Just a couple more news blurbs.
1. E! Online and the Hollywood Reporter both have stories up now on the upcoming Warner Brothers special-edition DVD of the original King Kong (1933) — it will be available as a basic two-disc special edition, in a collectible set with a souvenir program etc., and in a four-disc set with The Son of Kong (1933) and the original Mighty Joe Young (1949). And all of these sets will include a new two-hour documentary on the making of the original King Kong by Peter Jackson, who is of course working on the latest remake for Universal Studios, due to come out in December. FWIW, the Warner DVD — which has been in the works for two years — won’t include any promotional materials for the new remake, and the fact that it is coming out so soon before the Universal movie is, according to a Warner rep, “actually a coincidence.” Uh-huh.
2. FilmStew.com reports:
Paramount Pictures is headed to Sunday school with the purchase of the A.J. Jacobs novel The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Obey the Bible as Literally as Possible. The studio has taken the book to Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, which will serve as the producer of the adaptation. Living Biblically will be published by Simon & Schuster in fall 2006.
In the book, Jacobs, an editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, spent a year of his life trying to live, literally, by the rules set forth in both the Old and New Testaments.
Has Jacobs written on this already, perhaps in a magazine article or some similar preview? I expect there to be some variation on the famous Ned Flanders remark: “I’ve done everything the Bible says — even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!”
3. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Christian calendar, and Frederica Mathewes-Green makes an interesting point in her new Beliefnet column on the subject:
God is light. Throughout the Scriptures, God appears repeatedly in the form of overwhelming light. . . .
But there is something about light that most previous generations would have known, that doesn’t occur to us today. We think of light as something you get with the flip of a switch. But before a hundred years ago, light always meant fire. Whether it was the flame of a candle, an oil lamp, a campfire, or the blazing noonday sun, light was always accompanied by fire.
And fire, everyone knew, must be respected.
Kind of reminds me of that post I made here a few weeks ago, about how easy it is to forget just how dark the past used to be.
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