No Book of Mormon Movie For Now, and 7 Other Stories You'll Be Talking About Today
Happy Wednesday! Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: Jeremy Renner may be King... Justin Lin ducks out of the flatlining Terminator revamp... Paramount plans to spruce up the joint... The case for Netflix... and more.
· Despite their professed interest to turn the Tony Award-winning smash musical The Book of Mormon into a movie, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone officially want you to know there are no development plans presently in the works. "We did a stage show and it worked out way better than we ever thought, and we'd like it to be that for a while, you know, without contaminating it with a movie," Parker said this week. Now you know. [THR]
· Jeremy Renner is attached to star as George Leslie, the title character in an adaptation of author J. North Conway's historical saga The King of Heists. Leslie, an otherwise unassuming gentleman in 19th-century New York City, "secretly put together a crew and masterminded a heist of nearly $3 million in cash and securities from the Manhattan Savings Institution in 1878." Renner will also co-produce. [Deadline]
· To no one's real surprise, the glacially slow process of developing a Terminator reboot with Arnold Schwarzenegger and rights-holder Megan Ellison has sent director Justin Lin packing. He'll make the sixth Fast and the Furious film while they get their shit together -- like, you know, a script, a studio, a budget... little things. [Deadline]
· Paramount plans a 25-year, $700 million overhaul of its lot on Melrose Ave.: "Portions of the lot along Melrose and limited areas within the main production area are being targeted for development, although the studio said it will maintain many of the historic structures while modernizing them. The plan also involves six properties in Hollywood adjacent to the studio." And jobs! Reportedly more than 7,000 of them! Yay! [THR]
· Are Netflix and embattled CEO Reed Hastings actually on the right track with their controversial plan to split their DVD and streaming operations? Patrick Goldstein makes a compelling case in their favor. [LAT]
· Here you'll find a conservative columnist daring to conflate the unpopularity of his ideology in Hollywood with the alienation felt by gays. Read at your discretion, and remember to spit-take away from your computer. [Big Hollywood]
· Speaking of the gays, so begins the best college memoir you'll read all day: "I was a young gay man hoping university athletics would help me fit in. Then the oil wrestling began." [Salon]
· So what's shakin' with North Korea? Oh, not a lot, just trying to figure out why we only had 25 refugees from there in 2010 compared to, say, 12,000 from Bhutan. "It's too small a number," one analyst notes. You think? [38 North]
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Comments
BigOTED Hollywood. Yup. Good Morning pun. Also, Justin Lin needs to please please please only make F&F movies. And Ratner his Rush Hours. These franchises are perfectly constructed douche-bag containment systems-- akin to the lead sarcophagus around Chernobyl (badly in need of repair.) We risk terrible cultural contamination if they escape.
The comments on that Big Hollywood post are unsurprisingly more disturbing than the post itself.
The comments on ANY site (except for Movieline, of course) are always more disturbing than the post itself. Comments just in general are pits full of deranged hyenas with bad spelling skills and single-minded drive to somehow blame everything on Obama.
It's kind of otherworldly, isn't it?
The entire Right v. Left spectacle is a false dichotomy, a non-discourse inside of which very little of meaning can be expressed. This much you may have already guessed.
The really disturbng part of the Big Hollywood article's structure is that it tries to employ the "left's" tactic of appeal to the reader's empathy for the author's victimization as a method of persuasion-- the very type of appeal a conservative is supposed to hold in deep disregard.
If you are publicly complaining about your access to cultural institutions based on a perceived bias against your "life-style"-- then what, exactly, is the nature of your conservatism? Aren't you, then, just another "bleeding heart?" What do conservatives bleed if you prick them?
Oh, right. Blood. That's the point. Maybe we just need to stop pricking.
To be fair, I reject the very concept of "sexuality" as a thing (as anyone who has actually read any of my ridiculously out-of-place lengthy comments here will know.)
That the sexuality-as-inborn idea has created this awful beast of neutralizing the meaning of the renegade and provocative aspects of the breaking of social sexual taboos-- well, it just breaks my heart.
That people would rather say "Sam is my sex partner because I am into guys of his physical type and we worked out a mutual partnership where I have sexual access to his goods" rather than "my love for Sam and my desire for intimacy with him personally made me not give a damn about gender or what anyone would think" is a tragedy to me-- in that it removes the possibility of tragedy as a meaningful human component and simply renders all relationships neutral arrangements--contractual bonds. Since Love, in the classical sense, is now unconsciously regarded as retrograde fanaticism. By both "liberal" and "conservative" alike.
So, seeing the cultural acceptance of that conceptual framework and it's ensuing intractable arguments and contradictions becoming so absolutely accepted as to result in a a supposed "conservative" trying to co-opt its victimage-- well, it really just testifies to the inherent meaninglessness of our current "lifestyle" identity culture.
Thoughtful conservatism, which at its best is a rejection of that kind of "I-am-whatever-I-say-I-am-and-whatever-that-term-means-to-me-as-I-define-it-personally" nihilism, is certainly not evident in whatever this guy was trying to explore.
I agree that the narrowly defined "Hollywood liberal lifestyle" is radically intolerant of what it perceives a self-identified conservative to be (again, having met thoughtless, hateful individuals of both ilk, I can say absolutely that the terms are utterly insignificant as descriptions of human beings) but I can't see the intellectual coherence of attempting to make an argument about unfair judgements from others, when the position you claim to inhabit consists entirely of the idea that there are valid judgements to be made about the nature of how a human being should live life.
And, let's not mince words, I have not heard about that time an intolerant limousine liberal dragged a young conservative boy to death down Sunset Blvd. So, maybe let's avoid these kinds of equivocations. I'm all for thoughtful provocation. But, come on.
You can't scream "don't judge me," when you are an advocate of judgement. And you certainly appear foolish when talking of the shock you experienced at hearing harsh and violent language used about perceived ideological enemies when you identify yourself as a "libertarian-leaning right-winger"
Man up, buddy. That's your birthright as a conservative. Walk it off.
So, in short, the piece speaks in a profound way about the incoherence of "right-winger" as simply one more "life-style" costume for the 21st century (non)self-- when there were once conservatives who actually opposed what they considered the terrifying dead end of this kind of self-proposed identity proposition.
Apparently, the unfortunate entitlement to "life-style" posited by the left has been unconsciously cemented in the right as a foundational element.
Everyone's heart is bleeding now. For poor little old me. And absolutely no one else. And not bleeding very lucidly.
Earlier this morning, I was re-reading a section of Neil Postman's great book Technopoly.
In the last chapter of this vital text, he advocates a critical position he calls "The Loving Resistance Fighter."
Oh, the dialogue we could have if there were more practice of that kind of criticism.
I feel you. Trey and Matt are libertarians, too, and you'd never hear them whining like this dude. I notice you put this comment here and not over at Big Hollywood. Smart choice 🙂
Fucking-A. Justin Lin is awful. So glad he's off Highlander re-boot. Can you imagine the barbed-wire tattoos on all the shaved-headed immortal wiggers? And the linkin park soundtrack. Ug.
You're right about a lot. I do think at the end of the say its simply a matter of fitting in with a crowd. If you go to a tea part rally, you gotta be cool with those folks. remember the Simpsons Rules of the Schoolyard: “The code of the schoolyard, Marge! The rules that teach a boy to be a man. Let's see. Don't tattle. Always make fun of those different from you. Never say anything, unless you're sure everyone feels exactly the same way you do." Odds are most of the Hollywood liberals ain't that liberal and most of the conservatives at the rallies aren't all that conservative. But if you want to play on their playground, you'll have to just shut up. People just hamg in crowds, try to belong, makes 'em dumb. Welcome to century 21. And like Neil Postman (I am excited enough to post cause you mentioned him) says, it's all just consumption in the service of technology anyway. good comment.