new Portishead album Third releases on 4/29

Here's some great video of performances from the new album

Sugar, Spice, and Cartoonstitute

Famous for creating the girls known for "saving the world before bedtime" aka The Powerpuff Girls, creator Craig McCracken and Dexter's Laboratory creator Rob Renzetti have formed Cartoonstitute, "a new initiative designed to dramatically increase the animation development slate" for the Cartoon Network.

I hope it really means it will create a lot of new jobs for people in the U.S. and not use cheap labor in foreign countries. I do love the shows that use this cheap labor, however there are so many promising animators-in-training in the U.S. eager to work for a television network like The Cartoon Network.

I'll be watching for any developments so check back at Wednesday's Korner for word of any new shows.

EW interviews Speed Racer filmmakers

Check the latest Entertainment Weekly interview with the Wachowski brothers on Speed Racer due in theatres on May 9. Page 2 of the article shows a link to exclusive photos from the film. Christina Ricci plays Trixie and the exclusive photos can be found of her here and here. Several trailers can be viewed from this site.

Whedon's on Track with Dollhouse

Not really intending the track home community pun, but if you think about it, that'd be a sweet way to set up a loft consisting entirely of track home-style dollhouses. "Little boxes on the hillside..." Anyways, there are newsbits all about Joss Whedon's new TV project called "Dollhouse". I'm looking forward to it and it best damn well not be cancelled after ten shows air.

Penelope Review

Penelope has finally found its opening weekend and my review is as simple as this: Go SEE it in the theatre because it is a rare, wonderful, sharply comedic and quick-moving film. Support a movie in a theatre that uses great set designs which includes art by Joe Sorren and includes music by Sigur Rós. Chase scenes are not predictable. Penelope covers, in a few comical moments, what else would a person do who was confined to one house their entire life? I enjoyed the "who's real" and "who's fake" process of elimination and how one copes when you only find the latter. The characters are well-crafted and played by some of my favorite people, obviously Christina Ricci, but also minor characters played by Burn Gorman (Torchwood), Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead's Nick Frost, and the ever-watchable (getting all the laughs when I saw the movie) Peter Dinklage which you've seen in The Station Agent and Death at a Funeral, plus Marianne Faithfull is in it and she really is as great looking as I remember her from the brief appearance she made in BBC's "Absolutely Fabulous". The story's moral is powerful: embrace individuality. It's as simple as that and I would love a poster of this phrase on every street corner to remind those people that forget to do it.

Roger Jackson news

Roger Jackson writes to confirm that I did hear his voice on a Comcast commercial the other day, he says, "I am doing a couple of Comcast spots, one about 'We like math,' and one with something about 'Dreaming one of those big fat library full of HD movies only Comcast has- dreams.'"

"...Just did a program where I did gibberish SIMS-style of real-sounding fake languages as Salah-ah-din, a Tokugawa Shogun, Mahatma Gandhi, Otto von Bismark, Genghis Khan, a Pictish warrior, an African tribal hunter, and an English professor, among others."

The movie Control

Gosh, if you wake up on a sunny day and decide it is time to get depressed, you definitely will be after seeing Control, the biopic on Ian Curtis based on the book by his widow Deborah Curtis called Touching From a Distance.

There's a lot of information in this podcast interview with the actor who plays Ian, Sam Riley. He embodies this character extremely well, it is not just mimicing because any actor can train themselves to mimic someone well. The actors as a band perform the music for real, a choice I prefer, and they sound fantastic! Most importantly, Sam Riley plays Ian as a real person. I think this helps take the audience immediately to a level that does not glamorize this singer nor his life. Anton Corbijn films the movie in, as he says in this interview, black and white which is appropriate since most of the photos I've always seen of Joy Division are in black and white footage. I do not care much for the video he made of the song "Atmosphere" back when MTV showed music videos, so I was a little concerned that this could try to commercialize the band, but it doesn't. I'm also so glad that Corbijn uses the guy known as JCC (John Cooper Clarke) from the punk scene of the 1970s. I hadn't heard of him and I read his credit in the movie's credits. It's pure genius spoken word from a time that no spoken word was known of at all. You can hear the entire piece on the movie's official site by choosing the soundtrack and scrolling to the track "Evidently Chickentown." The Control version is without the backing music, unlike the "Sopranos" version.

I thought it was best to know no background about the making of the film before seeing it, however in the movie as I watched the characters move through Ian Curtis's hometown of Macclesfield, I really believed that the director chose to use the actual home of and workplace of Ian Curtis. I'm not sure, however, if the parents' home is the actual home. I was pleasantly assured after hearing the interview and another interview with Corbijn that, indeed, these locations were authentic.

I had a very dear friend of mine visit Macclesfield back in the '90s and he went to the boyhood home and stood outside. The residents looked at him from the window and even came out to talk to him, but he refused to go into their house. He went to the place where a stone was laid in Ian's honor. He researched it all in the Macclesfield library after having taken the earliest train out to the town from Manchester, I think. This friend of mine worshiped Ian and much of Joy Division and New Order's music to the point where he would not just randomly agree to watch a bootleg video of the band I just had lying around. It's all so sacred in his mind. He idolized Ian to the point of becoming fixated on suicide, had talked about it even as a teenager, and one day he did take his own life, unfortunately. He talked of the pain he felt in headaches he was experiencing and completely did not agree that the drugs worked. He didn't like the impurity of putting drug chemicals into a drug-free body... of having to take drugs to help him cope and I think he got this idea mostly from the knowledge of the side effects Ian experienced. Migraines can be kept from occurring quite successfully with drugs these days.

This friend was also mentally delusional, experiencing depression while he projected so much of his interpretation of how he wanted things to turn out directly onto people, thereby resulting in him being upset when he learned that their intentions did not match his deluded image of them.

I feel terrible that the loved ones close to Ian Curtis were not depicted much afterwards, long enough to express the toll it takes on a person's life in the years that follow a suicide because it is quite a process for the family and friends of suicide victims to process this sudden loss.

You can also read about what the daughter is doing while still living in Macclesfield.