* If you missed the Simpsons last night (or if like our friend, Brian, you've taken an ethical stand against sub-par, late era episodes of the long running cartoon) they aired a teaser for the feature length Simpsons film during a commercial break. The nature of a teaser is that there's no actual plot of the movie involved, just planned imagery and mood, thus the segment was pretty sparse on actual news about the movie. However, hope springs eternal when it comes to something as beloved as Matt Groening's work. CC is still holding out that something this long in the works will have some early Simpsons caliber smarts behind it.
* Oscar-winner and on-screen gunslinger Jack Palance (pronounced PAL-ance, not pa-LANCE, according to the New York Times obit) passed away over the weekend. News you can use courtesy of the NYT: In addition to being able to do one-arm pushups, Palance also wrote poetry and did pen-and-ink drawings.
* One of our favorite essays so far on Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is David Mendelsohn's analysis in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Mendelsohn nicely picks out the running thread through all of Coppola's work ("spirited young women chafing at social restraints") and the autobiographical nature of preoccupations in his article.
"The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It's a mournful shot of the Queen's state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You'd never guess from this that men's lives—those of the Queen's guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom."Posted by karen at November 13, 2006 12:09 PM