James Wolcott profiles Alec Baldwin. It’s a good read, but nothing new, though I’m interested because Baldwin’s career is so interesting. He’s absolutely killing TV right now on 30 Rock, after killing Saturday Night Live all those years. He’s been great in a couple good movies (as Wolcott notes), but doesn’t have a big role in an important movie. How will we think about him in 20 years?

Oh, by the way, he’s talking about retiring after 30 Rock…

So perhaps the smoke signals he’s sending up about retiring aren’t a bluff. But I can’t help but think that if he gets the chance to work with Meryl Streep again he won’t say no. That would be like turning down dessert, and he’s a cat who can’t resist cream.

We seriously didn’t get enough craptastic shark/octopus action in Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus? We need Sharktopus? I don’t think so SyFy. Of course I’ll watch it, but it has as much of a chance of being good as the St. Louis Rams.
Note: This movie has the rare distinction of earning the Unlikely Words “Crappy Movies” tag before I’ve even seen it.

When Roger Ebert goes on Oprah today, he’ll be doing so with the help of a computer generated voice created from his own voice.

Computer programmers have captured his voice from movie commentary tracks so he can type what he wants to say and listeners hear a voice that sounds like him.

Not bad, not bad…

Via Pop Candy

This Venn Diagram of Denzel Washington’s wardrobe in various roles is brilliant. Also it’s not one of those lazy 3 chamber Venn Diagrams. This has 7, count’em SEVEN, different possibilities. Absolutely brilliant.

Via Paul Scheer

I wanted to post this Olly Moss Alice in Wonderland poster here, but since images don’t seem to work in RSS anymore and Flickr makes it hard, maybe just click over and check it out.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus was an awful movie and bad science is just one of the reasons. To clarify, the mega shark would have had to swim 710 KM/H to jump high enough to bite that airplane. For reference, a Tomahawk Missile flies 880 KM/H. Frankly, though, a shark that swims that fast is terrifying.

I’ve always been curious about this. Also funny are the comments arguing in favor of Mark Hamill’s career, which, while it may have been pretty good, doesn’t really match up to Harrison Ford’s.

Harrison Ford: “So as long as I sign this, my career will continue after this film?”
Mark Hamill: “I’m pretty sure it’s a scam. I didn’t sign.”

If you are a reader of Roger Ebert’s Journal then you won’t learn a lot from this Esquire profile, but it’s still a good read. Sad, in parts, but also uplifting. I’d like to find online copies of the Esquire profiles (Paul Newman, Groucho Marx, Hugh Hefner’s daughter) from the 60s mentioned here.

Hendrik Hertzberg explains the Oscars’ new voting system. The change, while making it more likely that blockbusters will be nominated, makes it more likely that an underdog will actually win.

From 1946 until last year, the voting worked the way Americans are most familiar with. Five pictures were nominated. If you were a member of the Academy, you put an “X” next to the name of your favorite. The picture with the most votes won. Nice and simple, though it did mean that a movie could win even if a solid majority of the eligible voters—in theory, as many as seventy-nine per cent of them—didn’t like it. Those legendary PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants don’t release the totals, but this or something like it has to have happened in the past, probably many times.

This year, the Best Picture list was expanded, partly to make sure that at least a couple of blockbusters would be on it… To forestall a victory for some cinematic George Wallace or Ross Perot, the Academy switched to a different system. Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus.

Via Balloon Juice

I do believe this is why the Genie effect on a Mac was invented.