MysteryAs
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.
HorrorMy 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 FictionI 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 MeBesides
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.
. [/Film]
, The Incredibles
) is all set to direct Mission: Impossible 4 based on an idea by JJ Abrams and Tom Cruise (who are also producing the film). I really hope Bird gets some story input too. If he does, there's no reason that this shouldn't easily be the best in the series. (About the image accompanying this post: I've got no idea if the M:I team from the last movie will be featured in the next one. I just needed to see Maggie Q again. [Empire]
Mystery
