Warren Ellis’ RED has been adapted into a film. Here’s the trailer, but (frankly speaking) isn’t the title quote, from Ellis himself, enough to make you leap with joy?

Onset, between takes at the Golden Girls, telling silly jokes. It’s fun.

Dennis Hopper, 1936 – 2010.

(Watch for a small cameo by a bit player who’s much more famous now than he was in 1993.)

The Stranger’s Lindy West gives Sex and the City 2 both barrels, and it’s lovely. A few choice bits:

It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.

Apparently, the plot involves them visiting Abu Dhabi. And so:

[…V]ery quickly, the SATC brain trust notices that it’s not all swarthy man-slaves and flying carpets in Abu Dhabi! In fact, Abu Dhabi is crawling with Muslim women—and not one of them is dressed like a super-liberated diamond-encrusted fucking clown!!! Oppression! OPPRESSION!!!

This will not stand. Samantha, being the prostitute sexual revolutionary that she is, rages against the machine by publicly grabbing the engorged penis of a man she dubs “Lawrence of My-Labia.” When the locals complain (having repeatedly asked Samantha to cover her nipples and mons pubis in the way of local custom), Samantha removes most of her clothes in the middle of the spice bazaar, throws condoms in the faces of the angry and bewildered crowd, and screams, “I AM A WOMAN! I HAVE SEX!” Thus, traditional Middle Eastern sexual mores are upended and sexism is stoned to death in the town square.

At sexism’s funeral (which takes place in a mysterious, incense-shrouded chamber of international sisterhood), the women of Abu Dhabi remove their black robes and veils to reveal—this is not a joke—the same hideous, disposable, criminally expensive shreds of cloth and feathers that hang from Carrie et al.’s emaciated goblin shoulders. Muslim women: Under those craaaaaaay-zy robes, they’re just as vapid and obsessed with physical beauty and meaningless material concerns as us! Feminism! Fuck yeah!

Heh. Goblin shoulders FTW.

But that didn’t stop Sean Young from shooting some 8mm footage behind the scenes during Dune. No original sound, but she’s added a voiceover. Everyone is very, very young.

We noticed last night that the song Dr. John was rehearsing in NYC (with Albert’s son, among others) was actually the same song Albert and his Indian colleagues (many of whom are actual Mardis Gras Indians) were singing, a capella, at the end of the episode in honor of their dead wild man. But what we didn’t notice was that the outro music, under the credits, was the same song yet a third time.

Nor did we realize, until I Googled around a little today, that the instrumental version was by Donald Harrison, Jr., a respected jazz sax player who is himself the son of Donald Harrison, Sr., a former chief of the Guardians of the Flame tribe — which is the tribe Clarke Peters’ Albert Lambreaux leads on the show. As the linked blogger notes, it’s probably not a stretch to think that Lambreaux is meant to be a composite based on the elder Harrison (same tribe, jazz player for a son, etc.). Harrison Jr. even cameoed earlier (playing sax with Delmond Lambreaux in NYC gigs in an earlier ep), and serves as a consultant to the show.

I’d previously wondered if Peters’ character was meant to be Tootie Montana, the legendary chief of chiefs who died the summer before the storm, but the Harrison parallel fits much better (especially since Montana was namechecked by Dr. John in the rehearsal scene). Fun fact: Montana’s cousin plays Antoine Batiste’s current squeeze on the show.

Mad Men returns on July 25. Happy Birthday, Mrs Heathen.

Noticed elsewhere: We are just as far away from the release (in 1993) of Dazed and Confused now, in 2010, than the film was from its time period (spring 1976). It’s 17 years both ways.

Ouch. Weirdly, this also means that the period music from the film was as far removed from us as the early 90s music is to us now, which seems really strange. “Slow Ride” seems farther from the Gin Blossoms or Counting Crows than those bands do from Train or #random_2000s_pop now, though (upon reflection) it’s clear that urban, R&B, and hip-hop inflected/influenced acts have a bigger piece of the Hot 100 than they did 17 years ago.

Apparently, the French take on Indiana Jones includes a hot, female Indy analog; a mummy; and a pterodactyl. WIN. Directed by Luc Besson, naturally. Click through for the trailer and some clips.

(Source material.)

Last summer, we called your attention to Star Wars Uncut, a collaborative online effort to remake Star Wars in distinct 15-second clips — a mix of live action, animation, the technically brilliant and the charmingly awful.

It’s done. There’s a short trailer, and also a longer teaser clip, covering the escape from the Death Star. It is all kinds of freaky awesome. Enjoy.

Behold, a second completely excellent film mashup in a single week! We present Wes Anderson’s Fellowship of the Ring.

Tarantino vs. the Coen Brothers. Make time.

(Via @Richard_Kadrey‘s twitter, who in turn credits a certain Mr Ebert.)

Skateboarding + photography + cutouts + more photography == this very cool video.

Apparently of the opinion that the prequels in general were not sufficient to completely sully their legacy, LucasFilm is developing a Star Wars sitcom.

Robert Culp? Dead.

Weird: The untold story of Al Yankovic, with Olivia Wilde, Mary Steenburgen, Patton Oswalt, and Aaron Paul as Al.

I am, as they say, Not Making This Up.

Dinoshark premiered on March 13.

Bricks in the rain. Do NOT miss the comment.

Holy Crap, do NOT miss 1945A.

“Hey, who is THAT GUY?”

The 20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History.

Local spots are easy to poke fun at, given their usual level of sophistication and technical acumen, but sometimes, rarely, somebody hits a home run.

Viceland is running a long interview with the God of the Wire. Go read the whole thing. Some choice bits:

This seems to play into what you mentioned earlier, that you were writing Greek tragedy, which certainly had comedic elements.

Yes. Before finishing the first season I’d reread most of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, those three guys. I’d read some of it in college, but I hadn’t read it systematically. That stuff is incredibly relevant today. As drama, the actual plays are a little bit stilted, but the message within the plays and the dramatic impulses are profound for our time. We don’t really realize it. I don’t think we sense the power in there because we’re really more in the Shakespearean construct of—

Yes, the individualism kind of thing.

The individual and the interior struggle for self. Macbeth and Hamlet and Lear and Othello. These are the great tragedies—the dramatic branch that leads to O’Neill and our modern theater. But I saw a version of Aeschylus’s The Persians done on the stage in Washington, and it made my jaw drop. They put it on during the height of the insurgency in Iraq—after that misadventure in Iraq had made itself apparent. If you read that play and if you saw this production of it, it was so dead-on. I don’t know if you know the play.

I’ve never read it, but I know what it’s about.

It’s basically the people back in the Persian capital wondering what’s happened to their army and, of course, bad things have happened to their army. And the young emperor who wants to be compared to his father—it’s Darius the Great, I think—he wants to win the victory that was denied his father over the Greeks.

Sounds familiar.

Yeah. And of course they performed it in Republican ties and suits. It was a Washington audience. I was watching it and I was looking around, and some of these lines were landing, some of the dialogue was landing. I was looking around like, “Did everyone just catch that? Did they really just say that?” It was so ripe in its critique of Bush and Cheney and all those guys.

It seems to me that people want to be sort of special, unique snowflakes, and the Shakespearean thing addresses that more.

Right! Let’s celebrate me and the wonder that is me. It’s not about society. The Greeks, especially the Athenians, were consumed with questions about man and state. They gave Socrates hemlock because his ideas were antithetical to their notions of state.

Listen, that’s totalitarianism in any sense, but for him, he was cynical about democracy and he was an iconoclast about the democratic principles. That went to the heart of Greek thinking. It was like, “Don’t fuck with that.” Now, the thing that has been exalted and the thing that American entertainment is consumed with is the individual being bigger than the institution. How many frickin’ times are we gonna watch a story where somebody—

Rises up against the odds?

“You can’t do that.” “Yes, I can.” “No, you can’t.” “I’ll show you, see?” And in the end he’s recognized as just a goodhearted rebel with right on his side, and eventually the town realizes that dancing’s not so bad. I can make up a million of ’em. That’s the story we want to be told over and over again. And you know why? Because in our heart of hearts what we know about the 21st century is that every day we’re going to be worth less and less, not more and more.

Worth less and less as people, you mean?

As human beings. Some of us are going to get more money and be worth more. There are some people who are destined for celebrity or wealth or power, but by and large, the average American, the average person in the world on planet earth, is worth less and less. That’s the triumph of capital, and that is the problem. You look at that, and you think that’s what we’ve come to and that’s where we’re going and it’s like, “Can you tell me another bedtime story about how people are special and every one of us matters? Can you tell me that shit?”

And, later, on the supposed divide between literary fiction, crime writing, and how the Wire relates thereto:

Everybody should write the stories that matter to them and then we’ll figure it out once everything exists.

Word. God Save David Simon.

Nic Cage Shoots A Little Girl In The Chest.

(See Also.)

Space: 1970: “This blog is dedicated to the science fiction films and television series of the 1970s – and very early 80s – including such nostalgic favorites as Star Wars, Space: 1999, UFO, Space Academy, the original Battlestar Galactica, Jason of Star Command, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Logan’s Run and many others.”

His coverage of Ark II is particularly fine. I hadn’t realized that the jetpack they used was an actual, working Bell prototype.

Team Edward FTW!

Given the trendline between 1970s-era disaster movies like Airport and The Towering Inferno — localized, but still awful, events — and recent world-ending films like Knowing and 2012, what will the Michael Bays of the future do to up the ante in the years to come?

Do not miss this.

The 100 Greatest Quotes from the Wire. They may not be YOUR favorites, but they’re fine ones no matter what. Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. Also, the king stay the king.

This silent-movie, Chaplinesque version of the Matrix isn’t quite perfect, but it’s worth passing on anyway.

So, we missed the first ep of Big Bang Theory for whatever reason, and wanted to catch up before watching episode two. We checked Hulu and iTunes and found nada, but managed to snag a torrent in about half an hour.

It occurs to me that it might’ve been on CBS.com, but network-based streams have been, in my experience, even more fail-filled than Hulu. I checked anyway: it’s clips only, so apparently CBS’ opinion is that if I miss an episode, I should just wait until they deign to show it again.

Um, fuck that. I long for the days when TV producers actually understand how data works. Let the record show that we tried to buy it before resorting to torrents. Sigh.

The Coen Brothers are remaking the classic John Wayne film True Grit — or, rather, making another film from the same source, Charles Portis’ 1968 novel of the same name.

Stormtrooper 9/11.

An old episode of Cold Case is on at the Sheraton; the plotline is about a murdered schoolteacher during the Red Scare, as recounted by his paramour.

Said paramour is played by Ellen Geer. Geer is the daughter of Will Geer, better known as Grandpa Walton, and himself a victim of McCarthy-era blacklisting.

Sadly for Heathen-aged people, Ellen is nearly 70, so she is the “old” daughter of an actor I only knew as an “old” man in the 70s, but she is about as old as her father was as Zebulon Walton in the 1970s.

By the way, the whole Red Scare? Architected by the GOP.

Universal is apparently making a big-screen re-reboot of Battlestar Galactica — with Bryan Singer attached — that will share essentially none of the lore from the groundbreaking, award-winning TV reboot.

It’s really hard to understand this as anything but a craven attempt to mine geek wallets. Of course, that’s what the original BSG was in the 70s — it debuted in the wake of Star Wars’ huge success — so I guess in some ways this is just a return to form.

The new Where The Wild Things Are trailer looks even better than the first one.

Sincerely, John Hughes. Teenager Alison Byrne Fields wrote a fan letter to Hughes in 1985, and they ended up pen pals.

This is all over the Net, but I’m sure enough that more people need to see it that I’m running it, too. I got it from JWZ. There’s also a follow-up.

Dead.

The director of iconic 80s coming-of-age films had a heart attack on his morning walk. He was 59.

This is an excellent time to note how prolific he actually was; while he’s well known for directing Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), and Ferris Beuller’s Day Off (1986), he also wrote National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) (and, sadly, its sequels), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), among others. The Heathen Generation’s youth wouldn’t have been the same without him.

Save Ferris.

The 21st Street Mission run by Edith Keeler in “The City On The Edge Of Forever” has got to be the cleanest homeless shelter ever.

Excellent illustrations of Wire characters.

“He can speak French. In Russian.”

This Star Wars fan-remake hinges on a great idea: split it into 472 15-second bits, and have random folks sign up to make a segment. So far, 24 are finished.

Direct Link.

David Sedaris Delivers a Pizza.

Brit sketch comedy on homeopaths:

Amber Benson and Ron Jeremy star in One Eyed Monster.

No, really. Watch the trailer. Probably NSFW though.

None of this is fake. It is all real, and is all full-size.

Ebert on Transformers 2 is a wonderful thing. He opens with:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

More:

The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

Which Wire character are you?

(For reference.)

Carrie Fisher and her double sunbathe on the set of Return of the Jedi. And yes, in the iconic outfits.