Whoa. How did this get greenlit? Visioneers seems like it’s going to be one, two-hour string of non sequiturs. The quirkster film tradition, rung in by the Andersons (PT and Wes) is hitting its baroque phase.

According to New York, Speed Racer is:

like a nightmare in which you’re trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids.

And:

the simple act of watching the trailer on YouTube hypnotized everyone we know into buying a copy of Catcher in the Rye and climbing a water tower.

So of course I’m going to watch it this weekend. I mean, right now. My AIM is officially “away.”

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. because that’s what it says on the other sites.

So Cindy Sherman made herself rich and famous by mugging in private photos, dressed up as other people, subsuming her identity in theirs. It was the art that launched 1000 feminist grad theses. But recently her long-time boyfriend made a doc about being swallowed by her identity as a jet-setting art star. Salon has an interview with him:

For five years he tags along as Sherman attends galas, hobnobs with celebs and collectors and jet-sets around the globe, spending his days as “the person hardly anyone wants to talk to.” The final blow, at least as he presents it, may just be when H-O brings Sherman to see his therapist in an attempt to save their five-year relationship, and the therapist chooses to take her on as a client, jettisoning him. “Even my shrink would rather be with Cindy!”

Via Rape Memo. It gets awesome when the blood starts flowing.

There’s a documentary showing now at Film Forum about Stalags, a fiction genre that flared in Israel in the 1960s and depicted S&M involving concentration camps and Nazis. The movie seems like it’s weak but the subject is fascinating and somehow totally understandable. From Wikipedia, which actually had a more informative write-up than anyone else:

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File this under “stuff I can’t wait to see”: a movie based on the work of/by some of the all time european and american greats of b&w cartooning- Lorenzo Mattotti, Blutch, Charles Burns, and Richard McGuire, as well as two I’d not heard of before (but their work looks pretty amazing) Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo.
 Official Site

Artist/very rich guy Richard Prince just sold a movie:

The American painter and photographer Richard Prince has just sold the rights to a film pitch. The story - which falls somewhere between Lord of the Flies and Lost - follows a group of people who are the last surviving humans on earth. According to Prince, who will be the subject of an exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery this summer, inspiration came from his regular holidays on the Caribbean island of St Barts. “I liked the idea that privilege is turned on its head,” he says. “And when it comes to the fight for survival, clean water becomes more precious than money.”

I guess Prince is just making art about what he knows, and what he knows now is St. Barts, home of the $24 champagne cocktail.

So apparently Ben Stein made this movie called Expelled, which is about how evolution has a stranglehold on education and how intelligent viewpoints are being suppressed. Well, DG hero Pharyngula went to see it and got expelled himself by some aggressive muscle, only, they apparently didn’t recognize his friend … Richard Dawkins, who went on in.

And the atheist gets further confirmation. If you live in Philly, you can rsvp for a screening on 3/27.

Robert Downey Jr continues to ruin his life and the lives of others by playing a white man dressed as a black man in Ben Stiller’s new comedy, Tropic Thunder, which is about a film crew shooting the most expensive Vietnam movie ever.

Thanks to DG superfriend Poofy, for the comparison hilarity

DGSF Todd, via Debbie, sends word today of An American Hippie in Israel, a movie of searing political commentary, violence, nudity, killer mimes, and robots being hit with a giant sledgehammer. It looks like Cavemen on acid. Highly recommended!