Hurwitz and Hayden Talk BTTF

Hurwitz and Hayden talk to Bleeding Cool about their plans for the big Back to the Future reboot.

HS: And now to spite them we are doing Back to the Future. With Zac Efron as Marty McFly, and Tim Allen as the Doc.

Bleeding Cool: You know I’m going to put that in the headline, right?

HS: We know.

JH: It’s a Mini Cooper now, not a DeLorean.

Big Monday Links

(some links stolen from the great zunguzungu)

* It’s bad enough that I’ll never be asked to reboot Back to the Future—but it’d be utterly intolerable if the gig goes to two guys I went to high school with. Jon says it’s all a big misunderstanding but you know he’s just trying to throw me off the scent.

* There is no fresh start: The Return of Mad Men and the End of TV’s Golden Age. A metafictional reading of the series. And for fun: The Foreign Language of Mad Men: Do the characters really talk like people from the ’60s?

* Let us start with the obvious: in the entire decade or so of airport security since the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist.

* Arundhati Roy: “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.”

* In his novel “2066: Red Star Over America,” Han, China’s premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike. The seas around New York rise, the Twin Towers crumble and the U.S. is plunged into pandemonium. You had me at “Go.” Via io9.

* Do professors get paid too much for too little work? Obviously. More here.

* Related: “College Professors Demand Right to Be Mean.”

* Facebook asserts trademark on word “Book.” Can’t see that being controversial.

* It must be an election year, because suddenly the Obama administration is talking about the environment.

* Extreme weather events over the past decade have increased and were “very likely” caused by manmade global warming, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change said on Sunday. “Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Research used physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations to link extreme rainfall and heat waves to global warming,” Reuters reports. “It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming,” said the study. Why didn’t anybody warn us!

* Government spending is good in a recession? Why didn’t anyone tell us!

* Why is horseracing even allowed? Via MeFi.

* Rules: This is a very specific contest. Don’t tell us why you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.

* If They Directed It: The Hunger Games. I don’t think anything I’ve written on Twitter has gotten as many retweets as my brief reading of series as a utopia.

* Imagining The Wire Season Six.

* On not calling Rich Santorum “crazy.”

* Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes up his visit to the wonderful conference I was at last weekend, ICFA 2012.

A highlight of ICFA was China Miéville’s talk “On Monsters.” I am a fan of Miéville’s work; The City and the City is one of my favorite books. His narratives are always beautifully written as well as philosophically challenging. Besides possessing an astonishing vocabulary (he sends me to the dictionary, and makes me wonder how they ever gave me a PhD), he is a writer widely read in theory — though his books never turn into allegories for lit crit. They always trace problems, and stay away from anything easy. Miéville brought up Quentin Meillassoux and speculative realism, for example, during his paper (dismissively: he is not a fan of SR or object oriented philosophy, which surprised me). China’s presentation started off as straightforward account of how the uncanny might be broken into various subcategories: the ab-canny, the sur-canny, the sub-canny, the post-canny, the para-canny, and onwards. His account began seriously but spiralled into a proliferative joke. His point was that classification is not analysis, and that such a “taxonomic frenzy” (as he called it) mortifies: “the drive to translate useful constructs into foundations for analysis is deadly,” because it violently takes away the potency and possibility of the terms it organizes. What was interesting to me, though, is that China’s talk performed something, um, para-canny (right beside itself, there but unseen) that I’ve also learned from studying medieval encyclopedists: taxonomic frenzy might produce a desiccated system of emplacement in which everything gets filed into a cabinet and drained of its vitality. Or it might actually be so creative in its proliferative energy and so limned by the necessity of its own failure that it undermines its own rigidity in the very process of articulation, becoming an envitalizing and innovative act — an act of writing — rather than a system of deadening inscription. China’s multiplication of canniness had a power that he walked away from, I think: why abandon your monster like that?

* Honoring the 20th anniversary of Apollo 18 the only possible way: interactive fiction.

* This American Life: What kind of ideology?

* “He Was a Crook”: Longform.org remembers Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.

* Haiti: Where did the money go?

* Support for Afghan War falls. Support for NC anti-gay amendment rises.

A recent Elon University poll found that 58 percent of North Carolinians oppose the amendment, with 38 in favor of it. That poll surveys adults statewide, while the WRAL News poll includes the results only of likely voters.

Despite the broad amendment support in the WRAL News poll, only 37 percent of voters said same-sex couples deserve no legal recognition in North Carolina, according to the poll.

So you have no idea what you’re voting for and won’t bother to find out. Got it.

* Because the 2012 campaign hasn’t been tedious enough: 2016.

* Trayvon Martin and the history of lynching. The Corporations Behind the Law That May Let Trayvon Martin’s Killer Go Free. On Trayvon Martin as innocent victim.

* Why Obama’s Healthcare Law Is Constitutional. Absolutely everything you need to know about health reform’s Supreme Court debut. What the Supreme Court Could Do About Obamacare, Explained. Legal experts: Court won’t strike down ‘Obamacare.’

* If I didn’t know better I’d say this little video has some sort of message.

* MLA Job Information List data back to 1965.

* Infographic of the night: Doomsday Predictions Debunked.

* The headline reads, “UC review backs use of pepper spray on protesters.” Huh! I really thought they’d give themselves hell.

Referring to pepper spray, he wrote: “A few focused applications on the crowd that blocked the officers near the row of bushes would likely have cleared that area very quickly, with few additional baton strikes.”

You’re a university, for Christ’s sake. My god.

* What could possibly go wrong? Has Obama put us on a permanent war footing, even in peacetime?

* And what could possibly go wrong? Tacocopter could be the unmanned future of food delivery. Some should have read more Jenny Rhee.

Friday Night

* What it’s like to be a woman on the Internet. Via MeFi.

* Suffer the little children: An unprecedented increase in the deportation of undocumented immigrants has left an estimated 5,100 children languishing in U.S. foster homes — a troubling figure that could triple in the coming years, according to a November report from a New York-based advocacy group. Another Obama triumph!

* Democracy in America just isn’t working very well lately.

Public attention has focused on the new state photo ID requirements. But many other new and not-so-new devices have been instituted across the nation. These include: cutbacks in the days available for pre-Election Day voting, making it harder to assist voters with registration, eliminating Election Day registration and requiring proof of citizenship to either register or vote.

* Hometown hero watch: A brief history of Harold and Kumar 3D.

* Yes, X-Men: Second Class is going to be a thing.

* Beware the black money grift.

* And if you’re hiding from E.T., please, remember to turn off the lights.

Wednesday Morning Papers Didn’t Come

* And now they’ve taken away the Big Bang, too.

* The Internets have gone crazy with the happy news that Prop 8 has been overturned. Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gays and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.

* The president would have you believe that today is his birthday. Don’t be fooled! Wake up, sheeple!

* Arrested Development movie “half-done.” I half-believe it!

* Wyclef Jean to run for president of Haiti.

* A Very Harold and Kumar Inception.

* And Edge of the American West has your tragic political dare of the day:

Modern Republicans can’t possibly oppose both the Dred Scott decision and the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which reverses it.

[quiet weeping]

All the Links

* Does the Daily Show have a women problem?

* Democracy Now covers the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

* Elaine Marshall already within one point of Richard Burr.

* The elephant in the room: Republicans want the economy to fail.

* Democrats still pretending they’ll pass climate legislation. It’s adorable.

* Because you demanded it: A Harold & Kumar 3 script synopsis.

* Science proves gelatinous cubes can think.

* Nate Silver: Why we have U.S.-Ghana at even money.

* Minimalist science fiction film posters.

* Collective nouns, illustrated.

* The 20 most “anticipated” science fiction films of 2011. Things don’t look good.

* How I learned to stop worrying and love my homemade nuclear reactor.

* Will humans go extinct in 100 years?

* And you had me at “ragdoll cannon game.”

Friday Night Links

* The Devil is living in the Vatican, says the Pope’s chief exorcist.

* Texas state School Board unpersons Thomas Jefferson.

* Can soccer ever fix tie-breaking?

* Google’s bike maps “‘filled with potentially fatal flaws.'”

* The public option is dead again. Glenn Greenwald, as we might expect, is pissed. I’m really not sure what the argument for caution is supposed to be here, as the public option remains at least ten points more popular than the rest of the bill. Why not pass it through reconciliation while we’re doing everything else? What bad thing will happen if we do?

* Adding student loan reform to the health care bill, on the other hand, is probably both good policy and good politics.

* Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein give reason to hope November might not be the Democratic bloodbath we’re all expecting.

* And here comes A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas?

(Not-Actually-) Thursday Night Linkdump

* People who write sonnets should be hung!

* Inside Philip K Dick’s FBI file.

* If I recall correctly, Jon and Hayden’s first screenplay was an American Pie rip-off called Gross, so it’s a little strange to see them now taking over the franchise. Congrats, guys!

* Democrats continue to stupidly chase voters they’ll never get.

* Pandagon has an update on the many lies of James O’Keefe. If accountability actually mattered to the mainstream press they’d have given ACORN’s exoneration the same press they gave the original, bogus story. I don’t think they’ve given it any.

* On filibuster reform, Chris Dodd is a bad guy and Evan Bayh is a good guy. Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

* Related: Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans.

* Meet The Tea Partiers: Male, Rich and College Educated.

* 80% of Americans hate the Citizens United. Of course, that’s still not enough consensus for Democrats to act.

* Yes, use reconciliation to bring back the public option. It’s good policy and people want it. (And then there were nine.)

* Maddow v. Beck.

* Black Man Puts His Feet On Desk, Wingnuts Furious.

* And Bill Simmon links to officially the best Super Bowl photo ever.

Monday Night Linkdump #1

* Spider-Man 4 has apparently completely imploded; Raimi has quit and the next film will be a reboot instead.

* The New Jersey legislature has approved a medical marijuana bill. I learned this from—who else?—@jonhurwitz.

* Because I don’t just assume everything I don’t like is unconstitutional, I suspect Thomas Geoghegan is probably wrong and the filibuster is probably constitutional. But I’d be very happy to turn out to be wrong.

* Paul Krugman defends Europe.

* Feingold says Nebraska’s long-cherished right to permanent Medicaid reimbursement will probably be stripped out of the final health care bill.

* The New Yorker slums it at the Jersey shore.

* And Jonathan Chait has your daily dose of things that could have been phrased better.

The Company You Keep

Who’s Barack pallin’ around with now?

The attack ad just writes itself.

Trying in Vain to Breathe the Fire We Was Born In

Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in: someone else has made a movie out of Morris County.

Equal parts drama, horror, true-crime anthology, this grim life-cycle piece presents three tales of alienation and woe in suburbia. Starring indie regular Pamela Stewart (100 Proof, Amateur) and TV mainstay Albie Selznick (24, Suddenly Susan) alongside stunning newcomers Alice Cannon and Darcy Miller, Morris County juggles the horrors of human nature against the kind of sadness that cuts deep. In Ellie, we spend one day in the life of a damaged teen-age girl whose reckless behavior hides a grave secret; The Family Rubin finds a seemingly happy couple and their young son, whose questionable lifestyles begin to tear at the seams; and finally, Elmer & Iris explores the life of an elderly couple who prove that love can overcome almost anything, even death. This triptych of suburban decay will leave you questioning just how well you know your neighbors.

Matthew Garrett’s disturbing debut feature recalls the work of fellow New York indie director Douglas Buck (Cutting Moments), exposing suburbia’s dark heart and the self-destructive compulsions that fester there.

Here’s a trailer:

Morris County Movie Trailer

Leftovers: Cell Phones, Harold and Kumar, Scrabulous

Friday leftovers.

* The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff telling them to listen to Ze Frank and use a cell-phone headset (even if Salon is right and it won’t really make you a safer driver).

* Hometown heroes Hurwitz and Hayden are writing another Harold & Kumar—which is a good thing, because it was always conceived as a trilogy. (I’m told they actually have nine H&K movies planned out, including the three prequels.)

I regret to admit I missed the second in theaters, but I plan to make up for that error when the DVD is released in just four days.

* Now that its competing Facebook application is up and running, Hasbro has renewed its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous. More at Slashdot, which notes: “EA’s version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous’ estimated 2.3 million.” I still say they ought to just buy Scrabulous and be done with it.

* Math may be hard, but there’s no gender difference in math performance, according to a new study in Science. Via MeFi, where the poster adds: “Bite me, Larry Summers.”

* And the Edge of the American West continues to impress: here’s a look back at the decision in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, handed down 24 years ago today.

* The minimum wage: a disgrace and a scandal.

Here is how the political and economic system has been ripping off workers. Once upon a time, if you worked hard and were productive, that translated directly into your paycheck. Not anymore. From 2000 to roughly 2007, productivity went up 20 percent — while the median hourly wage was up 3 percent. My friend Joel Rogers,director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, made a stunning calculation not too long ago: Had wages tracked productivity as they have over the past 30 years, “median family income in the U.S. would be about $20,000 higher today than it is.” Check this out: Taking into account productivity, the minimum wage should be $19.12 — which would make it almost 50 percent above today’s median wage (not to mention the pathetic $6.55).

That’s right. The minimum wage should be more three times what it is today. At that level, you would make almost $40,000 a year. Not an outstanding amount given all the other costs and the likelihood that you would not be in a job with health care and a pension (that’s another issue). But, beginning to be in the realm of respectable.

Writing about Film on the Internet

I find the blog form is exceptionally good for discussions about film. Here’s just two recent examples, Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed talking about Wall-E in the context of Kenneth Burke’s Helhaven and the Pinocchio Theory on Harold and Kumar Go to Guantánamo Bay.

Olbermann Explains It All, Plus A Hurwitz and Hayden Shoutout

While we’re waiting for the polls to close, here’s Keith Olbermann with a helpful primer on which states count and which don’t.

In other useful K.O. videos, Chuck Todd explains why the race is effectively over tonight, while Kal Penn explains how it was that Harold and Kumar came to Guantánamo. The hometown heroes get their names deservedly dropped.

Dueling Harold & Kumar Reviews

Dueling Harold & Kumar reviews! Salon says “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay isn’t a political picture, but it is a patriotic one, in the nonpartisan sense of the word,” while the House Next Door opines “Somebody needed to do a merciless sendup of Homeland Security bullshit, but are Harold and Kumar up to the task? Not quite.”

Either way, Randolph! Catch the fever.

Keeping Kosher with Imaginary Animals, Big Ups to Shankar, and Several More

Monday!

* Which imaginary animals are kosher? Via Boing Boing.

* Plan59.com is a great site for retro and nostalgia art.

* MetaFilter has now apparently set about translating all of Pulp Fiction into Shakespearease, following the lead of this link.

* Cogitamus has a question for the class, via Cynical-C.

Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the “Keating Five,” had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with a man who denounced the Catholic Church as a whore, and stated that he knew next to nothing about economics — do you think it’s possible that Obama would have been treated differently by the media than John McCain has been? Possible?

* The New York Times says Harold and Kumar 2 creates a whole new genre: the stoner protest film. The legendary Randolph High School debate squad of the 1990s even gets a veiled shout-out…

* The Catcher in the Retirement Home.

* A people’s history of the banana.