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a href=”http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=27127827″>BUTTERKNIFE 1: Plastic Hassle

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• Butterknife premiered here. Joe talked a little bit about the ingredients of his new web series here.
• Every single little bit of Sundance coverage lives here.
• Aaron Katz’ Spirit Award-nominated Quiet City hits DVD.
• Daniel Day Lewis and Diablo Cody take their Oscar campaigns in their own hands, as worries mount that a split vote will net the latter’s film an award that no one thinks it deserves.
• 5 Things The Cloverfield Monster Could Symbolize.
• Wong Kar Wai’s new movie is shuttled down the calendar.
• Stop Loss is added to the SXSW lineup.
• Looking for metaphors in The Bourne Identity.
• Did MAGNOLIA anticipate Tom Cruise’s future weirdness, or has Tom Cruise become a parody of a character that was intended as a departure?
• Trailers: Son of Rambow, 88 Minutes, Smart People
• Another print film critic’s job is eliminated.
• Joss Whedon whines about Weird Science.
• The Moldy Peaches played their Juno love theme on The View, and it was weird.
• Photos from the set of Gus Van Sant’s Milk.
• Vince Vaughn can’t let Swingers go.
• Perhaps Peter Bogdanovich exaggerated Tom Petty’s cross-demo appeal just a tad?
• Karina’s gonna spend the night with prosumer video and song.
• Michel Gondry gives us the latest in meta marketing.
• Will the new Hobbit movies be totally new with Guillermo Del Toro at the reigns?
• Ernest Borgnine as an Amish father? We’re there.
• Heath Ledger and the Dark marketing conundrum.
• Alain Resnais, by Blur.
• The origins of Woody Allen’s favorite typeface.
• Eight Val Lewton movies are being remade.
• Zooey Deschanel is the cutest thing ever.
• On our podcast, we bitch about the alienating effect of Sundance. Karina also talked about Sundance on a CNET podcast.
• Chris is still hung up on Amelie, even if she doesn’t really exist anymore.
• Juno finally has a gross to match its press release.
• There might not even be a Wet Hot American Summer musicals, but Chris is against it.

Under discussion:

The Goonies  (1985)

Mystic Pizza  (1988)

Con Air  (1997)

Wet Hot American Summer  (2001)

I’m sure that David Wain was just joking when he told MTV Movie’s Blog that there’s been talk of a musical adaptation of Wet Hot American Summer. But that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it in depth. At first I was really excited. From the very beginning I’ve loved both the movie and its soundtrack (which I had to hand craft, since an actual WHAS album doesn’t exist) and would definitely be interested in seeing the whole thing acted out on stage. But now I’m realizing its a bad idea, and I’ve included that van crash scene as a metaphor for the concept. Sure, I would love to see the movie acted out on stage, but in the same way I loved watching my buddy play “Data” in an off-Broadway musical version of The Goonies. And in the same way I’d love to see the Con Air and Mystic Pizza musicals starring the fictional Jenna Maroney (winner of a NYC film critics award for Best Actress in a Movie Based on a Musical Based on a Movie). But is it something I can see really being any good? Not at all.

As much as I can imagine a singing can, and as much as I’d love to hear Paul Rudd sing a song about “Lindsay” tasting like burgers or about what a pain it is to clean up after himself or about his journal (pronounced gurnal — and rhymes with infernal, in case the lyricist is reading), I just couldn’t see all the characters, subplots and jokes making their way sufficiently onto the stage. And as the van crash is my most favorite gag in the film, I’d hate to see it unused (or used, since it just wouldn’t work the right way). Then again, if Wain and company could find a way to make it all fresh and have new, more theatrically appropriate humor, I would be first in line. And speaking of new material, how exciting is it that Wain (hopefully telling the truth) says he might shoot some kind of “new addendum” to the film for an upcoming special edition DVD? I’m suddenly not feeling as sorry that I lent my original WHAS DVD to a friend who never returned it.

Anyway, I don’t know if this is a coincidence, or if it’s even worth sharing, but tonight I was already planning to fondle some sweaters fondue with cheddar. I swear it’s true!

Under discussion:

Amélie  (2001)

Dirty Pretty Things  (2002)

The Da Vinci Code  (2006)

Priceless  (2008)

For those of us who are still completely enamored with Audrey Tautou in Amelie, seeing the actress in Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless (original title: Hors de prix) could possibly be unsettling (the old international trailer is embedded above, but you can find the new American-release trailer on Moviefone). In the film she plays a character who is the very opposite of Amelie. She’s a shallow gold digger rather than a selfless romantic, the whore rather than the Madonna. She’s also sexy rather than cute, which is only a matter of antithesis in the movies.

Is this going against type? Or does she not necessarily have a star persona to begin with? After falling in love with Tautou in Amelie, I watched every one of the actress’ films available in the States, and I quickly realized that she rarely resembles Amelie. Only in Happenstance, which was sold in some markets as Amelie 2, was she close to acting like that beloved, iconic character. And she certainly wasn’t all whimsy and sainthood in either of her English-language films, The Da Vinci Code and Dirty Pretty Things. So why do I still have this idea of Tautou being Amelie in the same way we think of Chaplin as the Tramp or any of the other many movie stars who consistently play(ed) themselves and/or a recognizable persona throughout their career? Why do I expect her to be a sweet, innocent type in every new role?

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