Fresh Loaf

Centi-pumpkin? Jack-o-pede?

So far the 13 Days of Halloween series on the Culture Surfing blog has beheld scary things (movie trailers, short stories, TV shows, songs, etc.) from a safe distance. Some of the spookiest, most creative visions of the year, however, might be on view right down the street from you at this very moment. The past couple of decades have seen Halloween lawn displays evolve from modest Jack-o-Lanterns to sprawling, grisly spectacles worthy of professional haunted houses like Netherworld. Down the street from my mother-in-law’s home in Chamblee, for instance, you can see a giant-sized spider surrounded by fake human bones (at least, I hope they’re fake) in an otherwise nondescript neighborhood.

Given that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting morbid yard art this time of year, What’s the best local Halloween display you know? E-mail photos of the scariest or most imaginative outdoor decorations to Joeff.Davis@cln.com — if you dare! — and we’ll make an online slideshow of them worthy of “Night Gallery.” It’s your chance to  take your monstrous front-lawn tableau viral and scare exponentially more people.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution debuted its redesigned Sunday edition on May 2. In an example of Great Moments in Awkward Timing, that same day’s installment of the “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip commented directly on trends in the newspaper industry (with which we can sympathize). I saw the strip in question online first, and checked the AJC to see if they actually ran it in their Sunday funnies. Turns out, they did. Here it is:

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Given labels such as “Ballet Mavericks” in the press, the Trey McIntyre Project uses ballet technique as the jumping off point for emotionally charged dance performances. Trey McIntyre of the North Carolina School of Arts, the Houston Ballet Company and the New York City Ballet founded the company in 2004. Executive director John Michael Schert describes the Trey McIntyre Project’s approach to ballet and pop music in anticipation of his performance with the company at Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts on March 14.

I heard someone on the radio say the Trey McIntyre Project “turns ballet on its head.” How would you describe the company’s work?

What the Trey McIntyre Project is trying to put onstage is as authentic as possible. If we were in the theater, we’d be method actors. The dancer really has to feel and express the emotions of a piece. Trey sets a lot of his work to pop music: There’s Beethoven, but also Beatles, Etta James, Beck, bluegrass musicians like Ralph Stanley. This show is being billed as Peter, Paul and Mary or Beatles music, but Trey treats it as a classical score, which has just as much import as a Ravel composition. I believe what Trey’s doing is the next evolution of an art form. We’re classified as a “contemporary ballet company,” but labels tend to come from outsiders and are applied after the fact. What Trey’s doing isn’t contemporary ballet — that happened in the 1980s. It’s something that doesn’t have a quote-unquote style attached to it. It is ballet-based, but ballet’s really a technique. Every dancer takes ballet — ballet training is like your daily dose of medicine.

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A testament to both the popularity of the original Watchmen graphic novel and the excitement over the new movie version (released today and reviewed here) is the sheer quantity of Watchmen homages and parodies in cyberspace. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since Snakes on a Plane-mania of 2007, which seemed to abruptly end when Snakes on a Plane finally opened. One of the cleverest, most widely-diseminated Watchmen riffs I’ve seen is this clip, which envisions the story as a 1980s kiddie cartoon:

Other video parodies include a pretty good one that spoofs “Two and a Half Men” and a weaker sitcom riff, “I Love Rorschach.”

More esoteric quips: Comics Critics wonders “What if there were a Watchmen video game?” Boingboing envisions “Watchpeanuts,” as if the comic book were drawn by Charles Schulz of “Peanuts” fame. The New Yorker magazine’s on-line cover contest re-imagines its mascot Eustace Tilley as “Rorschach Tilley.” Someone Photoshopped the official poster into Swatchmen. Plus I have to mention that several years ago, “The Simpsons” made a passing reference to “Watchmen Babies: V For Vacation.“

Update: I’ll add more as they come up, like Ombudsmen (Popeye as Rorschach). Slate wonders What if Woody Allen directed Watchmen? (Kind of tepid, but Slate seems to hate the movie and the graphic novel alike.)

(Thanks to Allison Keane for drawing my attention to some of these.)

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THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: Elle Fanning as the title character in 'Phoebe in Wonderland'

Conyers natives Dakota and Elle Fanning are an impressive pair of acting sisters, particularly given the fact that they’re both kids. Elle Fanning was only 10 years old for the filming of Phoebe in Wonderland, yet her rich performance nearly carries the entire movie and makes a potentially gimmicky role into more than a collection of tics.

Fanning’s Phoebe is a creative, precocious girl, bored by the rule-obsessed teacher at her school. Phoebe decides to audition for the school’s production of Alice in Wonderland. The free-spirited theater teacher Ms. Dodger (Patricia Clarkson) intrigues her, and Phoebe wins the role of Alice. Phoebe in Wonderland’s cleverest creation is Phoebe’s classmate Jamie (Ian Colletti), a budding theater queen who collects dolls and tries out for the Queen of Hearts.

During the rehearsal process, however, Phoebe’s quirks become more problematic. She washes her hands until her knuckles bleed, engages in endless rituals, spits at classmates and lets verbal outbursts fly. Her scholarly parents Peter and Hillary (Bill Pullman and “Desperate Housewives’” Felicity Huffman) grapple with guilt and concern when she exhibits symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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THAT’LL TEACH ’EM: François Bégaudeau (center) as the Teacher

The Oscar-nominated French film The Class could qualify as a remedial course for audiences who believe that “inspirational teacher” films like Dangerous Minds or Stand and Deliver impart all the lessons you need about the educational system.

In The Class, teacher and award-winning novelist François Bégaudeau plays a fictionalized version of himself, a middle-school French instructor who tries to explain the imperfect subjunctive to rebellious 13- to 15-year-olds from an inner-city Parisian neighborhood. Rather than earn Hollywood-style standing ovations from his students, François faces insolent challenges and constant low-level chatter. At times he seems more like a comedian talking over hecklers on open-mic night.

Director Laurent Cantet, whose previous films include the mournful white-collar drama Time Out, restricts the action entirely to the classroom and various faculty offices, so we never glimpse the home lives of François or his students (played with impeccable realism by actual students). Instead, the classes prove to be scenes of near-constant conflict, including one outburst of violence. The audience easily sympathizes with François’ attempts to keep order and stay on message, giving The Class more real tension, in its soft-spoken way, than your average heist thriller.

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LOVE IS DA BOMB: Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman, left) and Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson)

Upon its publication in the mid-1980s, the 12-issue graphic novel Watchmen earned a reputation for being “the Citizen Kane of comic books.” That’s not just hyperbole: Both works feature multiple narrators trying to piece together an enigmatic death, although in Watchmen, the ensemble happens to be former masked heroes, sleuthing against a backdrop of impending nuclear war.

Like Orson Welles, Watchmen writer Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons drew on seemingly every stylistic innovation in their respective media and shot them with lightning, raising the bar for a popular but increasingly sophisticated art form.

Zack Snyder’s long-awaited film adaptation of Watchmen is not a classic worthy of Citizen Kane. Thankfully, it’s not a bomb on a par with Howard the Duck, either. It comes close to being something like A Clockwork Orange for superhero movies — a dystopian satire marked by meticulous craftsmanship and sluggish pacing, of incongruous music and horrific violence, of heavy-handed sermonizing and astonishing imagery.

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PEEP HOLE: Jaclyn Jose as Nayda in 'Serbis'

A Golden Palm nominee at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Serbis is like no multi-generational slice-of-life film you’ve ever seen. Philippine director Brillante Mendoza sets his bumptious drama at a failing adult movie house in the sprawling Philippine city of Angeles. The Pineda family not only manages the porn theater, but they also live under its roof, just a few flights of stairs away from films such as Bedmates and Young Screwpine.

Serbis’ first scene sets a tone of exhibitionism and voyeurism, as a teenage daughter vamps in the nude before a mirror while her schoolboy nephew peeps at her. The ironically named Family movie theater practically simmers with surging libidos. A young would-be painter lances a boil on his buttock in an early close-up, which interferes with his girlfriend’s subsequent visit. The Pinedas presumably turn a blind eye to the down-low prostitution that accompanies the screenings, as young rent boys and she-males ask “Serbis?” to prowling movie patrons. Serbis resembles the bawdiest work of novelist John Irving, or perhaps trash filmmaker John Waters most serious moments.

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HORNY COUPLE: Idris Ackamoor (left) and Rhodessa Jones

In 7 Stages’ The Love Project, Rhodessa Jones and Idris Ackamoor bring their considerable talents to explore that many-splendored thing that makes the world go ’round. Love is an impossibly broad subject — it’s like devoting a show to everything and nothing — but Jones and Ackamoor prove to be such consummate entertainers that they can delight audiences no matter what their ostensible theme may be.

Co-artistic directors of the San Francisco performance company Cultural Odyssey, Jones and Ackamoor wrote The Love Project with Atlanta’s Pearl Cleage and Zaron Burnett. Dancers Dezrica “Star” Murry and Millicent Johnnie occasionally provide hip-swaying accompaniment. Directed by Harriet Schiffer-Scott, the show offers a cabaret-style variety of songs, stories and set pieces, beginning with a spoken-word poem about “love in a time of war,” and how people should cling to each other, romantically and otherwise, at a time of national turmoil. The introductory piece feels more written and less spontaneous than the rest of the show. The segment’s evocations of Gaza and Iraq, while hardly out of date, make The Love Project initially seem less timely than it actually is.

When Jones riffs lustily on Barack and Michelle Obama’s first night in the White House, however, The Love Project proves fresh and funny. Jones croons and scats jazz tunes but turns out to be a born raconteur, chatting up the audience, recounting tense stories of life on the road and celebrating sensuality. (The name of her one-woman show, Hot Flashes, Power Surges & Private Summers, presented at 7 Stages in 2000, hints at her cheerful, frank attitude about sexuality.) She’s the kind of force-of-nature performer who can get audiences to stand up and sing love songs, even at an afternoon show.

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Georgia Shakespeare has announced the cancellation of Shake at the Lake, the company’s open-air theater production held for the past five years at the Lake Clara Meer dock of Piedmont Park. Producing artistic director Richard Garner cites the difficulty in raising the funds underwrite the popular event, which had been scheduled for May 7-11.

“It has become clear over the last month that we will not be able to secure the full funding needed to present Shake at the Lake in 2009,” Garner said. “While we are saddened that the event will not happen this year, we feel this is a fiscally responsible action taken to ensure ongoing stability of the company as we continue to serve our core mission of mainstage and educational programs.  We look forward to working with our donors, the City of Atlanta, and our friends at the Piedmont Park Conservancy to ensure that Shake at the Lake is back in the park in 2010 as we celebrate our 25th Anniversary Season.”

As if offering a consolation prize, Georgia Shakespeare adds something fun to its 2009 season: a one-week engagement of Rick Miller’s MacHomer, a one-man production that recasts Macbeth with characters from “The Simpsons.” MacHomer runs Aug. 26-30.

The rest of the company’s 2009 season, which runs June 10 through Nov. 1 at the Conant Performing Arts Center, includes: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare(June 10-July 31); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams (June 25-Aug. 1); Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (July 9-Aug. 2); Alice in Wonderland based on the work of Lewis Carroll (July 18-Aug. 1); and Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (Oct. 8-Nov. 1).

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Outkast’s André Benjamin remains the headmaster of “Class of 3000,” even though Cartoon Network ceased production of the animated school daze comedy after 26 episodes. “Class of 3000” is transferring to a new medium, however, as the Alliance Children’s Theatre presents the world premiere stage adaptation beginning Fri., March 6. Benjamin, the show’s creator, executive producer and vocal star as the inspirational Willy Wonka-esque music teacher Sunny Bridges, discusses the TV series’ origins and its transition to the stage.

Did you ever have an inspirational teacher like Sunny?
I’ve had a few in my lifetime. What inspired the character (played by Atlanta’s Sinatra Onyewuchi at the Alliance) was the fact that I wouldn’t want to be Andre 3000 forever. I’d eventually want to leave the stage. I never thought about being a music teacher, though. I wanted to be an art teacher, because I also draw and paint, and I remember art teachers who were like Sunny. My guitar teacher right now, Zaza, he’s a teacher like that, too. He’s a fun time, and I can enjoy that, even though I’m 33 years old.

How did you originate “Class of 3000?“
I was approached by Cartoon Network first. Once they gave me an offer, they wanted to see what show I wanted to create. Originally it was going to be an Adult Swim show, but the more I got into it, I started shaping it into a mainstream, prime-time kind of thing.

You provided a new song for every episode, five of which appear in the stage play. Was it different writing songs for a young audience, compared to your usual audience?
I wasn’t trying to water down the music aspect of the show just because it was for kids. You watch old “Peanuts” or “Fat Albert” shows, they weren’t necessarily kids’ songs. On “Peanuts,” you’re listening to jazz by Vince Guaraldi. I want to make sure that kids had something to listen to that wasn’t teeny bopper songs — although we would do those, too, if they fit into the story. I wanted to give them a little jazz, ragtime, blues, funk music, with the hope that if kids heard those kinds of music later, they’d say, “Hey, I remember this kind of song!” I thought that was fitting, since I play a music teacher. I also wanted to show how different kinds of songs, like classical music, could be reinterpreted in new ways, which is what I like to do with my other kinds of music.

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ELECTRIC SLIDE: Unlike animated features, live-action adaptations require intricate and expensive special effects, such as Jon Osterman's (Billy Crudup) transformation into Dr. Manhattan for 'Watchmen.' (Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

After more than 20 years, DC Comics’ Watchmen will make the quantum leap from comic-book page to live-action film with its release this Friday. If hype and anticipation translate to even a fraction of box office success, Watchmen will affirm the popularity of superheroes — and even R-rated antiheroes — as Hollywood’s saviors. The blockbuster could join the ranks of such record breakers as the Spider-Man trilogy and the Oscar-winning The Dark Knight.

Superhero movies make the transition from ink and paper to celluloid the hard way, however. Saving the world and defeating flamboyant evildoers is the least of it. Simply making an exciting, convincing superhero movie that doesn’t insult an audience’s intelligence practically demands a miracle. Cinematic, super-powered derring-do requires massively expensive special effects, along with the challenge of casting flesh-and-blood actors to play literally two-dimensional, archetypal roles with impossible physiques and ridiculous costumes.

For every hit like The Dark Knight, there’s at least one costly flop: take the nipple-costumed Batman & Robin or Halle Berry’s embarrassing Catwoman. Even with the successes, audiences face flaws like the obvious CGI-rendered Spider-Man and Hulk in their first movies, or unfortunate choices such as Ian McKellen’s dumb-looking Magneto helmet in the X-Men films.

Animation holds out an easier approach; it goes with comic book stories as comfortably as a cape and cowl. The best cartoon features and TV series can do an end run around the real world’s limitations to offer an unlimited canvas that emulates iconic comic book art while putting exciting designs into motion. The right voice performances can even convey emotional heft without hanging a tights-wearing movie star from wires.

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The monthly burlesque-and-B-movie festival The Silver Scream Spookshow at the Plaza Theatre presents She Demons at 1 and 10 p.m. Sat., Feb. 28. The 1958 schlock fest features a remote island, dancing jungle girls, snaggle-toothed monster chicks and guys in Nazi uniforms, so it looks sort of like Werewolf Women of the SS, only in black and white and not fake. The trailer calls it “A FRIGHT-Mare of Blood-Chilling HORROR,” so you know it’s serious, because a frightmare is a lot worse than a regular nightmare:

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Citing the current economic climate, the Alliance Theatre has announced the cancellation of the world premiere musical iSOndheim. The new multimedia musical revue of musical theater legend Stephen Sondheim would have closed out the theater’s 40th season. I’ll let the press release explain what went wrong:

The production was cancelled because of difficulties encountered by the commercial producers attached to the project, the Frankel/Viertel/Baruch/Routh group, in raising the necessary funds for the multi-media musical revue of Sondheim’s life and career.

A representative of the group said, “The show’s extensive technical requirements for film and multi-media projection required raising, what proved to be, an extraordinarily large amount of additional money; millions, actually, which was simply unavailable for a non-commercial production in the current economic climate.  We regret the situation as the Alliance Theatre was ready, willing and able to fulfill their commitments for financing and infrastructure to stage this production.  We intend to produce the show at another date.”

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Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps the 21st century should amend the quote to include internet memes, which apparently can circle the world dozens of times before either lies or truth get started. After Barack Obama’s non-State of the Union address Tuesday night, Bobby Jindal’s officially Republican response almost instantly received comparisons to the delivery of Conyers native Jack McBrayer in his role as naive man-child Kenneth the page on NBC’s “30 Rock.” By Wednesday night, Jimmy Fallon’s on-line “Beta-test” version of “Late Night” (to be broadcast on NBC beginning March 2) had McBrayer on the show for his response to the Internet’s response to Jindal’s response:

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KID 'N PLAY: Azur (top) and Asmar as boys

The French fairy tale Azur and Asmar uses cutting-edge digital animation to replicate centuries-old artistic styles. For his fourth cartoon feature, awesomely named French director Michel Ocelot crafts backgrounds that evoke medieval tapestries or illuminated manuscripts. You can imagine seeing images from Azur and Asmar hanging in a museum, only the figures within them move and talk.

Like one of Scheherezade’s tales from the Arabian Nights, Azur and Asmar presents a classic storybook quest. Beginning in an unidentified European country, the film depicts two boys: blue-eyed, privileged Azur and dusky Asmar, the son of Azur’s nursemaid. Azur and Asmar grow up literally suckling at the same breast and hearing the nanny’s tales of her homeland’s mythic Djinn Fairy, a magic princess held in an impregnable prison. They become close friends, despite comically frequent arguments, until Azur’s father callously sends his son off to a distant tutor and casts out Asmar and the nursemaid.

Entranced by his nanny’s stories of the Djinn Fairy, Azur travels as an adult to Asmar’s home country, where the Muslim natives treat him as an outcast because of his blue eyes. Azur undergoes sharp reversals of fortune before reuniting with Asmar, and the two become rivals who each seek to find, free and wed the Djinn Fairy.

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Film Love’s Black History month program, “Civil Rights on Film: Rare Films on African-American Life, 1941-1967,” continues on Friday and Saturday. The third evening, “The Fierce Urgency of Now” (Fri., Feb. 27, 8 p.m. at Eyedrum) puts the spotlight on such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. “My Name is Jason Holliday…” (Sat., Feb. 28, 8 p.m. at Emory University’s White Hall) offers a showcase of Portrait of Jason, a recently restored, cinematic portrait of a loquacious gay cabaret performer and raconteur.

In addition to the entirety of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the liveliest films on the Feb. 27 bill is Santiago Alvarez’s six-minute “NOW!” which dates to 1965 yet qualifies as an early example of the music video form. Alvarez juxtaposes two swinging versions of “Hava Nagila” (one sung passionate political lyrics by Lena Horne) with shocking images of police brutality and other moments from the Civil Rights movement. It loses a little bit in the Youtube window, but remains a striking call to action:

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BLOND AMBITION: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix, right) eyes Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow, center).

Most of the downbeat romantic drama Two Lovers transpires in the timeless corners of Brooklyn, at mom-and-pop dry cleaners or the kind of blocky apartments where neighbors call to each other from opposite windows while jazz music plays from an unseen source. When we first notice cell phones or DVDs in Two Lovers, they almost seem like contemporary anachronisms that snuck into a period piece set a half-century ago.

Director and co-writer James Gray places Two Lovers very much in the present, but gives the film the black-and-white shadings of an old fashioned social realist script, pitched somewhere between the 1950s plays of Arthur Miller and Ernest Borgnine’s love-among-the-losers film Marty. Gray deserves credit for trying to give his class-conscious romantic triangle a grounding in character and real-world texture, and the cast clearly takes its work seriously. But Two Lovers ultimately seems stuck in a bygone decade.

In Brighton Beach, unmarried Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in the clutch of his Jewish immigrant parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Moshonov). He works at his father’s dry cleaners while vacillating between his dream of being a photographer and his suicidal tendencies following his canceled wedding engagement. (more…)

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NOM DE PLUMAGE: Flannery O'Connor with one of her trademark peacocks

Flannery O’Connor’s life never went to the extremes of her work. How could it?

In her unique, off-putting novels and short stories, O’Connor crossbred humor, horror and piety; her output had such hybrid vigor that she virtually established the genre of the Southern grotesque. Her first novel, Wise Blood, critiques Southern religion by way of homicide, self-mutilation, mummies and gorilla suits. Her famous, oft-anthologized short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” begins with a mundane family road trip and ends with psycho killer, as if A Trip to Bountiful received a surprise visit from No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

As Milledgeville, Ga.’s most famous resident for the majority of her brief life, O’Connor wrote unnerving tales that probably kept the town’s name synonymous with “mental instability” almost as much as the notorious Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum. Yet O’Connor lived the life of a genteel spinster, devout Catholic and famed bird-fancier, having contracted lupus, a disease that claimed her father, narrowed her personal horizons and took her life in 1964 at the age of 39. O’Connor told a friend in a letter, “There won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

Brad Gooch uses that quote as the epigram for Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, the first biography of one of the South’s most iconic literary figures. “After spending five years with Flannery O’Connor, I see it more as a coy challenge than a statement of fact,” Gooch says of the remark. “Certain editors and people, including [O’Connor’s friend] Elizabeth Hardwick, asked me ‘Do you think there’s a life there?’ She was perceived as the Emily Dickinson of Milledgeville.”

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My favorite part of last night’s Oscars show (if I can find a better-quality copy, I’ll link to it):

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POUND IT OUT: "Which way to the bar?"

The idea of an Academy Awards drinking game seems almost like a hindrance during a global economic downward spiral: won’t obeying pesky rules just impede our nightly, alcohol-fueled descent into sweet, sweet oblivion? If you want Oscar Party-inebriation to come sooner rather than later, consider taking a drink for every awkward appearance of a young Hollywood star like Zac Efron, or every time the orchestra cuts off an acceptance speech, or maybe just whenever someone says “And the Oscar goes to…” Or says “Oscar,” for that matter. Otherwise, here are some suggested rules for the 81st Academy Award show, airing on ABC at 8:30 p.m. Warning: if you get too drunk, you might miss our simultaneous Liveblogging on Fresh Loaf. (Oscar the Souse would like to acknowledge the suggestions of Kent Gash, William Goss and Doug Hamilton.)

• First, if host Hugh Jackman plugs his upcoming movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, take a drink. If he does so by tearing open an Academy Award envelope with one of his adamantium claws, finish your drink.
• If Slumdog Millionaire wins Best Picture, drink tea from your party’s designated chai-wallah. But treat him with respect, because he might be able to buy and sell you by the end of the night.
• If Milk wins Best Picture, have a milk-based drink like a White Russian, but under no circumstances have a milkshake, because “I drink your milkshake” is just so pre-recession.
• If The Curious Case of Benjamin Button wins Best Picture, drink a hurricane. You know, because of the Katrina themes? And the New Orleans setting? What – too soon?
• If Mickey Rourke wins Best Actor for The Wrestler, take a drink, inject your buttock with an unidentified steroid and shave your armpits before the rest of the party guest hit you with a folding chair and fire staple-guns at you.
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DRESSED TO KILL: Linus (Chris Marquette, left) and Zoe (Kristen Bell) hydrate after a long day of role playing.

For a certain breed of dedicated, Jedi-robe-wearing, Boba Fett-imitating aficionados of George Lucas’s sci-fi franchise, Kyle Newman’s Fanboys is the most eagerly awaited film since Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And we know how well that turned out.

Fanboys takes the 1999 release of Menace, the first new Star Wars film in 16 years, as a generational tipping point, particularly for four Lando-quoting friends in their early 20s during late 1998. When Linus (Chris Marquette) reveals he’s dying from terminal, unspecific cancer, the foursome road trip from Ohio to California, intent on breaking into Skywalker Ranch to see a rough cut of the film.

First scheduled for release in August 2007, Fanboys became an online cause celebre when the Weinstein Company reshot the film to cut out the downbeat cancer subplot. The fans struck back (in part by threatening to boycott last summer’s Superhero Movie) and the sickness storyline was restored. The cancer subplot unfortunately proves mawkish and contrived, but at least it helps justify behavior that would otherwise be illegal and stalkerish.

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As usual, Tyler Perry has avoided pre-screening his latest film, Madea Goes to Jail, for critics, and one must acknowledge that this approach has worked out pretty well for him. Considering that Perry’s huge box office success trickles down to the Atlanta economy, why complain? You can get at least a little taste of the new material from our Tyler Perry Primer from two years ago, which offers a point-by-point comparison of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion and the video version of the Madea Goes to Jail stage play:

The most overtly funny of the three, this stage play filmed at the Fox Theatre in 2005 feels like a musical version of a 1970s sitcom such as “Good Times.” Perry and his cast’s ease and interaction with the audience conveys Perry’s deep-rooted popularity on the “chitlin circuit” of African-American stage plays.

Tomorrow’s cinematic release will probably diverge sharply from the stage version in numerous ways. One of the most charming moments in the Madea Goes to Jail video has Perry and the cast essentially breaking character to sing old R&B standards, and I doubt that the film version will have the same kind of ingratiating looseness. One hopes the script will retain such local shout-outs as:

“I wasn’t about to go to jail in Conyers. I had to get to DeKalb County where I know somebody.”

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BURIED TREASURE: "This Way Up" stands out among Oscar-nominated short films.

The nominees for Best Animated and Live Action Short Film tend to be the most obscure entries on Oscar night, not counting the documentary categories, of course. The relative obscurity of short subjects makes the Oscar Nominated Short Films 2009 program, divided into animated and live-action segments, so handy.

I guarantee, however, that most of you have already seen one of the animated shorts. Pixar’s “Presto,” about a pompous stage magician and his hungry bunny. It was attached to last summer’s WALL-E and received a bigger showcase than its competitors could have dreamed of. Although it’s one of Pixar’s best shorts, and a delightful tribute to the slapstick cartoons of past generations, “Presto” has garnered more than enough approbation, so it’d be nice if one of the other nominees won the statuette.

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The 2009 Academy Awards may have the most predictable Oscar slate in recent memory: most of the likely winners look like they’ll carry their categories in a walk. But upsets happen every year, and the most surprising turn of events would be if nothing surprising happened. (By the way, did we mention that we’ll be Liveblogging the Oscars broadcast on Sunday night? We did? Just checking.) At any rate, here’s my complete list of predictions in every categories. And they’re my final answers, Anil Kapoor.

Best Picture: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader , Slumdog Millionaire

Prediction: Benjamin Button received the most nominations and has earned the most money at the box office, Milk has the greatest political cachet, but Slumdog Millionaire has the most momentum, having virtually swept the various Guild awards. Plus the movie actually leaves the audience feeling good, which can’t hurt at times like these.

Best Director: Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Stephen Daldry (The Reader), David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Gus Van Sant (Milk)

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