… Here’s the film I made for Darryl’s Hard Liquor & Porn Festival. This three-minute short contains adult themes and content, but no nudity.

Sorry!

It’s not that I thought the pilot episode of NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was particularly bad, but I do think that its very existence is fundamentally wrong.

Has Hollywood so exhausted its supply of original ideas that a television network would dramatize a show that is still on the air? Or does Studio 60 seek to woo an older crowd, specifically the boomers who watched the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players but can no longer relate to the comedy show that hasn’t grown up with them?

Or maybe people are actually interested in the mundane goings-on behind a light entertainment show? Whatever the case can someone please help me understand, because I’m quite honestly baffled here!

Let’s face it, you’re going to be innundated by all things 9/11 today, so I’m only going to second Ed Miller‘s recommendation of United 93, now available on DVD.

Despite some ongoing complaints about the characterization of a German passenger on board the flight, the film managed to do what World Trade Center and Flight 93 couldn’t—not suck.

For the last act of the film I actually felt like I was on board that fateful flight.

Wow.

So I’ve been up since 4am and am now ready to go back to bed. I’d sleep all day if I could but I’ve got an audition to get to at lunchtime. It’s to voice a computer-generated hobgoblin for a feature film called The Spiderwick Chronicles, so I don’t have to memorize any lines, which is good. But I also haven’t a clue how to voice the character, which is bad. Every voice I try in front of the mirror sounds like a weak Peter Lorre imitation, which is about as close as I can get to Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films.

If anyone has any good ideas, leave a comment below I’ll check it before I head out. If I get the gig I’ll give you a percentage!

Pity my poor travel companion… While I had the luxury of a slow, methodical packing day yesterday she was stuck in Hamilton, sweating through a twelve-hour simulated plane crash for an episode of Mayday. Originally she was set to shoot Friday and would have Saturday off to pack with me, but as it turns out the empty runway the production wanted to use at Hamilton International Airport was only available Saturday.

Why?

Because apparently none other than Captain John Travolta had to land his plane there Friday, and didn’t want any cameras or crews around. Like anyone would care.

In the words of Vinnie Barbarino: “Geez…”

If, like me, you saw Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center over the weekend, you’d probably find it hard to believe that the same guy who wrote Salvador and directed Natural Born Killers could even be capable of making such a mediocre film. Chalk it up to these scary times we live in, I guess…

Most of the reviews out there have been glowingly positive, but I suspect that’s more than anything a safety against angry readers who would confuse a bad review of the film with some kind of dismissal of the actual event.

Here’s the truth: WTC is first a mere dramatization of far more compelling documentary footage from inside Tower One, then an only slightly higher stakes version of My Dinner with André, then some really bad schmaltz on par with the retchid M.O.W. about doomed United Flight 93, then finally a feel-good happy ending teaching us that in adversity humans actually help each other… Well, I should certainly hope so!

Oh sorry, did I spoil the ending for you? You probably won’t want to read any further then…

Any film school professor will tell you that if you render your two main characters immobile underneath a pile of rubble then you’d better have some pretty compelling dialogue between them. This movie didn’t. And instead of putting the audience in the middle of the action and showing them the horror of being buried alive we inexplicably cut to the subs, where the victims’ families are at each other’s throats about petty, stupid things. I didn’t feel a lick of compassion for any of them.

I wish now more than ever I made time to see the theatrical feature about Flight 93 while it was still playing… Maybe I was fearful that it would have been just as bad—or worse, just as safe.

Hard to believe, but from about 1pm yesterday until just after 4pm today this actor was—gasp—without representation!

No sooner had I auditioned for a hilarious new American sketch comedy show about office porn and nipple clamps when I received a call from my agent’s assistant, informing me that the new head of Ford Models had decided to shutter the Toronto talent division that very morning—“shutter”, by the way, is showbiz-speak for “firing a bunch of staff and orphaning an entire roster of talent with no prior notice”.

Fortunately my agent is opening up a boutique agency of his own, and he’s bringing me, his star client, the one who currently averages less than one ACTRA gig per year, with him. So if you’re looking for someone to make balloon animals at your kid’s party, be sure to let us know!

I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been a fan of the Harry Potter series. I read a paragraph or so in my local bookstore and couldn’t see what the fuss was about. And the movies? Well, they were faithful to the books, which ain’t necessarily a good thing…

So when I woke up this morning to the supposedly earth-shattering news that hack writer JK Rowling will be killing off two of the main characters in her latest cash-in adventure, it seemed just a tad obvious to me which two will go. Not that I give a rats-ass, mind you… I just wanted to spoil the surprise for all you dumbledorks out there!

Lady, I know just how you feel…

Happy 666 everyone! Hollycrud is celebrating this date by releasing a remake of The Omen. The original is now thirty years old, but it seemed good enough to scare the bejesus out of me when I saw it on video some years later, and I have to say that after watching the trailers for this new version I can’t see anything especially compelling or different about it.

So for the young’uns out there, I’m wondering… Is there any specific rationale for you to see this over the original? Do movies made in the twentieth century have cooties, perhaps? Or is it that you need to see a CG Satan instead of the old-tymey alternative?

If you can’t answer this question maybe you should boycott this shameless attempt at calendar-profiteering, or at least register a complaint on the movie’s MySpace page like I’m going to do now…

Ain’t no justice like internet justice!

Last week Stockholm police raided the offices of The Pirate Bay, the web’s most popular search site for BitTorrents, as most the others have already been shut down by the MPAA.

But that’s not the end of the story. Here’s what happened next:

• In direct response to the raid the website for the Swedish National Police Force was brought down by a massive DoS attack the very next day.
• Over the weekend, surveillance video of the raid was released on YouTube for all to see.
• A mere three days after the raid, the site was back up and 100 percent functional.
• The legality of the raid is now being called into question, as seen in this assembled list of civil rights violations.

Kudos to the folks at The Pirate Bay for winning this important victory in the battle for copyright reform. Hollywood says that file sharing is stealing; why then does it keep making crap that isn’t worth paying for?!