It’s pilot season. And Variety is reporting that Rebecca Romijn has just been cast in ABC’s “Eastwick”, alongside Linsday Price and Jaime Ray Newman and Veronica Cartwright.

Sayeth the industry bible:

“Eastwick” revolves around three women who discover they have mystical powers when a mysterious man comes to town.

I mean, yeah, that’s what John Updike’s book was about, too … kinda …

Seriously, though. How did they pitch this? “It’s ‘Desperate Housewives’, but with Satan! Perfect for the Sunday night block!”

And poor Veronica Cartwright. Twenty-two years after the George Miller movie, here she is spewing cherries all over again …

President’s Day in the U.S., Family Day in Ontario … wow, ain’t nothing going on today. Oh, but “The Simpsons” went high-def last night, and it was pretty splendiferous.

The Onion AV Club has the revamped 16:9 credit sequence available for viewing in this post, if you missed it. Also lots of commenters complaining about the show sucking for the last five to ten years, but that’ll happen any time someone mentions “The Simpsons” on the internet.

(Yeah, I know. Go to it.)

And not a moment too soon.

True story: Late last October, on my way back from the Vienna film festival, I cleverly arranged a seven-hour layover in London so I could dart into the city to stock up on all the British goodies I so dearly love — bakewell tarts, mint Kit Kats, and the like — before catching my flight home.

Because the Piccadilly line train is largely above ground for the airport run, I phoned Kate to give her an update on my whereabouts. I don’t remember the exact content of the conversation, but it was in some way film-festivaly — some stuff about Vienna, and a mention of stopping by the London festival’s offices while I was in town, since that was still running and I’ve made some friends there.

And somewhere, I guess, we talked about “Doctor Who”. Maybe it was that the Christmas special had just been announced; maybe Kate had asked me to pick something Who-related up at Tesco’s, which is more likely. Anyway, there was some chat about that, and then I hung up.

At which point, I noticed the two well-dressed young gentlemen sitting opposite me, staring with what I can only describe as “goggle eyes”.

I nodded a hello. (I am polite, especially on public transit in foreign lands.) They nodded back, and after a moment, the younger one of them leaned forward and asked what seemed like a very important question.

“Are you … the American?”

Continue reading “Are You the American?” →

If you thought the “Star Wars Holiday Special” was as low as George Lucas could go … how about “Star Wars” on stage?

Oh, yes: TV Guide is reporting that Lucas, John Williams and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra are prepping “Star Wars: A Musical Journey”, which will pair clips from all six films with live performances of selections of Williams’ scores. But it’s classy; it’s going to have live narrators!

Yes, that’s right: George Lucas is cribbing ideas from Guy Maddin now. I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

That said, I’d love to hear Isabella Rossellini try to get through the opening crawl of “The Phantom Menace” …

So here we are again with the holidays, and the abrupt stoppage of interesting stuff happening in the world.

But wait! The Onion AV Club saves the day again, with its list of 42 seasonal delights that don’t make us want to bludgeon an elf to death. Or they do, but in a good way.

As always, the comments beneath the article — which, this time, include an intriguing sub-thread about the inescapable darkness of “It’s a Wonderful Life” that echoes Wendell Jamieson’s great New York Times essay — are just as engaging as the piece itself.

And if you don’t come out of this wanting to spin up “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” again, well … let’s just say that won’t be coal you find in your stocking come Thursday morning.

Over at Salon.com, Alex Koppleman has an interesting story about the still-bubbling controversy over Barack Obama’s birth certificate — and why it doesn’t matter that said controversy was debunked months ago.

See, Obama was born in Hawaii, but a very persistent subset of right-wing lunatics insists he wasn’t — the truth, they claim, is that he was actually born in Kenya as part of some elaborate Manchurian Candidate scheme to install a secret Muslim in the White House nearly five decades later. (Which worked out spectacularly well, I have to say.)

You can disprove that story pretty easily, but as Koppleman points out, it doesn’t matter — actual, factual evidence won’t do a thing to change people’s minds on something like this:

“There’s no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody’s mind,” says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, and who holds an undergraduate and a master’s degree in psychology. “The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it … Once you’re committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind.”

I mean, I think these people are just plain nuts — driven by a combination of unacknowledged racism and open rage to reject the results of the election by any means available. The validity of said means is pretty much irrelevant; as we’ve seen in recent years, if you say something often enough, and loudly enough … well, you can get a lot of people to believe it.

Never let it be said that Stephen Harper went down whining. (I mean, that’s pretty much what he’s doing, but let it never be said.)

After attempting to do the one thing capable of uniting the nation’s fragmented opposition parties — taking away public funding for political campaigns, thus ensuring that only the very wealthy would be able to have their voices heard in future elections — Harper stood slack-jawed as his opponents formed a workable coalition and called his bluff: You know, you’re just a minority government. We can take you, little man.

In a very short while, Harper will trek up to the Governor-General’s mansion and ask her to suspend this Parliamentary session for a month or so — as the Star puts it, he’s basically asking for a “time out” to figure out how to crawl back from the brink of revolt.

But here’s the rub: The Governor-General doesn’t have to do that. It’s entirely within her power to declare the coalition valid; constitutionally, that’s how Canada is able to deal with the defeat of a minority government without holding an election. And given the urgency with which Parliament needs to deal with this whole economic crisis, it seems to me that it’d be a lot more responsible to let the coalition get to that immediately, rather than giving Harper’s Conservatives a month to sit on their hands, officially prevented from acting.

But wait, I can hear my non-Canadian readers saying. What the hell is going on up there? Well, it’s a little tough to explain in a few sentences, but the knitblogger who calls herself the Yarn Harlot has put together an excellent summary of the situation without ever using the words “big baby” in reference to Harper. Pretty sure I couldn’t have pulled that off.

Hang on, Canada. It’s gonna be an interesting Christmas.

A 34-year-old Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death yesterday morning as customers overran his store in search of 5 am “Black Friday” bargains.

Okay, we knew this was bound to happen eventually, what with the escalating stories about “those crazy consumers!!!” every year, and the whole clutching, grabbing mob thing that happens whenever people see the words “limited quantities” on a flyer.

It’s still obscene.

That’s all.