 25th to celebrate the humour and insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

It’s a tough universe out there. Make sure you know where your towel is.

Orson Scott Card has published a blistering article in the Rhino Times (via) which takes apart JK Rowling’s legal claims against Steven Vander Ark and the Harry Potter Lexicon.

Card points out that authors use each others ideas all the time and, while the Lexicon may not be scholarly, it certainly falls within the realm of scholarly comment. He also hits the nail on the head in pointing out that Rowling has let herself be talked into being outraged over a perfectly normal publishing activity, one that she had actually made use of herself during its web incarnation and now.

Her case will probably fail – it certainly deserves to – and once the dust has settled Rowling is likely to discover that she has irretrievably damaged both her reputation and her career. And all for the sake of some small book that wouldn’t have had even the most minor impact on her income.

Update

JK Rowling could learn something about artistic professionalism from Sylvester Stallone who said (via) of Son of Rambow: “The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators.”

As has been widely reported, Paul Verhoeven is set to publish a biography of Jesus in September that claims that Christ was probably fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary during an uprising in Galilee. Verhoeven also claims that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot.

According to The Hollywood Reporter (via) the book – which was co-written by his biographer, Rob van Scheers - is the result of more than 20 years of research.

Verhoeven, who turns 70 in July, has had a lifelong ambition to make a film about Jesus, based on scientific research. Verhoeven decided to write the book to raise interest in the project. His publisher is in negotiations for an English-language translation.

Predictably enough, the instantly outraged are getting their complaints in already. Bill Donohue of the US Catholic League complained to Fox News (via) that the book is “with idle speculation grounded in absolutely nothing.”

Sounds like a religion, then. And on the subject of religion, here’s Pat Condell.

For an alternative take on the Jesus myth, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you check out The God Who Wasn’t There.

Joss Whedon is one of the better writers working today and I’m more than happy to admit that, when I heard that the creator of Buffy and Firefly had signed up to write Dollhouse – a science fiction series that will star Eliza Dushku - I was more than a little enthused.

Not as enthused, however, as the people behind Dollverse. This – as you may have guessed – is a fan site for Dollhouse, and there is nothing wrong with that. What I do find a bit strange is that this is a fan site for a TV series which not only hasn’t been aired yet, but one which hasn’t even started shooting.

A tad premature, perhaps?

Last week I mentioned that someone had started a petition calling on Uwe Boll to stop making films. Now a petition has been started in support of the German director.

[O]utrageously bad adaptation is always better than mediocre adaptation, and in this sense Uwe have never failed us.

Long Live Uwe Boll!

Uwe Boll, the director of such cinematic classics as Seed, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and the deliberate shock-fest that was Postal, is a very easy character to mock. And I have to admit to being guilty of doing this myself on occasion.

Boll may not be the best director to come from Wermelskirchen but he knows it – and this is what makes his antics so much fun. This wasn’t always the case, of course, and there was a time when he really did seem to think that he was doing something other than making incompetent adaptations of unloved video games. But, in recent years he has not only resigned himself to his niche, but embraced it – going so far as to challenge his critics to face him in the boxing ring.

As such, it should come as no surprise that when told by FEARnet that 18,000 people have signed a petition calling on him to stop making films he immediately made himself a hostage to fortune by demanding 1 million signatures.

But what I don’t understand is why so many people want him to stop making films. Yes, his films are rubbish but so were Ed Wood’s. William Castle’s films were hardly the height of artistic achievement, yet we still look back at them with fondness because Castle was such a showman. Boll is a showman in exactly the same mould and even if you don’t watch his films – and I do often avoid them – he’s fun to read about and brings some much need colour to a film industry that can often be mind numbingly bland.

No-one is making any of these 18,000 people actually see any of his films so what does it matter to any of them if he keeps on going apart from the often very funny press coverage that he generates?

We need more of Uwe Boll, not less.

The full interview is worth reading, if only to find out how he manages to reconcile his support for PETA with using a kitty as a silencer.

Charlton Heston died on Saturday, aged 84. The BBC has a good Obituary.

Heston once said of himself, “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses in my career. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”

But, while his screen giants gave him the stature to champion his causes, Charlton Heston, along with many critics, felt his best film performance was as the shy, awkward ranch hand in Will Penny.

And while Charlton Heston will always be identified with heroes who lived before the birth of his country, it was perhaps the American pioneer who was closest to his heart.