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If you’d written off the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow after seeing the trailer, dust off your interest and read this preview, from the NYT Magazine. Not only does the movie sound excellent, the article’s a blast, too:

For [Kerry Conran, creator of Sky Captain], the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of ”Sky Captain” began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring — extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn’t touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ”Risky Business” and directing ”Fried Green Tomatoes” but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don’t think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran created the entire universe of the movie using computers. I mean, I guess it’s not that rare in the age of Pixar, but the live actors involved (including Gwyneth, Jude, and Angelina) worked in front of blue screens the entire time. That seems big, somehow.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow’s arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

Salon is opening up a new bureau in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Sidney Blumenthal:

“The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.” Under Blumenthal’s leadership, Salon’s new Washington bureau will produce a flow of revealing stories about the Bush administration and the election.

How are they planning to penetrate the famously secretive White House? I mean, come on, this is Salon. It’s being run by the former press secretary of Bill Clinton. And they’ve clearly stated their intention to air President Bush’s dirty laundry. Any “senior administration official” caught talking to them will be disembowled, lightly seasoned, and fed to Karl Rove for brunch.

Maybe they’re hoping to find more people like this former Pentagonian.* Maybe Sidney Blumenthal will discover what Dana Milbank could not. At any rate, they must think they’re going to get something. I’m interested.

Also — dude. A new Salon bureau? But isn’t Salon dead?

Maybe I’ll fire off an e-mail to my buddy Sid and get to the bottom of it.

Read more…

How can you not love the Beeb?

Any interest in hearing Ravi Shankar speak? How about Andy Warhol? Gandhi? Nabokov? Woolf? Yeats?

Take your pick.

(Via E-Media Tidbits.)

Wow. Johnny Depp as Jesus. That’s brilliant!! I already feel ministered to.

Who else would make a good Jesus?

• Viggo Mortensen … I mean, he basically just played Jesus three times already, right?
• Sean Penn … This would be interesting. Crazy psycho supermasculine Jesus with an astonishing soft side.
• Julianne Moore … She can play anything.

The strangest book review appears in The Washington Post for Jayson Blair’s new book, Burning Down My Master’s House. Maybe one-fourth of it actually reviews the book, half of it is nanny-nanny-boo-boo WaPo vs. NYT one-upsmanship, and another fourth is a pretty unenlightening psychoanalysis of Jayson Blair.

The review starts with a shot of bitter scorn at the NYT — “Newspapers and television stations across the nation follow its lead,” the author writes. “This state of affairs, in a nation that sees itself as the capital of free markets, is appalling, but it is the reality of the news business.” Later in that paragraph, the author says, “We shouldn’t dismiss [Blair’s] allegations just because the people currently running The New York Times tell us to (as they recently did in a news article on their own pages).” Their own pages!!

The very next sentence pats the WaPo on the back for breaking the Jayson Blair story. And I mean, that clearly had to come at some point in this story, but it seems like a bit of a cheap shot right here. The rest of the review is spent making the case on the one hand for trusting Jayson Blair’s words whenever he casts the NYT in the worst possible light, and on the other hand for not trusting Jayson Blair’s words at all when it comes to his account of his feelings and motivations.

Maybe the weirdest part is that this book review has gotten probably the most play any review ever will on the WaPo website. I understand there’s a rivalry here, but is it supposed to be this obvious?

Via Kevin McAuliffe’s MetaBlog II, I want to also take this opportunity to point out that the following sentence appears in an AP story:

“The ingenious album reconfigures the trippy Beatles rock to jibe with the Jay-Z’s rough acapella raps.”

I won’t even comment on the fact that Jay-Z now apparently requires an article before his name. (Oh wait.) But I will say, for the record, that it’s spelt “a cappella.”

Don’t be snarky. I know how “spelt” is spelt.

Kevin Drum and Robin were both philosophizing today about The Bachelorette and illusions of attachment. Robin, apparently, was taken in by the show; he believed for a few moments that there was real devotion forming. Then, one of the Bachelorette’s suitors proposed, and the thing was so insincere and hammy that the facade was shattered.

I actually think that real emotion does happen on these shows. I really believe that the contestants or whatever you call them feel “in love” by the end of it. Their version of “in love” is strange, synthetic, and fleeting, but it’s not imaginary. I would argue that the same thing happened in high school when I went away for a week or two for special programs and retreats and whatnot. I’ll never forget the NYLC in Washington, D.C., specifically, although this happened in micro all throughout high school.

A few hundred students attended the National Young Leaders Conference, but they split us up into groups of 20 or so for the week. We had field trips and learned about democracy and crafted bills and elected people and whatnot. By the end of the week, we were Frnds4Evr. This group of 20 people was just the tightest, most amazing, most meant-for-each-other group of buddies the world had ever seen, and these relationships would never die.

Oh wait.

Eight years after that week was over, I still remember Katie Sparnecht, and dancing with Pat Germann on the last night, and quietly wanting this Polish guy Dave Swaintek, who was not-so-quietly hooking up with this girl Ashley. I remember Mormon Will, and my soft-spoken friend Mike. I knew these folks for (I think) nine days. There was enough genuine attachment there that vivid pictures of these folks are stuck in my minds. But the friendships were strange, synthetic, and fleeting.

Hasn’t that ever happened to you?

TODAY’S LUNCHTIME QUESTION: The Rocky Mountain Progressive Network has delivered a fidelity pledge to lawmakers supporting the Federal Marriage Amendment. To preserve the sanctity of marriage, the legislators must promise that they will not and have not cheated on their partners.

Say you’re a newspaper managing editor of a paper with unlimited resources. The executive editor comes up to you and says she’s got this idea for an investigation: How many senators are cheating on their spouses? A database of how much fidelity you can track down in the most hallowed chamber of Congress. You can use this information as you wish; perhaps cross-referencing it with those who’ve pledged to support the FMA, supposedly out of respect for the sanctity of marriage.

What do you say?

Psych!!

I will not see “The Passion.” Sounds like a pretty awful time. But, to complete my trifecta of utterly trivial posts, I just wanted to say that if Mel Gibson truly wanted to immerse Christians in an understanding of what Jesus suffered through before death, he wouldn’t have made a movie, he’d have made a video game.

For anyone who wants a really pretty free font, or for anyone who doubts they exist, try Gentium. It was made as part of the Master of Arts for Typeface Design at the University of Reading, and is free. It prints as pretty as it reads on screen, and the entire point of it is to have full language support. (Via Ask MetaFilter.)