toast your cranberry juice to Marty.

If Scorsese and The Departed hadn't won for best director and picture tonight, Marty would have had my permission to open fire on the first ten rows of the Kodak Theatre.

Pan's Labyrinth got dicked on best foreign language film; it really did. I say that not only because the special effects company that worked on it is from my area of California, but also because it was an absolutely beautiful movie. Guillermo del Toro doesn't get enough respect. The fact that Children of Men was not in the best picture or director noms was a slight.

Oh, and CBS, learn from ABC -- real networks don't tape delay big awards shows.

has he lost his mind?

I'm reading an article in Time about the "three-quel" mania (boy, I guess they don't call 'em trilogies any more, or it may be a useful neologism; actual trilogies seem to have a source and story that can't be contained in one movie) going on in Hollywood and there's a sidebar about possibilities for other such things, and one of them just happens to be the development of an Iron Man movie, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark and Terrence Howard as Jim Rhodes, which actually, is inspired casting to me -- Downey is Hollywood's prodigal son, an acting savant who chose to throw a lot of his career away on various forms of drugs and addiction, and if you've read any bit of Iron Man, a crucial part of Stark's background is his alcoholism.

I sense problems, though, because the director is Jon Favreau, whom I'm not sure has done a hell of a lot worth of value after Swingers -- his talent on-screen seems to be inversely related to his girth; the bigger he gets physically, the worse his movies get. The standard for comic adaptations got set rather high when Sam Raimi started with the Spider-Man franchise, and nothing in Favreau's directing credits suggests he's the person to handle this.

there is no humor in this.

There is nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing funny that can be drawn from going to prison. The filmmakers behind this obvious piece of crap should be drawn and quartered, despite the director being part of the wonderful Mr. Show and the screenwriters both coming from the sublime Reno 911.

The trailer for said flick implies all sorts of personal violations and plays them up for laughs. Anal sex should never be played for laughs. It is a serious act. Even bringing it up in the course of a relationship can sometimes be justification for being thrown out of bed and/or dumped, never mind the imprint on the mind that "he asked" that lasts FOREVER. Also, the implied pleasure it brings many people shouldn't be laughed at. Is it any wonder most movies and TV shows involving prison are dramas?

Anal sex isn't funny, people. The line of funny is between consent and assault, which means that porn is implicitly hilarious. It's like Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks.

Hold on....

(Murmurs in background, whispers in editor's ear.)

Oh, you mean anal rape? Fuck, there's tons of funny in that. Especially because it won't happen to me.

(This was actually semi-serious -- why comedic filmmakers make movies about the funny in prison, I'll never know.)

the seats in the theatre will be sticky.

Rumor has it that Eva Longoria and Beyonce Knowles will be the stars in an American adaptation of the novel Tipping the Velvet, which is about an 1890s lesbian love affair between a male impersonating dance hall star and a fishmonger's daughter (it was also a very good BBC mini-series last year.)

Observe the pictures again, then consider the inevitable: if this movie is made, it will be a must-see in theatres, no matter how crappy it is (and it could be; I don't like Sofia Coppola much as a director, but I'd go watch this). Those exact same aspects could entice you to wait for the DVD, and avoid any uncomfortable messes within the nooks and crannies of theater seats, which are nasty enough anyway without the likely mess of tissues, lotion, and Vaseline that this will attract from various sick fucks.

Hat tip to the News Blog for this one.

(You have no idea how hard it was to write this without cracking an obvious joke about female anatomy.)