Entertainment News

Very Entertaining

Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na-Na BATMAN
So, much as The Animatrix was a collection of anime and anime inspired shorts that bridged the gap between The Matrix and its sequels, Warner Brothers has commissioned the same umbrella group to make a Batman anthology set between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. So far details are scant, but the pedigree is impressive.

As are the early PR stills.

I'm interested to see how the Japanese perspective on Batman will pan out. I already read Child of Dreams, the manga-style graphic novel by Kia Asamiya (most famous for doing Nadeisco, though he apparently also worked on the exquisitely old-school Project A-Ko). http://www.amazon.com/Batman-Child-Dreams-Comics-Paperback/dp/156389906X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A-ko

That was interesting, if a bit shallow. The art was very nice, it just needed a bit more oomph in the story department.

So I'll be waiting to see how the Batman-i-matrix works out.

Source: Animation Magazine

Another Memoir Hoax
So yet another highly improbable memoir has been exposed as a fraud, and an overly credulous publishing industry/reading audience as dupes.

Sigh.

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling "memoir" depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.

Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.

Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.

Really.

People honestly believed, without evidence, that a small child was adopted by a pack of wolves, who she then convinced to act as her bodyguards on a 1900 mile trip across WWII Europe.

Seriously. They bought this.

Wow. People are so damn dumb.

Source: CNN.com

Well Now.
So Ellen Page, of Juno fame, has dropped out of Sam Rami's next horror movie project, written in the Army of Darkness era, titled "Drag Me to Hell".

Riiight.

Earlier this month we reported that Ellen Page had joined Sam Raimi's upcoming horror flick Drag Me to Hell. Although that was some of the most exciting casting news we've ever heard, Bloody Disgusting has confirmed that Page has dropped out of the film. The reason they were given is that "she didn't like the latest draft of the script", but as they speculate, that just seems like the public statement given in order to cover up the real story. Either way, this is sad news for Raimi's next flick.

So you have one hit indie film and you burn the biggest grossing director in Hollywood today, while passing up what may well be the next Evil Dead.

This does not seem like great decision-making to me.

Source: First Showing

PS: IMDB reminds me that she was Kitty Pryde in the ungodly terrible X-Men: The Last Stand, where, in a movie filled with cardboard cutout protagonists, she still set new records for bland.

Yeah. Raimi's better off.

Taxi to the Oscars
The Oscar-winning filmmaker who did Taxi to the Darkside has his sights set next on Jack Abrmoff and St. John McCain.

The filmmaker who won an Academy Award Sunday night for best documentary is next turning his attention to the Jack Abramoff scandal, including GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s role investigating the affair.

Alex Gibney, who made last year's "Taxi to the Dark Side," about the lethal interrogation of an Afghan taxicab driver by American military forces, told Politico his Abramoff film would be coming out later this year. Its tentative title: "Casino Jack and the United States of Money."

"The film should give viewers a greater understanding, in a blow-by-blow way, of how the political process works, particularly with regards to lobbying," Gibney says. "This movie will have it all: wild international intrigue, money changing hands in unexpected places, etc. It will be fun. As someone said about an earlier picture I made: 'It's a comedy that turns into farce and ends up in horror.'"

McCain "of course" comes up in the film, adds Gibney, who has "put the word out" to the Arizona senator’s presidential campaign for comment. "He certainly plays a role — he ran the [Abramoff] hearings, so he's unavoidably involved in the story. Then the questioning extends. Upon further investigation, one looks at his motives and things like that. I don't want to say much more than that, but he is a character in the story."

Since it's now been reported that McCain sat on emails implicating Abramoff in bribing the Republican governor of Alabama, it's not hard to see where this could be heading.

Poor St. John McCain.

Source: Politico

In The Basement
So it turns out Iran has one of the best and largest collections of modern art in the world, purchased with oil money by the Shah shortly before the Revolution. Who knew?

It's one of the finest collections of modern art anywhere in the world, but you won't find it in New York or Paris.

Dozens of works by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock -- together valued at roughly $3 billion -- are locked in a basement in Tehran.

Only a handful of westerners have had an up-close look at the underground archives in Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. ABC News was granted exclusive access inside the vault that holds a priceless collection Iranian authorities choose to keep locked away.

What was revealed was astonishing: a series of paintings by Picasso; a wall's worth of pop art by Roy Lichtenstein; Warhol portraits of Jackie Onassis, Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe; a Diego Rivera self portrait; and a painting many consider to be the best Jackson Pollock outside of North America.

...

The collection was supposed to be a gift to the Iranian people. It was assembled by the Shah of Iran and his wife using public funds during the oil boom of the 1970s. Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in 1977, designed to be one of the world's landmark modern art institutions, with an international collection worthy of that ambition.

But just months later came the Islamic Revolution. The Shah was deposed, Ayatollah Khomeinei was became the country's leader, and in the Revolutionary, anti-American climate the museum's western art was banished to the basement.

Ah well. El Presidente will probably blow the collection to smithereens with a bunker-buster bomb anyway.

Source: ABC News

Controversies, Weirdness

Legal Eagles and Rabble-Rousers

Accountability is for Other People
So the biggest Katrina suit against the Army Corps of Engineers, who built the faulty levees and floodwalls, often skimping on parts, using poor materials and defrauding the federal government, has been dismissed despite all the evidence of malfeasance and fraud.

The reason? An old Federal law granting immunity to the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control related damages.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal judge threw out a key class-action lawsuit Wednesday against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over flooding from a levee breach after Hurricane Katrina.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ruled that the Corps should be held immune over the failure of a wall on the 17th Street Canal that caused much of the flooding of New Orleans in August 2005.

The suit led to 350,000 separate claims by businesses, government entities and residents, totaling billions of dollars in damages against the agency.

The fate of many of those claims was pinned to that lawsuit and a similar one filed over flooding from a navigation channel in St. Bernard Parish. It was unclear how many claims could still move forward.

The ruling relies on the Flood Control Act of 1928, which made the federal government immune when flood control projects like levees break.

Throughout the court proceedings, plaintiffs lawyers knew they faced a daunting task because the canals were, over time, used as flood control projects by the Corps.

Yeah, it does seem like the law left him little choice. What a terrible law though! They can do anything they want in the name of flood control, run any scam, employ drunks, steal materials, whatever you imagine, and it's ok, they cannot be held to account. Ever.

God Bless America. Except the poor parts that lie near the rivers.

Source: The Associated Press

Worse than the Suit Thing, Huh?
People thought the judge suing over his lost suit was bad.

HARO, Spain (CNN) -- A Spanish businessman withdrew a controversial lawsuit Wednesday against the family of a teenage boy he struck and killed while driving a luxury car.

Tomas Delgado had filed a suit asking the dead boy's parents to pay him €20,000 ($29,400) on the grounds that the collision that killed their teenage son also damaged his Audi A-8.

News of the case sparked outrage in Spain and generated deep sympathy for the parents of 17-year-old Enaitz Iriondo Trinidad. He was riding his bicycle home to a campground when Delgado's car hit and killed him in August 2004.

First of all, why is this lawsuit being filed now? Secondly, man, that's cold. I don't care if the boy was at fault, violating traffic laws or what not, who knows, it's possible, you don't sue the family; the kid's dead. Deal with your car's body work and move on.

Or you could antagonize people and make things much worse for yourself..

A traffic report said Delgado was traveling 113 km per hour (70 mph) in an area where the speed limit is 90 km (55 mph). An independent expert hired by Trinidad's family said Delgado was going 173 km per hour (107 mph).

Shortly after the collision, a judge dismissed criminal charges against Delgado after concluding that he had committed no criminal infraction, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported.

...

A local prosecutor told reporters that he would take a second look at the case to see whether authorities can file fresh charges against Delgado.

Oops. That defense lawyer's going to cost you a lot more than 30 grand, you lunatic jerkass.

Source: CNN.com

Get Over Yourself, Conservative Catholics
So there are a lot of crazy right-wing Catholic groups that get upset every time there's any even slightly risque or critical or even humorous depiction of their Church in the media, right?

A new gym in Boston thought it'd be funny to run an add featuring nuns at an art class, sketching a nude male model. This is about as tame as I can think of. The right-wingers got really, really upset.

C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts said the ad shows contempt for the Catholic religion.

"It says a great deal about this perverse obsession in both the fashion industry and the advertising industry of exploiting and mocking and sexualizing Catholic religious imagery," Doyle said.

The fitness company responded with a written statement saying, "Our ad campaigns are based on personal motivation and fantasy and throughout history the body has been considered a form of art."

Yeah, where would anyone have gotten the idea that the nude body is utilized in artwork, let alone Catholic art? Heaven forfend.

Morons.

Source: The Boston Channel.com
Wikipedia (Various images)


P.S. These are hardly the first Catholics to get angry about art:

From the Wikipedia article on the Sistine Chapel:

The Ignudi[41] are the 20 athletic, nude males that Michelangelo painted as supporting figures at the four corners of the five smaller narrative scenes of central part of the ceiling. The figures hold or are draped with or lean on a variety of things which include pink ribbons, green bolsters and enormous garlands of acorns. The acorns are the symbol of the family of Michelangelo's patron, Pope Julius, and can also be seen as the finials on his chair in Raphael's portrait.[42]

The Ignudi, although all seated, are less physically constrained than the Ancestors of Christ. While the pairs of the monochrome male and female figures above the spandrels are mirrors of each other, these ignudi are all different. In the earliest paintings, they are paired, their poses being similar but with variation. These variations become greater with each pair until the postures of final four bear no relation to each other whatsoever. Their painting demonstrates, more than any other figures on the ceiling, Michelangelo's mastery of anatomy and foreshortening and his enormous powers of invention.[43]

The meaning of these figures has never been clear. They are certainly in keeping with the Humanist acceptance of the classical Greek view that “the man is the measure of all things”.[44] Their presence and nudity angered a number of critics, including Pope Hadrian VI who described the ceiling as "a stew of naked bodies" and wanted it stripped.[5]

He's a Loser Baby
This Beck really, really is one.

Discussing last night’s GOP debate on his radio show today, Glenn Beck and fill-in host Pat Gray mocked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) by derisively calling him “Juan McCain.”

...

During the segment, Beck also commented on a new campaign by the National Council of La Raza that targets him and Lou Dobbs for their rhetoric, which La Raza believes “demonizes immigrants and Hispanic Americans.” Beck suggested that La Raza’s campaign to get him off the air “before the election” may be “connected” to McCain.

...


UPDATE: On Beck’s CNN Headline News show last night, Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist compared La Raza to the KKK while smearing the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Honestly, is there ANYTHING a conservative can say that will get them off the air, permanently? Anything at all?

Source: Think Progress

Tom's Pictures
My friend Tom likes to send me links to bizarre images from across the web. I thought I should put a couple of them in here for posterity.

Power Rangers
How Not to Use an iPhone