Miller's directing? Hokay then. *gagging noise*

New Bats poster and I read over at Scifi Wire that Del Toro is now actually signed to direct the Hobbit movies.

New Bats poster

Niiiiiice. (Though my favorite part of the poster is where Maggie Gyllenhaal's name is, because it replaces Katie Holmes' name.)

Huh, I somehow missed that Aaron Eckhart is in it. Interesting.

IIRC, Eckhart is Harvey Dent.

Yeah, I checked IMDB after seeing the poster. Wasn't sure if that would be considered spoilery or not, but I guess name cast probably isn't.

Now whether he ends up as Two-face by the end of the movie or not would be a whole other thing.

So let's see: Billy Dee Williams begat Tommy Lee Jones begat Aaron Eckhart

Almost as many iterations as Batman.

A section of my forthcoming book talks about Philippe Petit's walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 (this walk happened between the recording and release of Richard & Linda Thompson's excellent "The Great Valerio," one of their two great highwire-as-metaphor songs). Anyway, I was surprised to read that there's a movie about Petit playing now in NYC: [link] I wish I lived there! I'd love to see this movie.

Corwood's post had me wondering how that related to comics until I realized what thread we were in. Oops.

I was torn between posting here, Lit, or Music. Comics would have been a decent compromise, I guess. Like the idea that if neither Obama or Hillary have a clear victory by the time of the convention, Al Gore should get the nomination.

Just checked the listings for TCM and there are some interesting things on the schedule.

Abel Gance's J'Accuse is coming up on Sunday. It's a silent anti-war film, notable for using wounded WWI veterans. Infamous might be the better word than notable since battlefield surgery had progressed enough by then to save soldiers who had their faces and jaws blown off. In France such veterans were known as (some idiomatic French expression meaning) "broken teacups." I've never seen the movie but I have seen some stills and it's riveting and ghastly and a potent anti-war statement.

Also, the silent version of Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney is playing this week. It's (I think) by far the best version ever done and much truer to the feel of Hugo's novel. Really does a good job of capturing the romance of that book, spending much more time on the King of Thieves gypsy culture than the later Laughton version.

Saturday, May 3rd, they're showing a slate of movies based on Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca, of course, but also Jamaica Inn and the fairly rarely shown Hungry Hills.

For 40s music fans, I highly recommend Reveille With Beverly which is an Ann Miller vehicle very loosely plotted around what amounts to 40s music videos starring: Frank Sinatra (young, skinny, in a tux, surrounded by an orchestra of women), Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Mae Morse, The Mills Brothers (in their cool early days) and many more. There's a production number every eight minutes and it's all swing.

It looks like they're running a special Silent Film festival this month on TCM, so there are a lot of interesting films to check out. Lots of Valentino, silent Swanson and the Nazimova Camille.