Tim Burton's Sad Thanksgiving Balloon, and 5 Other Stories You'll Be Talking About Today

Happy Friday! Also in today's edition of The Broadsheet: Catherine Zeta-Jones is getting Broken... The Bible is hot in Hollywood!... The only Akira takedown you'll ever need... and more.

· If you held any vestige of doubt that Tim Burton has attained institutional status in America, let it now be banished: The filmmaker has accepted Macy's invitation to design a balloon for this year's Thanksgiving Day Parade. What does he have planned? What else? A character named B. Boy, who, according The NY Times, "was created, Frankenstein's monster-style, from the leftover balloons used in children's parties at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Forbidden from playing with other children because of his jagged teeth and crazy-quilt stitching, B. retreated to a basement lair, where he obsesses over Albert Lamorisse's film The Red Balloon and dreams that he, too, will be able to fly someday." Festive! Kleenex, please. (Click photo for bigger image.) [NYT]

· Catherine Zeta-Jones has joined the cast of Broken City, in which she'll appear as the philandering wife of a New York mayor (Russell Crowe). A detective played by Mark Wahlberg investigates, someone dies, things go sideways... the usual. Allen Hughes directs. [Deadline]

· "Are Moses, Noah and Judah Maccabee the next Bella, Batman and Harry Potter?" Great question! By which I mean, shut the fuck up. [THR]

· "Akira is about a terrible, unstoppable, cataclysmic force; half-baked plans for an ill-conceived remake are not dissimilar." And critic Ben Child's knife goes deeper, and deeper still. Blistering stuff. [The Guardian]

· Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained hasn't even started filming yet, but here come the philosophical comparisons to Inglourious Basterds: "I don't actually hunger for a revenge flick about slavery. I understand why Jews might hunger for a some cathartic revenge in terms of the Holocaust. There's a certain clarity to industrialized genocide. But slavery is something different, something at once more variable, intimate and elusive." [The Atlantic via Andrew Sullivan]

· "Carson Palmer! Reporting for duty!" For the NFL fans out there: If you're not reading Jim Behrle's illustrated football-pick haikus every week, do yourself a very, very funny favor and check them out. [The Awl]

[Photo: Macy's via NYT]