* My favorite mafia story, because it’s the story that does the best job of stripping away the Godfather romanticism and revealing mobsters for the shitty little monsters that they are, is the one about how when one of John Gotti’s civilian neighbor John Favara accidentally struck and killed Gotti’s son Frank his car while Frank was riding his bike, Favara was later forced into a mysterious van and was never seen or heard from again. The case is back in the news as prosecutors allege a Gambino soldier dissolved Favara’s body in acid.
* Hey, look, it’s a trailer for George A. Romero’s next zombie movie, which either is or isn’t called Of the Dead. It’s, uh, yeah.
(Via STYD.)
* Jon Hastings ponders film adaptations’ fidelity to their source material, and why it really doesn’t matter. I think Tom Spurgeon had the best take on fanboy complaints about this subject:
what geek culture really means 99 percent of the time [when demanding films be “faithful to the source material”] is “please don’t put us in a position to be mocked or laughed at.”
I think Jon would agree.
* This made me laugh: Harvey Weinstein apparently knows less about the status of Sin City 2 than your average nerdblogger–he literally had no idea Frank Miller had even been thinking of writing the sequel–whereas actress Jaime King says her boy Frank has finished the script for the thing.
Tom nails it, yeah. I used to be much more fanboyish about this, but the Cranky Critic won me over with his repeated insistence that he was reviewing the movie at hand and concerned only with it. I started doing that deliberately as an exercise, and found that it led to me enjoying more movies in more ways.