Editorials > Filmwad Breaks it Down: Wednesday November 7

The strike continues to all but completely dominate movie news today, but there's still a little left to talk about. Spike Lee has come under fire recently from surviving Italian partisans who claim that his World War II drama Miracle at St. Anna is inaccurate and ignores "the truth." Welcome to Hollywood, kids. And by kids I mean brave Italian anti-fascist veterans.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart is being revisited in the loosest possible way. Josh Lucas will play a heart transplant patient who learns that his new heart came from a murder victim, and the killer is coming back to get it again. I think this might actually be worse than my idea of a dead man's cell phone going off underneath the floorboards.

Batman's been getting more trouble from Hong Kong, this time for asking HK residents to leave their lights on to make their shots prettier. Environmentalist groups took issue with this waste of energy naturally. Between this and the TB-infested waters, it seems The Dark Knight's producers can't decide whether they like pollution or not.

And Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker will have nigh-total control over a Mountain Dew ad campaign called Dewocracy. He'll be like what Orson Welles was for Paul Masson's wine, but even Welles didn't get final cut.

The first trailer is for Starting Out in the Evening, starring Frank Langella. I suppose he's supposed to be a JD Salinger figure, kind of like Finding Forrester but hopefully without that catchphrase. It's been getting very good reviews, with most of the praise going to Langella. If this isn't Oscar bait I don't know what is. Good luck, Frank. You're the man now, dog!

The other trailer is decidedly less prestigious. It's for Alvin and the Chipmunks. You get the impression from the trailer that even Jason Lee knows this isn't worth his time. There really are no words for this. Except maybe three: IMDb bottom 100. Watch out Who's Your Caddy?.

Written by David Morgan