This story about the making of I ♥ Huckabees is amazing. Did I ever mention that when I first moved to New York to work for the American Booksellers Association, I took the same job that David O. Russell had just a few years previously? Judging from some of the handwritten notes scrawled across the backs of press releases in the ABA files, he was working on the screenplay for Spanking the Monkey while he was there.

OK, this is one of the more interesting collections of footage I've seen recently. It looks like that madman with a movie camera, Robert Rodriguez, has decided to do a visually faithful film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City series of comic books. Some of the results are on display
here. Warning: this is a big chunk of video.

This footage was apparently debuted at the San Diego ComicCon, which has become as important as a venue for film marketing as for the comic book industry. It looks like Rodriguez is shooting for hard-boiled, but he needs to keep his rating in mind, too; it's unlikely that what we see on screen will be quite as violent as the comics, or as saturated with mostly-nude women. (Jessica Alba, on the evidence here, seems to be playing a stripper who doesn't take her clothes off.)

Whatever. What's fascinating is that Rodriguez has managed to find a rough cinematic analogue to the stark black-and-white drawing style Miller employed for this series, aping Miller's compositions with extreme camera angles. Not only is it a pretty distinct match for the comics, but it also looks to be as close to truly expressionist film noir camerawork as anything I've seen in years. Will it hold together as a filmed narrative? Who knows? But I'm looking forward to finding out.

Following the U.S. Presidential election? Feel like biting your nails for the next eight weeks? The electoral vote predictor shows a color-coded map of the 50 states going red or blue, updated daily based on state-by-state polling results. Today the breakdown is 252 electoral votes for Kerry, 254 electoral votes for W, and 32 "exactly tied" (Nevada and Florida). The successful candidate will need 270 electoral votes, so as it stands today, Florida, with its 27 electoral votes, could once again swing the whole election for one candidate or the other. Can you stand it?