stuff
Poster for The Lookout, the directorial debut for Scott Frank, screenwriter of Minority Report, Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Joseph Gordan-Levitt (Brick) plays Chris Pratt, a janitor who, after suffering a brain injury that leaves him facing a mental disability, becomes part of a heist at a bank that employs him. Isla Fisher plays a scandalous vixen, Carla Gugino portrays a therapist, and Matthew Goode (with spiffy new moustache) plays a criminal. Jeff Daniels also stars. [imdb]
Lots of new high-res stills from Hannibal Rising.
Two fascinatingly different perspectives from The House Next Door. First, Travis Mackenzie Hoover thinks Pan's Labyrinth is "a thoroughly mediocre movie -- not egregiously bad, but dull and unremarkable and easy to dismiss... [T]he fact that the film is a repetition of the fairy tale structure is exactly what people find so profound." (In my less generous moments, I've found myself thinking something similar about Neil Gaiman's novels.) Meanwhile, Matt Zoller Seitz mourns the lack of "a coherent vision" in Children of Men: "It's a compelling pastiche, and that's not nothing, but I wanted it to be great rather than just proficient and gripping; it never quite gets there, and it suffers in comparison to earlier classics in the same vein."
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The House also linked to "Drop everything, read this now" at Jim Emerson's film blog. He directs you to a New Yorker piece by George Packer about knowing the enemy in the so-called "war on terror" (both the article and Emerson's comments are worth reading):
“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” he said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.”
Why does the idea of one world, one language strike me as a mortal blow to the human imagination?