Isegoria

The lastest news out of ShoWest is that theaters may ask to jam cell phones, which is common in some countries but illegal in the US.

For now, theaters have to rely on “funny fake movie trailers urging viewers to shut off phones.”

I didn’t realize that Isaac Hayes was one of…them. From Soul singer Isaac Hayes quits “South Park”:

Veteran soul singer Isaac Hayes, voice of the libidinous character ‘Chef’ on the satiric cable TV cartoon ‘South Park,’ said on Monday he was quitting the show, citing its ‘inappropriate ridicule’ of religion.

‘There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry toward religious beliefs … begins,’ Hayes said in a statement.

Hayes, 63, a devoted follower of the Church of Scientology, did not mention a ‘South Park’ episode that aired last fall poking fun at Scientology and some of its celebrity adherents, including actor
Tom Cruise.

David Hornik says we may see Inigo Montoya On Broadway. From Guettel and Goldman to Team on Princess Bride Musical:

Composer Adam Guettel and screenwriter William Goldman will collaborate on a musical version or the hit fairy tale film ‘The Princess Bride,’ the New York Post reported.

The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed opens with number 10:

The ‘Real’ Alien 3
1992, Directed by, oh, let’s say Ridley Scott

Orville Schell tells NPR’s Sheilah Kast about Heinrich Harrer’s life, in Out of Austria, into Tibet:

Austrian mountaineering legend Heinrich Harrer is dead at 93. He was a pioneering climber, an Olympic skier, a tutor to the Dalai Lama… and a member of Hitler’s SS. He was the subject of the film Seven Years in Tibet.

Ryan Robbins calls the new Black & Decker Alligator Lopper A Stroke of Shear Genius and says that “backyard branches don’t stand a chance against this chainsaw-scissor mutant.” I ask, how long until this ends up in a horror film?

The Wikipedia has an number of amusing entries, including this one on the infamous heavy metal umlaut:

A heavy metal umlaut (aka röck döts) is an umlaut over a letter in the name of a heavy metal band. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band’s logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that invokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to a desire for a “gothic horror” feel [1]. The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor is it intended to affect the pronunciation of the band’s name.

Heavy metal umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the film This Is Spinal Tap (which is spelled with an umlaut over the “n” and a dotless i), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) opined, “It’s like a pair of eyes. You’re looking at the umlaut, and it’s looking at you.” In 2002, Spin magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as “the diacritical mark of the beast”.

The key factoid:

The first gratuitous use appears to have been by the Blue Öyster Cult in 1970.

Edward Jay Epstein explains The End of Originality — Or, why Michael Bay’s The Island failed at the box office:

In Hollywood, originality is anything but a virtue. Paramount rejected a recent project that had attached stars, an approved script, and a bankable director by telling the producer, ‘It’s a terrific idea; too bad it has not been made into a movie already or we could have done the remake.’ This response, alas, is not untypical. Studios today, as a former executive explained, tend to greenlight four types of movies for wide openings: remakes (such as King Kong), sequels (such as Star Wars: Episode III), television spinoffs (such as Mission: Impossible), or video-game extensions (such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider).

Hollywood, of course, still turns out original movies, but the number is constantly shrinking. Studio executives don’t lack imagination, nor do they find particular joy in mindlessly imitating bygone successes, but they must take into account the underlying reality of today’s entertainment economy. Unlike in the old days when the studios could rely on a vast habitual herd of moviegoers to fill theaters, audiences must now be created from scratch for each and every film. For the studios, ‘audience creation,’ for which they spent on average over $30 million a film in America alone in 2005, has become just as important a creative product as the film itself.

The key to a movie’s success is the level of awareness that exists for the project well in advance of the advertising blitz that takes place in the week or so preceding the actual release date.

A tiny gelfling has passed along word that Tartakovsky Will Power Dark Crystal:

The Jim Henson Co. has hired Genndy Tartakovsky to direct Power of the Dark Crystal. The fantasy film is a sequel to 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

The story is set hundreds of years after the first film and follows a mysterious girl made of fire who steals a shard of the crystal in hopes of reigniting the dying sun. Annette Duffy and David Odell wrote the script.

The Jim Henson Co.’s Lisa Henson and the Orphanage Animation Studios’ Scott Stewart will produce. Brian Froud will design new characters for the film.

Tartakovsky told Variety that for Power the puppets will operate amid a CGI backdrop, rather than expensive sets.

This isn’t exactly reassuring. From Turkish movie depicts Americans as savages:

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine-gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison — where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

‘Valley of the Wolves Iraq’ — set to open in Turkey on Friday — feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward their longtime NATO allies: Americans.

The movie, which reportedly cost about $10 million (euro 8.3 million), is a work of fiction and does not purport to level allegations against American troops. It is part of a genre of popular culture in Turkey that demonizes the United States.

I must admit that I wasn’t expecting this:

The movie’s American stars are Billy Zane, who plays a self-professed “peacekeeper sent by God,” and Gary Busey as the Jewish-American doctor.

It’s not often that the Wall Street Journal invokes either death metal music or muppets, but Jim Fusilli’s That’s Good Enough for Me brings the two together:

While the extreme branch of heavy-metal music known as death metal is defined in part by often-vile lyrics about violence, catastrophic destruction, nihilism, anarchy and paranoia, its singing style is associated with a beloved goggle-eyed, fuzzy blue puppet.

Death-metal vocalizing is also known as Cookie Monster singing, if not in tribute to, at least in acknowledgment of, the ‘Sesame Street’ puppet that blurts in a guttural growl, his words discharged so rapidly that they tend to collide with each other.