Shortblogging Monday

Mann on Miami: This has got to be the best bad idea for a movie since Michael Bay announced intentions to make a live-action Transformers. Master of slick crime grit Michael Mann is turning Miami Vice into a movie starring a nearly-mulleted Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx (who is following up his previous Mann vehicle, Collateral). I’m a sucker for Mann’s elegiac, showy, faux epics (with the exception of the burdensome Ali), the way he turns darkened cities into seething, neon-lit danger zones strewn with grizzled anti-heroes. “Badness, happening right now,” Farrell says in the trailer. The staff of the New Yorker couldn’t write a better description of what this movie will surely be.

V for Very Cool: Anti-government vigilantism in post-apocalyptic, totalitarian Britain just got a little bit cooler. The Wachowski Brothers' newest sci-fi parable, V for Vendetta, has a new trailer up at Apple. Ain’t It Cool recently scored the first ever screening of this film, and they’ve been pimping it hard. Still, it was the last film in a 24 hour long cinema marathon, so those who saw it may not have exactly been models of intellectual perspicuity while watching. It doesn’t really matter though; the Wachowskis, anti-government sentiment and sci-fi comic book geekiness pretty much guarantees my ass will be front and center come March.

A Supersized Idiot Returns: Morgan Spurlock will be adapting Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science, which chronicles the legions of armored red-staters who’ve lined up with their bazookas and battle axes to fight the evil scientific menace. Sure to be as insightful as his last documentary, which exposed the previously unknown fact that eating 5000 calories of fatty food every day is, gasp!, unhealthy, you can file this under “more statist bloviating from the we-wish-this-were-true world of leftist agitprop” (because I know all of you have a file with that title).

King of the Jungle Indeed: Despite its mediocre box office returns, I’ll put forth that the last two hours of King Kong are some of the finest filmmaking I’ve seen in years. My review will be up soon, but do yourself a favor and find the biggest, baddest, loudest movie theater you can and see this film now.

The Me-O-Meter, Quick Take: Over at the Tech Liberation Front, Tim Lee recommends my article on legislation designed to “plug the analog hole.” Many thanks to Tim and the rest of the excellent TLF crew.