* Entertainment Weekly’s Nicole Sperling breaks down the Hobbit movie deal between New Line, MGM, and the Peter Jackson camp with a mixture of fact and kind of sloppy speculation. Points covered include potential directors (Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonso Cuaron are all mentioned, as usual with no real evidence to support any of them), the role the failure of The Golden Compass played or didn’t play in the rapprochement, and the plot of the second planned film, inaccurately described as “imagined entirely by Jackson and [Fran] Walsh” (it’s going to be drawn from supplemental materials and all the stuff that was going on off-screen during the events of The Hobbit, according to everything else I’ve read). (Via Jason Adams.)
* Matt Maxwell revisits Day of the Dead in a fascinating posts that tackles experiencing the “Reagan Era” of horror as a child, the fright potential of mockumentary and mockumentary-esque horror, military stereotypes, the difference between Day, Night, and Dawn, and the role of Bub the “smart” zombie.
* Rob Zombie is “seriously considering” making a full-length version of the movie from his Grindhouse trailer Werewolf Women of the S.S.. The existence of a movie touted with the phrase “Starring Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu” would constitute rock-solid evidence of a benevolent God.
* Comics Comics/PictureBox luminaries Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro engage in a critical “cage match” over Jonathan Lethem & Farel Dalrymple’s Omega the Unknown. I really like these writers and this format.
* Real life meets torture porn, part one:
Coalition forces found 26 bodies buried in mass graves and a bloodstained “torture complex” with chains hanging from walls and ceilings and a bed connected to an electrical system, the military said Wednesday.
—“Torture house, mass graves discovered in Iraq,” CNN.com.
* Real life meets torture porn, part two:
The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay….The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them….According to ThinkFilm distribution prexy Mark Urman, the reason given by the Motion Picture Assn. of America for rejecting the poster is the image of the hood, which the MPAA deemed unacceptable in the context of such horror films as “Saw” and “Hostel.”
—“MPAA rejects Gibney’s ‘Dark’ poster,” Anne Thompson, Variety. (Via Jon Hastings.)
I originally read “benign” in the Rob Zombie entry in the sense of “having no significant effect.” I love the idea of searching for evidence of a completely neutral God.
Whoops! Yeah, I’ve now changed it to “benevolent.” This is what happens when you post while absorbed in a Dr. Phil episode.