low culture

Dynamite, get it?
Existing screenwriters/directors to whom Napoleon Dynamite writer/director Jared Hess owes a debt:
Alexander Payne, for his usage of the “everyday”, contemporary America as a cinematic template.
Wes Anderson, for imbuing the quirkiness of characters with a celebratory yet sentimental quality—though not going nearly as overboard as Anderson ultimately does in this regard.
Todd Solondz, for nastily ridiculing the above notions of “the everyday” and “those who are quirky”, as well as “those who are lunkheads”, “jocks”, or otherwise boring as all fuck; knocking them all down a peg or two, and somehow giving an anti-hero hailing from the geeky dregs of mundane life a reason for the filmgoer to actually empathize with them.
Chris Smith (of American Movie and Home Movie fame), for successfully (and effectively) conflating such ridicule and empathy.
Todd Haynes, for utterly nailing the ability to appropriate for appropriation’s sake.
Adam Shankman (of Bringing Down the House infamy), for relying on some really regrettable racial stereotypes. Wow…whites, blacks and latinos are different, get it? Haha!

Another weekend, another new crop of films to consider seeing…but how to sift through the varied options and spend your hard-earned $10.25 wisely?

Thanks to media consolidation, however, there’s a new option, one where you don’t have to spend any money at all. In fact, the studios don’t even have to spend anything either if they just make these movies with C-list stars for a D-List cable network. Big spending producers, read on and prepare to save your millions.

	The Terminal Starring Yes, Dear‘s Anthony Clark and Kyra Sedgwick
	The Stepford Wives Starring Brooke Shields
	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Starring Quintuplet‘s Ryan Pinkston, as Harry
	The Day After Tomorrow Starring 7th Heaven‘s Jeremy London, and featuring Tony Danza as his concerned father
	The Chronicles of Riddick Starring Charlie Sheen and pop/R&B star Brandy
	Before Sunset Starring Sean Astin and Neve Campbell as lovers reunited
	Troy Starring Ryan Seacrest as Achilles, and Eric Bana

Tom Hanks as Viktor Navorski…. Victor Navasky as, well, Victor Navasky
As reported here earlier, using the names of writers for movie characters is a growing pseudo imaginary trend in Hollywood. The creeping influence of literature is probably unavoidable, since screenwriters, as a group, are such a well-read lot. (A West Coast friend of ours actually called us once from Book Soup to tell us Brett Ratner was buying the collected works of Isaac Bashevis Singer—and this was way before that writer’s centennial! And, presuming the books were in Hebrew, the director even attempted to read them from back-to-front!)
Anyway, the trend continues with the release of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, in which pink-cheeked national treasure Tom Hanks plays a character named after pinko Nation editorial director and publisher, Victor Navasky. (This is not the first time Navasky has seen his name named on film: he’s also the nomenclatural inspiration for Greg Kinnear’s character in You’ve Got Mail.)

Slated to appear on the New York Times’ Corrections page, June 18, 2004:

Because of an editing error, an op-ed by Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s Opinion section, “Smack That Cheney-Bot!“, accidentally revealed that the Vice President is a robot. The corrected article should have merely implied this fact. The Times regrets the error.