Time to round up a few news and commentary bits.<\/span><\/p>\n 1.<\/a> Is the high-def format war<\/a> coming to an end? Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema have announced that they will go exclusively with Blu-Ray, and stop releasing films in the HD-DVD format; this boosts Blu-Ray\u2019s exclusive marketshare to 70% and leaves only Universal and Paramount\/DreamWorks releasing films in the HD-DVD format. Variety<\/a><\/i>, IGN.com<\/a> and Nikki Finke<\/a> at Deadline Hollywood Daily, among other sites, have the details.<\/p>\n 2.<\/a> Kyle Smith<\/a> at Commentary<\/i> magazine looks at a passage or two from Cormac McCarthy\u2019s No Country for Old Men<\/a><\/i> and asks whether the novel on which the film was based reflects a concern with what Pope John Paul II called the \u201cculture of death\u201d:<\/p>\n John Podhoretz has castigated the film as nihilist<\/a>. But if you measure McCarthy\u2019s ironic tone in the book, you might come to another conclusion. Possibly McCarthy is taking the extreme, Catholic stance that all killing is wrong, from capital punishment to war to abortion. The book takes place seven years after Roe v. Wade, five years after the fall of Saigon, four years after the restoration of the death penalty by the Supreme Court. It\u2019s a year when the idea that state could sanction killing has begun to take root. The sheriff, in the book as in the film the voice of wisdom and restraint, expresses a sad resignation toward the death penalty from page one on, and a portion of the book that isn\u2019t referred to in the movie might be the key to understanding McCarthy\u2019s moral.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 3.<\/a> Kenneth R. Morefield<\/a> has posted some interesting thoughts on the \u201cideological ambiguities\u201d of Knocked Up<\/a><\/i>. A sampling:<\/p>\n What the film portrays fairly realistically, I think, is not so much a world without morals but a world without moral instruction. In a world that values pluralism, tolerance, and (above all) personal freedom, instruction on which criteria to use and how to apply it is looked upon as robbing the young of the freedom to choose for themselves. When you add to that a reluctance on the part of the adults to advocate for criteria that they have rejected in their own lives or for criteria that hasn\u2019t served them, you get the comedic equivalent of Anton Chigurgh asking of what use is a (personal belief) system if that system brought the person holding it to a point where it fails to address their most basic questions or meet their most basic spiritual and emotional needs. . . .<\/p>\n Combine the emotional distance of the parents with the inevitable comic disappearance of Alison\u2019s carefully chosen gynecologist when she goes into labor, and it begins to crystalize that one of the major themes of the film is abandonment. Indeed one of the central mysteries\/questions of the film, one that its critics feel it doesn\u2019t answer well, is how these characters are able to grope their way towards some sort of commitment. Would it not be more plausible to have these characters mirror what they have been \u201ctaught,\u201d if only by example? From whence does the sense of responsibility come from if not consistent moral instruction and example?<\/p>\n Perhaps it comes from a deep well of hurt that makes them cling to the possibility of commitment and responsibility, even in the face of difficult circumstances, extreme odds, and nay-sayers. Perhaps the absence of moral instruction could have been interpreted by the younger generation as indifference to them rather than embarrassment of the elder generation, an indifference that steels their resolve to not be responsible for similar hurt by being the agents of similar abandonment. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 4.<\/a> Variety<\/a><\/i> passes on a nifty detail about the parallel universe depicted in The Golden Compass<\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n The London of \u201cThe Golden Compass\u201d owes a debt to the unrealized vision of 17th-century architect Christopher Wren<\/a>. His St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral is the only part of his plan for rebuilding the city after the Great Fire of London in 1666 to have been built.<\/p>\n \u201cHe never got to do it in reality,\u201d says production designer Dennis Gassner. \u201cThat\u2019s what we get to do in movies, we get to do an homage to that.\u201d<\/p>\n The city, seen from a zeppelin through the eyes of young Lyra, combines Wren\u2019s vision with futuristic and magical elements to give it the right combination of reality and fantasy, Gassner says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 5.<\/a> Variety<\/a><\/i> reports that Mathieu Amalric, currently onscreen as the star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly<\/i>, will play the bad guy in the next James Bond film, while Jeffrey Wright<\/a> will be back as CIA agent Felix Leiter \u2014 making him the first actor to play the part in two consecutive movies. Only one other actor, David Hedison, has ever played the part twice \u2014 in Live and Let Die<\/i> (1973) and Licence to Kill<\/i> (1989) \u2014 but his movies were separated by several other films and at least one other actor in the role.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Time to round up a few news and commentary bits. 1. Is the high-def format war coming to an end? Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema have announced that they will go exclusively with Blu-Ray, and stop releasing films in the HD-DVD format; this boosts Blu-Ray\u2019s exclusive marketshare to 70% and leaves only Universal and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n