Star of the original series Kyle MacLachlan is planning on leaving his current gig as Orson on Desperate Housewives and creating Twin Peaks webisodes that will hopefully put the franchise back on the map.

In the past decade or so, FOX has taken loads of criticsm for canceling quality shows, many of which are still fondly talked about years later, including Firefly and Arrested Development. The treatment CBS gave Twin Peaks 18 years ago is certainly comparable. The first season of the show was nothing short of amazing, and the second season started off just as well. Part way through however, the makers of the show were pressured into revealing the solution to the mystery that hung in the background of the entire series. After this, ratings declined sharply and the show was then cancelled.

It is disappointing that David Lynch is not expected to be involved, because it was the Lynchian touches that made parts of the original series so unique. That said, the show was cancelled far before it should have been, and the concept of digging it up once more is very exciting.

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For me, this looks impressive. Scorsese has been at the helm of some very dark and visceral movies throughout his career, but this one looks to be incredibly  suspensful, a quality he hasn’t often strived for.

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Ah, yes.  With all the painfully vapid crap polluting the tube these days, I never understood why Futurama, a legitimately entertaining show with a sizeable fanbase, was left languishing in the TV graveyard.  What’s more, the fact that the post-Fox DVD specials were every bit as smart and funny as the series itself showed that the cartoon still had some life left in it.

Well, in a surprising turn of events a group of television executives managed to extract their crania from the opposite end of the body long enough to make a decent decision.  The consequence is that Futurama will be back on our screens at some point in mid-2010.  While Fox have retained the option to broadcast the first run, Comedy Central will likely be the ones airing the twenty-six new episodes.

There are numerous nuggets of good news peppered throughout this story, but here are a few of the most promising:

Voice actors Billy West (who played Philip Fry), Katey Sagal (Leela) and John DiMaggio (Bender) have all signed on to return.

…

Writing has already begun on the show; Groening said he was inspired by the “Star Trek” movie this summer enough that the updated “Futurama” may take a similar tact to explain the launch of this run.

Beyond that, Groening said he and Cohen already have a pile of potential episode storylines that they never got around to producing during “Futurama’s” original incarnation.

“David and I have ideas that we knocked around before we even began the first series,” Groening said. “And we haven’t gotten to everything yet.”

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While Sarah Palin, who apparently still exists, may have spoiled the surprise a little while back, it’s still good to hear confirmation that Stephen Colbert will be taking his act to Baghdad.  Here’s a snippet from the Variety.com report:

Stephen Colbert will broadcast four shows next week from Baghdad, where he says he’ll be “Bob Hoping” it for the troops.

 …

 The series of shows, each to be taped in front of an audience of about 450 troops, have been dubbed “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando.” It’s the first time anyone has broadcast from Iraq for a USO tour.

You know, this is the first time in a minute that something genuinely interesting has happened in television.  Colbert’s one of the few fellows on the small screen who can bring the funny on a consistent basis, and throwing him in the midst of this sort of situation can only heighten the comic tension.  It looks, however, as if it’s not going to be an all-out laugher from start to finish.

Colbert said he feels a “special guilt” and responsibility to keep the soldiers’ story alive because of the political nature of his program. The comedian is also guest editing next week’s issue of Newsweek magazine. (A mock-up sits on his desk with the question “Remember Iraq?” splashed across the cover.)

“I don’t want to forget that people are struggling through the things that I sometimes make jokes about,” he said.

As much I’d like to jump on that comment and launch a curse-laden mini-rant in his direction, I can actually see his point.  It might be a byproduct of the fact that Maury is the closest thing to news I watch on a daily basis, but I plumb forgot there was a war going on.  With all the talk of recessions, depressions and piggy sniffles, that dusty clusterfuck clean went out of my mind.

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Well, I think we all saw this coming.  The word on the web is that we’ve already had our first “Bruno”-related lawsuit, and the movie is still some way from hitting the big screen.  A lady by the name of Richelle Olson claims that she now needs a wheelchair or cane to move her litigious self from place to place due to an incident involving Sacha Baron Cohen.

The story, as far as we know it, is this: SBC, playing the role of Bruno, somehow made his way into a charity bingo tournament in Palmdale, California and ended up calling the numbers.  Naturally, the mood soon turned sour as Bruno began launching f-biscuits left, right and centre, and before long the aforementioned Richelle Olson decided it was time to get involved.  Olson, whose age and alibi for playing bingo have not been revealed, struggled to pull the mic from Bruno, and claims to have subsequently been attacked by the camera crew for “at least a minute”.

As the story goes, she then ran from the stage and, in a manner not described in any detail, fell and cracked her nut open on a concrete slab.  Somehow, the alleged brain bleeding which ensued left her with injuries which have been valued at more than $25,000.

I would make some sort of closing comment, but I think my tone of accusatory assholery made the point well enough.

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Good grief.  It seems as if this is really going to happen.  You may not think it a particularly big deal that someone’s going to make a Waldo movie, but you’re ignoring the manifold steps involved in such a project.  At some point a man or woman entered a room and told a group of people that they thought it would be a good idea to make a flick about a stripy-jumpered chump who has the good grace to hide himself in a crowd.  Those people agreed.  They then approached another group of people and asked them for millions of dollars to create a movie about the aforementioned twat in a hat.  They also agreed.  At some point they will actually make a movie about this bespectacled lurker, and on its release many thousands of people will spend up to eleven dollars to watch it.  A significant percentage of those people will enjoy the movie and subsequently spend up to thirty dollars purchasing the DVD or Blu-ray so that they can find Waldo all over again.

The preceding paragraph may have been the dullest thing since Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m sure you can appreciate that it took very little time, effort and money to create.  This movie, meanwhile, will require many months and an eight-figure sum of money to complete.  If you do decide to head to the multiplex for this one, you may like to spice th experience up by playing a game of “Where’s the fuckwit?” in the pre-film period.  The answer is “every seat in the theatre”.  Including yours.  But seriously, have a good time with it.

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I may not be the most objective fellow when it comes to matters relating to 50 Cent, and it’s the same case for many fans of the genre formerly known as hip-hop.  The problem, you see, is that I’ve been a champion of rap since my earliest exposure to the music in the mid-nineties, and as such I’m expected to stand up for it whenever the situation calls for such actions.  While I often make an effort, it’s increasingly difficult to justify my relationship with it, much like dating a girl who has gained twenty pounds since you first met her.  Folks like Mr. Cent only make my job harder, what with the glorification of violent crime, drug dealing and liberal use of the f.

Thankfully, I don’t have to speak for Fiddy et al. when they make a foray into the world of acting.  While a good number of rappers are equally at ease as actors, there are some whose performances are about as impressive as 2009’s hip-hop releases.  You can count Curtis Jackson among that number.  The following snippet from Variety.com doesn’t paint the prettiest picture for the film either.

The drama concerns two homicide detectives who find themselves caught in the crossfire of a gang-related homicide and a group of dirty cops. Jackson plays a gang-banger who becomes a reluctant informant.

Miller went to film school in Grand Rapids and is making his directing debut on “Crossfire.”

So you’ve got a wooden lead, a horribly clichéd script, a first-time director and Chris Lighty, widely renowned as one of the preeminent assholes of the music industry, involved in this project.  Superb.  I’ll be skipping the cinematic release/straight-to-DVD launch of Crossfire, but I will gladly pay for anyone’s ticket/DVD rental if they think they can watch it all the way through without harming themselves in boredom.

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If you’ve read any of my posts thus far, you’ll be painfully aware of the fact that I am very much a Hollywood outsider.  The industry, insofar as it can be called an industry rather than simply a loose agglomeration of assholes, makes as much sense to me as Memento after I slept through the first thirty minutes.  As such, I’m never quite sure why certain people pop up on my screen time and again when they have, as far as I can see, no unique selling point or discernible talent.

In Who Are You and Why?, I’ll be dissecting various Hollywood characters from my own perspective of contented ignorance, and it is my hope that in doing so that I can make a case for or against their career in showbusiness as a justifiable means of employment.  Up first is a figure whose pop-culture presence has confused and irritated me for some time.

Quick note about the rules: I’m not allowed to carry out even so much as a Google search on the “celebrity” in question prior to penning these pieces.  Once I’ve thrown together a decent number of these quick shots I’ll index them as a Wikipediaesque catalogue of opinion and misinformation.

Lindsay Lohan

Where do I know her from?
Nowhere.  That is to say that I have yet to see Lindsay Lohan play a part in any cinematic or televisual event I have watched either in whole or in part.  I am, however, aware that she appeared in a Disney flick some time back, and subsequently showed up in a movie called Mean Girls, or something similar.

Why is she famous?
As far as I can tell, her rise to prominence almost exactly coincided with the appearance of a healthy pair of chesticles.  At least, I can’t seem to remember a time she was mentioned by anyone I knew without the word “breasts” or some synonym appearing closely thereafter.  That was evidently sufficient to turn her from “some chick” to a minor celebrity, and once the tabloid media adopted her as a figure of interest, her fame was a done deal.  Even when she hit the celebrity wall and dropped forty-something pounds to become a ribcage in sunglasses, the paparazzi continued to pursue her boobless, assless ass relentlessly.  As is so often the case, the pressure of upholding a lavish lifestyle with no career obligations became too much, and the clusterfuck that was her existence became a soap opera.  With reports of her substance binges, unpaid prostitutory activity and casual lesbianism popping up on a daily basis, I still continue to wonder why the piss the media nominated this befreckled gingernut as the new person we’re supposed to give a shit about.

Why is she?
Read above.  The tabloids, gossip rags and celebrity sites are obliged to find a way to fill the gaps between adverts, and more often than not they do so by jawing about men and women who are famous for being famous.  It’s a shame they’ve forgotten about Lohan’s beginnings as the vehicle for a pair of breastesses, though, since the absence of such chestal endowments should mean the absence of public interest in her comings and goings.  Furthermore, with so many actresses with considerably more mammarian real estate around, why are folks still fixated on these nonexistent assets?  My advice to the media: Find new boobs and move on.

If anybody out there has any good idea why Lindsay Lohan or any of the individuals featured in Who are you and why? deserve to be famous, please let us know by dropping a comment below.

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Here are the facts as revealed by Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment today:

• The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will hit U.S. theatres in December 2011, about a month after it reaches the rest of the world.
• It’ll also be released in 3-D where available.
• Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook are all said to be involved.

Here’s why I’m not sold on the idea that Tintin is going to put up the numbers the studios are expecting: I don’t know anybody that claims any fondness for Tintin, either as a comic book or as a cartoon.  Why, then, will people suddenly lose their shit with joy and rush to the theatres for the motion capture release?  We’re told repeatedly that Tintin is a character beloved of children and adults anywhere, but the evidence simply doesn’t back that up.

Take French class, for instance.  If, like me, you studied the language to any level at school, you inevitably would have been presented with a Tintin comic book for perusal at some point.  At my school, at least, this was not a popular teaching tool.  Rather than thanking the gods that we were given something other than verb tables or Le Monde to look at, the word “Tintin” was invariably met with a collective groan from the class.  That, to me, really says something about its popularity.  If a comic book is so dull that a classroom of twelve-year-olds would rather do real work than read it, you’re probably not talking about a top-level franchise.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ll be giving the ginger Belgian and his goofy dog a miss in 2011.  Wake me up when they adapt Asterix (again).

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This is good news indeed.  Any movie involving Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is guaranteed to be at least moderately entertaining, and with a premise as accommodating as this movie’s, it should be better still.  For those not up to speed, messrs Pegg and Frost are set to shoot a movie simply called “Paul” which centres on a pair of road-tripping sci-fi fanatics who somehow stumble upon an alien who has escaped from Area 51.  Today’s news confirms that the alien in question, Paul, will be voiced by Seth Rogen.

I know previous collaborations are no indication of how a new movie will fare, but  you can’t help but think that “Paul” will be leaking win all over the theatre.  From Variety:

Pegg and Frost starred together previously in the Working Title-produced “Hot Fuzz” and “Shaun of the Dead.”

Rogen last worked with Mottola [He’ll be directing, by the way. - C.Y.] on “Superbad.”

Tell me that doesn’t tickle your movie-going pickle right there.  Seriously, tell me if it’s true.  I have a history of overhyping comedies on the basis of a strong cast, so there’s a chance I’m overlooking some small detail which could derail this film.

Universal and Working Title Films have added Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Jane Lynch to the cast of “Paul.”

There it be.  Let’s hope Jane Lynch can balance them out.

So, what are your hopes for this film?  Let us know what you’re thinking by dropping a comment below. 

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