I don’t know what to say about this remake of a very good, very influential movie, other than to say you could see it coming with blinders on and it looks like utter crap.

Okay, okay. The movie itself doesn’t look bad, but that trailer. My god. I’m no rocket scientist but what is up with the Limp Bizkit score and the movie’s tagline: “Titans Will Clash”? The movie is called Clash of the Titans and the best the marketing department could come up with as a slogan/tagline is titans will clash. Jesus H. Christ someone should be fed to the guillotine.

Also? Is Sam Worthington the real deal or is he just the latest in a string of Hollywood male leads they are really trying to jam down my throat. It was hard to tell with the latest Terminator, but we’ll get a really good look with Avatar and now this. Still, if anyone has seen Somersault then you know the guy is capable of delivering a nuanced and subtle acting performance.

“I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person,” he says.  “I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.”

The entire interview is filled with fantastic chestnuts ready to be opened.

Huh, well I’ll be damned.  “In 1999, writer Orhan Pamuk bought a three story building in Istanbul to interact as a museum with his new novel, “Museum of Innocence,” a first of its kind of this application.  He hired an architect, Ihsan Bilgin, before he started the novel to transform the building into a museum where the novel and the museum criss cross each other in a love story between Kemal and Fusun, the main characters. In an autobiographical story, Kemal obsessively collects every object Fusun touches, in remembrance of their complex history into the Museum he builts… After nine years, both Book (Turkish and German print at this time) and the Museum are available.” 

Basically, the guy wrote a fictional book about a musuem that collects objects representing a love story and then went out and physically created the musuem in real life.  I somehow love this idea as a method of storytelling. 

As the author himself has said, “The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.” [via]

In that case, perhaps Gladwell’s intellectual compromises are neither commercial nor unintentional but rather a necessary outgrowth of his higher calling: to explore the secret workings of the world and impart the resulting data to its self-appointed stewards, the titans of industry. This conclusion, if true, may resolve many of the most puzzling incongruities riddling Gladwell’s articles: his continued defense of the pharmaceutical industry even as he advocates for single-payer healthcare; his refusal to indict the financial sector’s rigged “star system” as the engine of corruption that it is; the meticulous bleaching of his own prose so that he’s whitewashed out any real context, any framework in which wars and economic collapses can actually be understood as wars and economic collapses rather than simulations or malfunctions; his near total avoidance of academic thought that does not base its findings on things observed in labs (with the exception of Carl Jung, whose legacy he reduces to the popularization of personality tests); his coyness about politics; and most memorably, his irritating, unrelenting readability.

It’s a long and thorough piece that is certainly worth reading if you’ve ever given 15-minutes of your lifetime drunkenly debating the merits of Gladwell just before closing time at a seedy bar.

Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

What’s better than one Slave Leia?  How about two catching some rays.  Kottke came across this photo of Carrie Fisher and her stunt double napping during the Tatooine shoot in Return of the Jedi. Enjoy!  But just know that I’m going to need a moment or two to catch my breath.  [via]

It seems like an excellent premise to be reimagined with better effects and acting and more weighty themes to explore.  Why then, did I feel ho-hum about the show after last night’s premiere?

You can read plenty of recaps elsewhere, but suffice it to say there’s a lot going on.  The FX look up to snuff, the acting is all pretty darn good (how could it not be with Elizabeth Mitchell, Alan Tudyk, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Scott Wolff, and Monica Baccarin) for a network television show and the themes are not disimilar from the recent Battlestar Galactica remake (religion, terrorism, identity, etc.). 

There were huge problems with the pilot episodes’s story arc: 1) the humans just accept the aliens with open arms, 2) the exposition/backstory is clumsily handled, 3) two of the main characters easily figure out that the lizard aliens are up to no good, 4) it’s too clean and polished.

Still, none of those complaints are what I’m having difficulty wrapping my brain around this morning.  I’ve never watched a show so anti-progressive as I did the one last night. 

And I’m not alone.  Both Time’s excellent James Poniewozik and Chicago Tribune reviewer Glenn Garvin made note of this: a telegenic messiah from a foreign and alien place comes to the United States with the promise of hope and change offers our citizens science, technology and — gasp! – universal health care. 

Make no mistake, the Obama parallel/allegory here is downright unnerving.  It’s so blatent I really thought some combination of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were show runners. 

Chew on this basic plot:  charismatic, attractive newcomers win the adulation of America’s youth with the promise of hope & change; they manipulate the braindead media and promise universal healthcare, but a group of real Americans are saavy to their evil (fascist?) hidden identity/agenda and will work to prevent the destruction of humanity. 

It would have been refreshing, or still can be, if the lizard aliens turn out to be the saviors of the human race.  But alas, I don’t think that will be the case.  And yet, and yet, I’m still going to tune in because there’s enough decent story threads that the show has my interest.

I’ve been wanting to participate for a few years now, but just haven’t made the effort.  It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this year either, even though it’s not too late to sign up. 

“Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap,” the website warns. “And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. … To build without tearing down.”

For most people, the hardest thing is just having the gumption to plow ahead without worrying about the quality.  It’s just about getting that first draft done.  Afterall, all great writing happens during re-writing.

There are parties afterwards and it always seems like there’s a great community of participants.  I’m thinking next year my first novel will make an excellent birthday present to myself.  It sounds daunting, writing a novel in one month’s time, but if you pace yourself 50,000 words is only about 125-150 pages.  Five pages a day — no problemo!  Right? Right?

Here’s where to find print versions of the book for sale and an electronic version can be downloaded for free under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

I loved his previous novel, Little Brother, which was my first exposure to his fiction work.  Can’t wait to print off a copy of the PDF to read!

I’m stupified as to how John Vanderslice and The Mountain Goats (John Darnielle) released a seven-song EP with a horror/sci-fi bent to it (the central thrust of the album concern organ harvesting colonies on the moon) and I just found out about it today.  Turns out it was a tour-only affair on vinyl and is no longer available, though with half an effort you can surely find it.

Cartoonist Jim Benton imagines what sort of children’s book Ted Geisel might write if he were alive today. [via]

Oh my god, so adorbz!  “Greatest cartoon ever? Greatest cartoon ever. I’m not kidding, if this was on TV, I would watch it every day until I began to gibber insanely… at its cuteness, of course.”

See also: io9 took the time to put together an introductory primer to H.P. Lovecraft — the man responsible for the tentacled Cthulhu creation.  He is considered, perhaps, the master of sci-fi-horror literature.

This is a much better trailer, at least now I get the gist of the story and it’s not so much “oh look at me and my fancy CGI” which was all the last trailer wanted to do.  I might be sold with this one — even if Cameron did plagiarize his story from an old pulp novel.

Not really much to go on here, but Elizabeth Mitchell was great on Lost. This premieres next Tuesday, so you won’t have to wait long to watch the entire episode.  To be honest, not much has grabbed me this television season, so I’m hoping V becomes that show.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by this magazine, Girls and Corpses, that is the amalgamation of sexy girls and dead bodies, because it acts no differently than Equire or whatever gentleman’s magazine you prefer to read.  If I were still nine years old, this magazine would have been my sweet spot.

You best damn well better believe I’ve got a cornucopia of mutant fucking squash on my table.  I’d throw up some corn stalks and scarecrows if I lived in a house, but something tells me my condo association would throw me on the curb if I turned my hallway into an apple orchard. 

But honestly?  Colin Nissan’s piece is the funniest thing I’ve read in two weeks.

Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers.  The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.

According to a press release:

The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country.  There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design.  Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta.  The new site will have:

• Daily featured clips
• The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
• The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
• The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
• The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
• A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
• A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
• New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!

It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.

The company said Google Editions marks its first effort to earn revenue from its ambitious Google Books scanning project, which attempts to make millions of printed books available online. Although the scanning program has faced complaints from authors and publishers over copyright, Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders.

The books bought through Google Editions will be accessible on any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon.com Inc and its Kindle e-book reader.

Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program, said Thursday the e-book market is evolving to allow access of books from anywhere and from any device.

Consumers can buy directly from Google or from any number of retail partners using the Google Editions platform, including online stores like Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon. Google will actually host the e-books and make them searchable.

We expect the majority will go to retail partners not to Google,” Turvey said at the 61st Frankfurt Book Fair. “We are a wholesaler, a book distributor.”

For fiction, they are: Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage; Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin; Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders; Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite; and Marcel Theroux, Far North. The winner will be announced at a ceremony on November 18. [via]

“Pitchfork’s position as indie kingmaker was cemented at the decade’s mid-point, but kings don’t always last in indie rock. The twin peaks of the Forkhype range were Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which showed up at No. 2 on the decade list, and CYHSY’s self-titled debut, which was left off entirely,” writes Jacob Ganz. ”That binary seems fitting for a Web site that’s more emblematic of music in the Internet era than any other: Pitchfork in the 2000s has been the story of how effusive praise can avalanche into a kind of canonization, even as the thrill of discovery sometimes ends in embarrassment and revisionism.” 

This is fairly nerdy musical stuff here, looking at the decade-long evolution of arguably the one music publication that still matters.

She won Britain’s most prestigious literary prize for her sprawling look at Henry VIII’s court in Wolf Hall.  Mantel, 57, beat such noted initialed authors as J.M. Coetzee and A.S. Byatt. 

For her efforts, she’ll take home about $80,000, the satisfaction of winning, and a nice sales bump from the publicity.  Not bad for a days work.

The site is partnering with the New York Times Book Review (bonus!) and aims to be, as editor Amy Hertz tells The Observor, “a gathering place for all kinds of book lovers — readers, booksellers, writers, editors, reviewers, book publicists, sales reps, book designers and printers — to speak to each other, to exchange ideas, to honor where we’ve come from as well as the road ahead.”

The NY Times has a largish story on the new venture.  My only gripe is that for a supposedly tech savvy company, it baffles me they have no easily embedded videos to give consumers a better feel for what they do.

A London couple have found the ultimate space-saving solution for a city-dwelling book lover: a staircase bookshelf.  The shelves/stairs were created by UK-based Levitate Architects.  This is pretty amazing and a good way to utilize storage.  It also makes the stairway, which are generally architecture and design afterthoughts, into something useful and interesting.  [via]

Eyeball created PBS’s new branding and it looks fantastic.  I love the simplicity of the slogan “Be More” and how evocative the color scheme is.  Well done.  As part of the campaign, which will roll out on September 27 during Ken Burn’s new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Eyeball designed 630 different on-air, online, and print elements to push the new branding into the public’s consciousness.

You can check out other images and videos of the rebranding campaign at Eyeball’s site.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was able to “write” her memoir in a mere four months. Going Rogue: An American Life clocks in at 400 pages (not sure if there will be pictures/child-like ryhmes), and will be available in hardcover on November 17. A little surprised it’s not coming out straight to mass-market paperback, since that’s generally her audiences’s perfered book format.  Dan Brown, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, blah blah blah. 

It’ll make the perfect holiday gift for the teabagger in your life.

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times died on Sunday. He was 79.

His conservative politics aside, it’s pretty badass to be remembered as the “oracle of language” upon passing away:  “There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ and ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’”

Season two starts tonight and hopefully it’ll really find it’s sea legs.  Based on the adendum episode “Epitaph One” we know the show is eventually going in the direction of a fullblown apocalypse with zombie human wrecking havoc on the world. 

That’s where we are headed, but for now Alpha is still running wild, Echo is beginning to remember her life and hold on to her identity, Ballard is now working for the Dollhouse and given the way Joss Whedon tells stories it’s going to make for some juicy tv.

“Well, not of interest to everyone, but this is the corrected text of master writer Fraz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ by the Russian master writer Vladimir Nabokov,” writes the World of Found. “WOF loves both these writers and we think that maybe, just maybe, Nabokov is correct is saying that his work has improved on Kafka.”

Nabokov was actually editing the English translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as part of his Lectures on Literature.  If this proves anything, it is that all good writing is rewriting.  Even Kerouac understood that.   [via]

This is shaping up to be a big week of television for fans of science fiction. Monday we started with the two hour premiere of Heroes, which returns for its fourth season. Last year’s storyline was far superior to the lame second season, so it will be interesting how the show develops, especially given its ratings plummet since the first season.  I know a lot of people have jumped off the Heroes train, but it’s still be enjoyable for me. 

Tuesday saw the season finale of the pretty good–if not quite great–original SyFy series, Warehouse 13. They’ve done a decent job of mixing the world-in-peril stuff with the comic relief stuff, and the cast is uniformly appealing.  Not unlike Fringe and Dollhouse, the show struggled to define itself in the early going but really hit a good stride in the second half of it’s run.  Given that it’s the highest rated SyFy show ever, we will see a second season and that’s pretty exciting.  Especially how the season wrapped up on a good cliffhanger.

Tonight at 8 on ABC is the series premiere of Flash Forward, about what happens after the entire world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds.  ABC has high hopes for the show and so far the previews have looked intriguing/promising. 

Following, on Fox, is actually the second episode of the second season of Fringe, a J.J. Abrams created series which is consistently intriguing and suspenseful and has one of the best characters on television. John Noble plays the goofably loveable (possibly insane) mad scientist, Walter Bishop. Again, an excellent cast throughout, in particular Anna Torv as a strong, yet vulnerable, FBI agent.  Now that the show is weaving a strong mythology into it’s weekly story arc, this one has become must watch tv for any lover of creepy sci fi.

For me, Friday is the cherry on the sundae. That is when we get the return of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. Admittedly, the first season was a little uneven. The appearance of Alan Tudyk toward the end definitely “kicked it up a notch.” BSG’s Tahmoh Penikett manages to play FBI agent Ballard as earnest and stoic without making him boring; and, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I would probably watch Eliza Dushku reading the phone book.

Another Whedon Alumnus Finds a New Home

It looks as if Nathan Fillion has finally found a quality home after the ignominious loss (to us) of the brilliant Firefly. Since then–with the exception of Joss Whedon’s clever web vid. Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, where Fillion did a great parody of the macho/heroic persona of Captain Mal–he hasn’t really had much to work with as an actor. Until this spring.

Castle was given a shortened (10 episode) first season, where it garnered decent ratings.

More importantly, it turned out to be good. Nathan plays Richard Castle, a wealthy and famous divorced novelist of murder mysteries, who manages to wangle his way into a squad of homicide detectives so he can observe the real cops in action. Stana Katic almost manages to out-Mariska Mariska Hargitay when it comes to playing the hard-assed and competent detective Beckett, who — just coincidentally, and often to her own frustration — happens to be heart-stoppingly beautiful. Of course, she finds the flirtatious Castle’s presence in the middle of her investigations to be a huge irritant; but, he’s a personal friend of the mayor’s, so what can she do?

Excellent cast of characters in support here, as well. Susan Sullivan is a kick as Castle’s mother, a one-time Broadway star. Molly Quinn is appealing as his pretty teenage daughter, who manages to be a good girl most of the time, while eschewing cuteness. Jon Huertas, Seamus Dever and Ruben Santiago Hudson are the other cops, who, to Beckett’s chagrin, all seem to enjoy having Castle around. I’m pretty confident that you’ll enjoy it, too.

Season premiere was last Monday, where it airs at 10 pm on ABC. You can also catch up with episodes on abc.com or Hulu.

Anyways, over at Surf, Emily Nussbaum’s new (and excellent [try saying that without the Mr. Burns inflection]) television blog, she discovers in John Ortved’s new The Simpsons: An Uncensored Unauthorized History the identity of the James L. Brooks assistant who inspired Waylon Smithers — one Mr. Richard Sakai. 

It sounds like a great read, even though James L. Brooks and Matt Groening didn’t participate.  But for good reason.  Nussbaum hints that the book portrays Brooks as “a genius bastard who screwed over his cancer-ridden lifelong best friend for money” and Groening as “an amiable lame-o who stole credit for the series despite the fact that he wrote very little of it.” 

Probably make a great Jesus’s birthday present for any Simpsons fan.