Links: Disney and Star Wars, JJ Abrams tease, and White Christmas: The Stage Musical

Mystery

As Bookgasm says, "Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai doesn’t just publish great crime fiction – he writes it." Actually, I haven't read any of it yet, so I'm taking their word for it on the "great" part, but the set up to both of his books (so far) certainly sound great. In Little Girl Lost, "John Blake, an NYU dropout turned PI, is stunned to learn that his high school girlfriend, Miranda, who he thought went to medical school and then on to lead a tame life in the Midwest, actually became a stripper. Even more shocking—she's been murdered."

In the sequel, Songs of Innocence, Blake gets involved with another girl with a seedy occupation, and she winds up dead. According to Bookgasm, "it looks like a suicide, but Blake knows better. Her mother doesn’t believe she offed herself, either, and she wants Blake to look into it. He refuses to take her money, referring her to someone else, but only so he can follow leads without her meddling." Maybe it's the great reviews about the writing style; maybe it's that Blake sounds like just the kind of pathetic hero I'd like to see catch a break, but I'm looking forward to checking this series out.

Horror

My favorite ghost story is A Christmas Carol and I'm always excited to hear about a new version of it. And I'd expect to be extra excited to hear that Disney is doing an animated feature based on it. I already watch Mickey's Christmas Carol every December as part of a massive Christmas Carol marathon and I'm willing to add another version to the list. Unfortunately, it's going to be a Robert Zemeckis-directed, motion-capture, CGI movie like The Polar Express. Even more unfortunately, it's going to star Jim Carrey as Scrooge and all the ghosts. The only way this could work is for Carrey to pull off the acting job of his life and give each character distinctive personalities rather than play them as the goofy caricatures that I expect he will. And even then Zemeckis is going to have to work equally as hard to have the characters not be as creepy as the ones in The Polar Express.

The teaser trailer that ran before Transformers for the J.J. Abrams movie is causing quite a stir. IMDB isn't at all helpful, revealing only that the fake working title is Cloverfield. A couple of websites have sprung up that folks thought might be related to it, but Abrams denies that, saying that the real movie site is 1-18-08.com.

Science Fiction

I love the steampunk, and Jay Lake's novel Mainspring about the world's being run by a gigantic clockwork that's about to run down is just begging to be made into a movie that I want to see on opening night.

This is rumor, but The Disney Blog is linking to supposed details about an upgraded film for Disney-MGM's Star Tours attraction. TDB's John Frost says he's also "hearing rumblings of improved relations between George Lucas and the Walt Disney Company" and speculates that that could possibly mean a whole Star Wars land at the Disney-MGM park. How cool would that be?

Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me

Besides A Christmas Carol, my two favorite Christmas movies are Ernest Saves Christmas and White Christmas. A while back, I heard about a theatrical version of White Christmas and wondered what force on Earth could possibly make me go see a version of it that didn't have Bing, Danny, Rosemary, and Vera-Ellen (not to mention Irving Berlin) to carry me through my annual anger over Betty Haynes' knee-jerk rejection of Bob Wallace. Mark Evanier let his curiosity get the better of him and paid the price. For which I'm thankful, because now my curiosity is sated too without my having had to endure it myself.