As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to assume that Kevin Smith cast Seth Rogen in Zach and Miri Make A Porno in an effort to capture some of the magic dust that makes Judd Apatow’s films so financially successful, while remining the audience that Kevin Smith movies have offered a blend of raunchy comedy and surprisingly traditional romantic resolutions for a decade and a half now. In a post today at Burbanked, Alan Lopuszynski questions whether Adam Sandler is currently starring in Judd Apatow’s Funny People for the inverse reason.

“At first, I figured that Sandler’s interest in working under Apatow as a director was because Sandler was on a downslope of box office returns at this point in his career,” writes Alan Lopuszynski at Burbanked. But then he got out the virtual graph paper, and realised that although Judd Apatow’s films are vastly more appreciated by critics than Sandlers, “the pair’s financial track records are extremely similar” — and when there has been a discrepancy, Sandler’s films have almost always grossed more than Apatow’s.

And so Alan coins a term to explain the collaboration:

…Read more

The Playlist wonders why “almost no bloggers have chosen to write about” this Esquire story purporting to blow the lid off the secret early life of Paul Thomas Anderson. I can only speak for myself: I had no idea this story, which is dated September 22, existed. But I’ll write about it now!

Based on a skim (it’s long and I’ll go back and read it more carefully when I have time, but I wanted to pass it along regardless), it seems to be fundamentally flawed, in that it’s based on the complaints of Anderson’s high school friends and former teachers, who are all clearly bitter that their old pal no longer returns their calls, as if an acknowledged burden of success is that one must take time out of their busy modern masterpiece-making, Oscar nomination-collecting schedule to visit their old high school (does anybody actually visit their old high school?) There isn’t anything jaw-dropping here––He went to a lot of prep schools! He watched a lot of laserdisks!––but it’s an interesting read for P.T.A. completists.

Two newly announced collaborations are making my birthday a very special one. In one corner we have the casting of Michael Cera in an Edgar Wright film, which seems almost like an intentional gift from a regular SpoutBlog reader. The only thing missing is the news that this film will also feature the Muppets, a plot involving an Objectivist teleporter and a 3-year-old Star Wars fan. The Cera/Wright team-up is titled Scott Pilgrim’s Little Life, and structurally it sounds like Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. Based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Scott Pilgrim Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, and scripted by Wright and Michael Bacall (Manic), the story involves a “young slacker” (Cera) who must defeat the evil ex-boyfriends of the girl he loves in order to win her heart. As if Cera couldn’t win any girl’s heart just by doing nothing.

See the video above for the first sorta collaboration between Wright and Cera (and Jonah Hill).

…Read more

Well, I’m back from my glamorous and exciting vacation. I have too many RSS feeds to catch up on to bore you with details, but suffice it to say, my Thanksgiving adventures looked a lot like the above scene from Punch-Drunk Love, except I fortunately managed to make an escape before damaging any property. I want to thank Pamela Cohn and Chris Campbell for filling in while I was gone; if you missed their posts, you can check out Pamela’s here and Chris’ here.

UPDATE: A story published in Saturday’s print edition of the New York Times has some additional information on Jeremy Blake’s disappearance and Theresa Duncan’s death. The story says a note referring to Duncan was found with Blake’s passport on Rockaway Beach. NYPD scuba teams have searched for but have not yet found a body.

Rumors are swirling that artist Jeremy Blake has gone missing, a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker/blogger Theresa Duncan, committed suicide. Kate Coe alerted me to the news, which she’s rounded up from several sources at FishbowlLA.

Duncan, a former videogame creator, was known in the blogosphere for her sometimes eccentric but often fascinating ruminations on art, imagery, culture and perfume. Her blog The Wit of the Staircase had its second anniversary on July 4th; she last updated July 10. She was apparently in New York, directing an adaptation of a Francesca Lia Block novel for Fox Searchlight. There is no IMDB entry for the film, or for Duncan; I don’t know how far along production had progressed, but it was her first feature film and it she had apparently hit a bump in the road.

The news of Duncan’s suicide and Blake’s disappearance stems from this perfume message board, which was then picked up by L.A. Observed. Blake, in apparent reaction to Duncan’s death, disappeared earlier this week. According to a posting on this modern art blog, Blake’s passport and clothes were found on Rockaway Beach here in New York shortly after a 911 call was placed reporting a sighting of a man swimming out to sea.

Again, I can’t confirm that this is how it all went down (no mainstream non-blog* outlet has yet reported on either Duncan’s death or Blake’s disappearance), but if it turns out to be true … man, what a sad story. Fans of Punch Drunk Love will know Blake’s work: he designed the film’s psychedelic transitions. He and Duncan also collaborated on a short called The History of Glamour, which L.A. Observer describes as “animated mockumentary about an art scene similar to Andy Warhol’s Factory.” Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on YouTube but another of their collaborations, an animated short made for the Oxygen channel, is:

**Wording changed after learning via an email from Tyler Green that he and Modern Art Notes are “as mainstream as it gets.”