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I am fantastically excited: Fangoria has the first peek (original) at the FanTasia film festival lineup. As I’d hoped, Night Watch and Kitamura’s Godzilla: Final Wars will be there. Night Watch is the Russian conspiracy modern fantasy epic which has a ton of buzz, and Kitamura is of course the director of the insanely spirited Versus. Those were the movies I’d really wanted to see. Lots of other cool stuff, too. Lion’s Gate has a small slew of J-horror sequels, which I’ll see if it’s convenient, and the horror anthology film Three… Extremes by Miike, Fruit Chan, and Chan-wook Park. I’ll see that for shock value. Lots of zombie movies. Hm, and Paul Spurrier’s “P” — made in Thailand by a British director, looks interesting, gives me some creepy vibes. I love fusion and I want to see that one badly. ...

So I’m not going to talk about the movie at all. You can’t see it for four months; why should I even plague you with an opinion on quality? I think you should see it, where “you” means “yes, you, reading this right now.” Further I will not say. I will talk about the experience of the preview a little. Sean Maher (Simon) and Morena Baccarin (Inara) showed up at the theater to thank us for coming and sign autographs. Joss Whedon had a trailer before the movie in which he talked about how we needed to go out and be browncoats and push the movie. The interesting thing for me was that he speaks with a fannish accent — you may know the one. Not the gamer fannish accent, which is fairly light, but the SF fan accent. He talks the way people who go to a lot of SF cons talk, with those careful pauses and deliberate telegraphing of wryness. ...

Real quick notes, here; I may write more about this later, but then again I may not. However: The new Mac OS X rocks. The Spotlight search functionality is pretty good, but what’s important to me is that it shipped with command line tools so I can do metadata searches in my scripts. Dashboard provides a paradigm for desktop widgets that I can use, namely that they stay out of the way until I go looking for them. The Safari RSS functionality looks pretty slick; I might not use it, but it’s comforting to know it understands Atom.

Huge news: Soderbergh is committing to simultaneous release across TV, DVD, and theaters (original). His next six movies will be released in theaters, on DVD, and on television (via Mark Cuban’s high def HDTV network) at the same time. The movies will be funded by Cuban, shown in Cuban’s Landmark Theaters chain, and the DVDs will be released through Cuban’s DVD label. So it’s all Cuban, all the time. This is something Cuban’s wanted to do for a long time; he is betting heavily on digital distribution and he’s probably right. He built his corporate structure with exactly this kind of deal in mind; he owns a company at each level of the movie distribution chain, from production studio down to every consumer product distribution channel. He must be thrilled that he managed to get someone as prestigious as Soderbergh to buy into the concept. Chances are that Soderbergh will bring one of his star stable (Clooney, Roberts, or Damon) along for at least one of these six movies, which should do wonders for publicity. ...

Ladies and gentlemen, Iraq has a government. Took a while, but they got there. I’m happy about that. I find myself concerned that Chalabi is the acting oil minister, since he’s not exactly a beacon of shining moral integrity. I’m also rather bemused that the Prime Minister is the acting defense minister. Having the head of state also be the head of the armed forces has not traditionally been a sign of democratic process, but at least it’s temporary. ...

When Phantom Menace was released, I took the day off work and drove up to the AMC 1000 Van Ness in San Francisco. If you ask me, it’s got the best screens in the city, although maybe the new AMC multiplex in Daly City beats it these days. But that multiplex was built over hospital parking, and is thus morally flawed, so I vote for the 1000 Van Ness. Besides, the Daly City multiplex wasn’t done when Phantom Menace came out. ...

Weird idea, while drifting off to sleep: A Lexicon of Lost Hollywood. Each entry is a movie review of a movie that was never made; each movie review must refer forward and back to other movies. You can make up actors and directors and screenwriters if you like, but they cannot be entries: they will always be defined only by the reviews of their movies. Or, if you wish, you can use the stars that we know. ...

Etymology buffs! Learn where the phrase “ no strings attached (original)” came from. Or so British tailors say, at any rate. Visit for the etymology, stay for the insight into tailoring.

We’re a step closer to the showdown on judicial filibusters. I kinda figured Harry Reid would force the issue. The short version of what’s going on: you can prevent a vote from occurring in the Senate by filibustering it. It requires 60 votes to end a filibuster. Senator Frist is threatening to change the Senate rules in order to require only 50 votes to end a filibuster. However, changing Senate rules has always taken a 2/3rds majority vote. How’s Frist gonna get around that? ...

The cardinals are spilling details on the conclave, although the article doesn’t get into the change in voting rules. (Via TPM.)