Newsbites: Playbook! Apples! Book launches!

Just a few more quickies, before I forget about ’em.

1. Terry Mattingly at GetReligion.org responds to a recent Variety story which said the film industry “has embraced an ever-growing set of guidelines described by some as the Passion Playbook.”

2. Variety reports that the Kolkata Film Festival in West Bengal opened last Friday with Adam’s Apples (2005), a Danish film written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen:

Ivan is an insanely optimistic preacher who takes in convicts to help around the remote, rural church he ministers. His current responsibility is to help a psychotic Saudi immigrant addicted to robbing gas stations and an alcoholic tennis pro convicted of sexual assault. His newest helper is Adam, a vicious neo-Nazi.

Asked to set a goal for his stay, Adam sarcastically answers that he’d like to bake a cake. Ivan puts him in charge of the parish’s pride and joy: the only apple tree in the vicinity.

Jensen has also worked on the scripts for Mifune (1999), Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), Brothers (2004), and others.

3. One of several fine people I got to meet at the Hollywood Jesus event last New Year’s Eve was Ken Priebe, and as I recall, he was reasonably excited about the fact that he had a new book in the works. That book — The Art of Stop-Motion Animation — is out in stores now, and he’ll be signing copies at an event being hosted at the VanCity Theatre near Seymour and Davie on November 29.

4. And speaking of book launches — albeit in a non-film vein — my friend and former editor Janet Whyte has written a children’s book for Scholastic, illustrated by Val Lawton, called Mr. Bert’s Story Time. It will be one of several titles featured at a book launch at the Hycroft Mansion near Granville and 16th on November 22.