Did we need another Dune? Doesn’t matter. Peter Berg just signed on to direct another one anyway.

That’s right. The greatest invention in the history of the internets is back. Lawyers have chased him off of Blogger, but Michael Bay is posting little items in the CHUD forum (it’s a little like that other Forum, but with movies). Items like this one, explaining the disappearance of the blog:

Okay, this Tom Cruise Katie Holmes thing…. Look, I’ve worked with more than a few scientologists. I’m not going to piss on their shit, and you know what, the female scientologists, I mean their thing has nothing against freaky deaky sex shit. So that’s something. I met a cute Baptist chick in LA, and she was like “God’s against anal” and I’m all like “Then God’s against you working in this town, and God’s name is Jerry Bruckheimer.”

And you know what, I’ve hung out with Cruise cause me and Spielberg are tight these days, since I’ve did The Island for him, and my next picture is at the SKG house. I wasn’t stoked on The Transformers until I did some research on my cut of possible ancilary benefits, and there really is more than meets the eye. But Tom’s a good guy, and I would never imply that he’s gay and has lovers. Or that Katie Holmes is doing this because she thinks it will break her out of television, and she and her people haven’t even come up with how she and Tom met story because everyone in town knows it’s a big lie, and Tom Cruise’s performance on Oprah was worse than the one he gave in Interview with a Vampire, which was surely not his coded way of saying to world “Look, I’m kinda gay!” I would never in a million years say that.

What I will say is this: I fucked Katie Holmes. It was after The Gift, and as I was casting Bad Boys II. I told her I might give her the Peter Stormarre role (and she believed me!)

Giant thanks to Galley Hero M.R. for discovering this treasure trove. More to come.

The free market is a highly imperfect thing, witness the victory of Blu-ray over HD DVD, which wasn’t exactly powered by consumers. But it can be a good predictor: With HD DVD gone, Blu-ray prices are rising.

Go Sony!

Per the recommendation of Sonny Bunch, I saw The Bank Job last night, and liked it. An interesting movie with a lot of different tones that made me wish I was British. (Anyone know what the Brits refer to the police as “the Old Bill”?)

But one thing in particular stuck out at me: The Bank Job would be unworkable as a story set in America.

Leave aside the fact that it’s based on a true story which took place in London, obviously. The reason the The Bank Job couldn’t be set in the states is because of guns. Access to firearms changes the dynamics of plotting, in ways which I’m not sure are particularly good.

Sonny makes the very astute point that the great joy of heist movies lays not just in the heist itself–we know it’s going to be successful, otherwise we wouldn’t have the movie. Rather, the interesting part is what happens after the heist–how the characters divide the loot, deal with each other, escape the law and/or other villains.

In superior heist movies, this becomes an exercise in systems engineering, where the robbers are trying to create a mechanism that will get their pursuers off their backs, allow them to keep some of the spoils, and often achieve the release of a hostage. What makes it interesting is that every party has something the other parties want and the parties have asymmetrical information and resources. The goal for the story is to devise an interesting way for the hero to solve what is essentially a big game theory scenario. That’s exactly what happens in The Bank Job.

But here’s the thing: Guns short-circuit the exercise. When the hero is trying to outsmart his pursuers, it often devolves into simply getting to the rendezvous point earlier and having an unseen team member working as a sniper. Any time the parties interact, there’s the potential for gun-play, which often takes the place of plot mechanics. From the drive-in theater hand-off in Heat to the Tim Roth/Sam Jackson standoff in Pulp Fiction, guns make things simpler.

In That Bank Job, our hero arranges a complicated situation where he brings multiple parties together in a precise choreography in order to achieve his goals (I’m being oblique so as not to spoil things here), and the scene only works because the hero knows that none of the villains will be carrying guns. If everyone has a Mac 10 under their coat, then things have to be much simpler.

I’m sure that to some screenwriters, guns are a boon, because they simultaneously cut down on the amount of heavy-lifting you have to do with plot and up the stakes by placing everyone in immediate mortal peril. But that probably results in fewer interesting movies.

The Bank Job delivers they type of satisfying stuff you want from a heist movie. And I wouldn’t mind seeing more gangster/heist films set in the U.K.’s recent past, if for no other reason than to clear the guns out of the way and force the writers to work a little harder.

Incredible Hulk 2.0 trailer is up. Meh.

Film Drunk has the perfect riff:

Everyone knows that in 2003, Ang Lee made a crappy Hulk movie. What this movie presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?

So is yet another for the Wachowski siblings’ Speed Racer. Maybe I’m being overly critical, but this looks like the fifth worst movie ever made. Something about the entire production–the casting, the color palette, the subject matter, the snippets of dialogue–makes it look like a distant relative of the 1990 Dick Tracy disaster.

Variety reports that WB is going to split Deathly Hallows into two movies, released six months apart. David Yates, who directed Order of the Phoenix and the upcoming Half-Blood Prince will direct the final two films as well.

Which is a little strange. Not quite clear why WB would hop from director to director for the first half of the series and then settle on one guy for the final half. OotP was a nice movie, but it wasn’t so transcendent that it made Yates look like the only guy on the planet who could grasp the material.

It’s always so much hotter on Cinemax.

WWTDD has a funny rant about Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut:

Actors are idiots. Just because you’re around something a lot doesn’t mean you know how to do it. I’ve been to Magic Mountain a hundred times, that doesn’t make me an engineer. My dad was a pilot for Delta. I talked to him about it all the time but I promise you, If I get behind the stick, we’re goin’ the fuck down. Look at her for christs sake. She’s even wearing those dumb boots and hat like a director from the 40’s. I’m amazed she isn’t yelling into a big megaphone at some actors in blackface for one of them to sit on a tiny cactus then run in circles for two minutes.

You have to see the picture of her on set to fully get the joke.