Category: Shallow

Having trouble deciding whether to go see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Mona Lisa Smile this weekend? If artist Luis Royo had his way, you could see both at the same time.
Royo is just one of the amazing artists in this gallery of celebrities re-imagined as fantasy/sci-fi heros. All the A-listers are here: George Clooney, Courtney Cox, Isabella Rossellini, and Will Smith all come in for the rippling pecs-swords-and-dragons-treatment.
It’s pretty great. Of course, once Pat Kingsley gets wind of this, she’ll probably complain that Jodie Foster, for example can be drawn from much more flattering angles.
My favorite? Steven Spielberg.

Ask any farmer what to do with a litter of kittens you don’t want and he’ll tell you to snuff ’em out right away. You can’t be sentimental: you don’t need all those mewling, hungry mouths around the barn, and you sure as hell don’t want another generation of strays spraying up the place and picking fights.
The same can be said for Web sites: some are best put down in their first weeks. Take Agora Magazine, a downy newborn culture and politics magazine—not a blog, never call Agora a blog—so young, its eyes aren’t even open yet.
But it’s claws are already out and it’s more than ready to scrap.
Started by Sam Munson the nephew of second generation neo-Con ne’er-do-well John “Norman’s Son” Podhoretz, whose New York Post columns are the second funniest read in the paper after Garfield, Agora takes a cranky Nabokov quote at the top of its page as its mission statement:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks

It’s all pretty much downhill from there.

‘SIX FEET’ SNAGS AMERICAN BEAUTY
“Four years after she starred in American Beauty, Mena Suvari is back again with the film’s Oscar-winning writer Alan Ball as the newest cast member on his HBO series, Six Feet Under.”
Alan, look out—there’s a shark! Good thing you jumped it. Phew.

Brett Ratner, Hollywood’s “hyperactive, self-promoting no-talent” (per the geniuses at LA Innuendo) is getting serious. Seriously serious! Serious—to the max! Spielberg doing Schindler’s List serious! Seriously.
The auteur behind the reportedly hilarious “Asian people talk funny/Black people love the dance” epics Rush Hour 1, 2, and 3 and the cynical stab at a “perennial” holiday favorite (annual Christmas-time broadcast=ka-ching!) The Family Man is set to direct something called Josiah’s Canon. (Don’t even get me started on Ratner’s hubristic remake of Michael Mann‘s Manhunter.)
According to Done Deal, Josiah’s Canon tells the jeering—I mean searing—tale of:

A Holocaust survivor [who] leads the world’s foremost team of bank robbers. The criminal mastermind sets his sights on an supposedly impenetrable bank in Switzerland, which holds special appeal: It purportedly houses gelt deposited by Jews prior to the Holocaust.

Awesome! It’s The Italian Job with Jews! Topkapi with yarmulkas! I can hear the film’s big catch-phrase already: “Zai gezunt, motherfucker!”
Rat, might I recommend this guy for the lead? He’s already done the Hasidic Jew thief thing.

P. DIDDY’LL BE ‘RAISIN’ HELL ON BROADWAY THIS SPRING by Michael Reidel
“Rap mogul Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs will star in a revival of ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ this spring on Broadway, The Post has learned.”
Weirdly, Jerry Blank will be co-starring as Mama.
Let’s hope these plans will just dry up… or explode.

Paul Thomas Anderson and Lars von Trier fall in punch-drunk love as they interview each-other in the new issue of Black Book.
Here’s an amusing excerpt (reproduced on Greg Mariotti’s super-duper PTA fan site, Cigarettes & Coffee):

PTA: If Bush invited you to the White House, would you go?
LVT: It wouldn’t make it easier for me to sit in a plane.
PTA: But we knock you out, give you a couple of pills, everything’s over, we wheel you into the car.
LVT: I’m sure Bush has the power to bring me to the White House if he really wants to.
PTA: But if Bush called you and said, “I want you to come to the White House, talk to me about what you’re saying,” would you go?
LVT: Uh, no. [laughs] You?
PTA: Absolutely. I heard that Clinton loved Boogie Nights, and that really made me excited. It made me like him very much. And then they actually requested a print of Magnolia.
LVT: We sent Breaking the Waves, I think.
PTA: To the White House?
LVT: For Clinton, or his daughter, whatever. They just can’t go down to a video store; it’s just impossible–it’s too far from the White House.
PTA: I don’t know though. Clinton used to like to get out of the White House a lot. He would take night trips to McDonald’s, and stuff like that. I think he wanted to get out of the house.
LVT: Compared to Bush, Clinton seemed like a good guy, right? He was playing saxophone.
PTA: He was playing saxophone, he was chasing pussy, I mean that’s the kind of president you’d like.

Von Trier’s Dogville opens in the U.S. on March 19th.

“Have you ever seen Ann Coulter in person? It’s like seeing a rat. It’s like, ewwww!” —Tina Fey, quoted by Page Six

“He was just caught like a rat.” —Major General Odierno
“[D]uring the search a spider hole was detected…”—General Sanchez
“[F]or operational purposes these locations were identified as Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.”—ibid.
“Breakthrough Capped a Renewed Effort to Ferret Out Leads”—New York Times sub-head.
“[O]ne council member said was filled with ‘rats and mice‘…” —Ian Fisher
“On Saturday night, I stuffed myself on lamb chops and potato pancakes at a holiday party at the home of Don and Joyce Rumsfeld.”—William Safire
“[I]f the pot broke or cracked, the guerrilla could be attacked by poisonous spiders or snakes…”—ibid.
Sidebar: I think I know someone who’s happy about all these critters in the news today.

So, Outkast‘s “Hey Ya!” is now officially the new Kool and the Gang’s “Celebrate,” right?
From The New York Observer‘s “Power Punk” call to arms to the music behind commercials for Bravo‘s Celebrity Poker Showdown to the soundtrack of this Times ‘Sunday Styles’ article, to being embraced by Polaroid, the song is more ubiquitous than Cris Judd at the Playboy Mansion. As soon as the sheet music is available, you’ll be treated to the spectacle of your Aunt Mitzy chanting “Shake it like a Polaroid picture!” along with the awful band at the next wedding or Bar Mitzvah you’re dragooned into. Eventually, you may even be able to get Andre and Big to play at the gig themselves.
Good times, indeed.

Did you ever think you’d live to see the day that The New York Post would have a more restrained cover than The New York Daily News?