jon's stuff...

On the rear wall, perched on top of a wooden cabinet, is a silver tray of spirits, centred around a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. A substance which, eight years ago, was indirectly responsible for saving MacFarlane’s life. He was due to be on the American Airlines flight that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on September 11, but missed the flight by ten minutes because he’d been boozing the night before.

This is the man, after all, in sole control of over $1 billion worth of some of the planet’s best comedy. On whose hunched shoulders the success of both American Dad!, and his other better-known series Family Guy, rest. The man who’s just added to his workload with a spin-off called The Cleveland Show, plus his own hugely successful YouTube channel and a feature-length Family Guy movie.

A look at the worst of Jack’s bad day’s over the past 7 seasons.

Do you need to know a good time to go to the bathroom during a movie? RunPee.com is for you.

It’s a simple idea that’s executed well on the web. The left-hand side has links to the current box office leaders and new releases, and clicking on one gives you the various timing points and narrative cues to head to the restrooms if your last stop before the cinema was a bar, coffee shop, or the concession stand. Choose a break point, and the top box explains what will happen right before you’ve got three minutes to make a run for it.

Click the headline to read the rest.

LOS ANGELES — “Ay, Caramba!” A ‘stampede’ of one billion Simpsons stamps began escaping from America’s 34,000 Post Offices and infiltrated the nation’s mail stream following the issuance of “The Simpsons” stamps and postal cards today.

The first-day-of-issue dedication ceremony took place at Twentieth Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles. There, The Simpsons Creator and Executive Producer, Matt Groening, along with Executive Producer James L. Brooks join the voices behind the famous characters appearing on the stamps (Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright and Yeardley Smith) in conjunction with the Postal Service in celebrating the stamps. Hank Azaria and other voice actors from The Simpsons will be in attendance to lend their support.

The longest-running primetime comedy in television history has become a cultural and ground-breaking phenomenon since the series launch in 1990. This honor solidifies their place in history.

This sucks.

It’s been known for more than month that Warner Bros. was pushing to get Terminator Salvation in with a PG-13 rating, despite promises from McG that he’d settle for nothing less than a gritty, bare-booby filled rated-R. Well Warner Bros. wins. It’s official, Terminator Salvation is a PG-13 movie, the first Terminator movie to receive any rating lighter than an R. That’s right, even the much maligned T3 was at least badass enough to warrant heavier than a PG-13.

The confirmation of the Terminator franchise’s transition from movie for adults to movie for teens, comes courtesy of the film’s official site, where they’ve gone ahead and posted the PG-13 rating, below the “Thursday May 21 We Fight Back” tagline. In the interests of honestly, they should probably now change that to “Thursday May 21 We Fight Back, But Not So Hard That It Might Scare Your Kids”.

Click the headline to watch - NPH rules.

tkaydesign

via sujay:

NPH > All

Ron Howard wrote the following for The Huffington Post:

William Donohue of the Catholic League is on a mission. Whether it is a “mission from God,” as the Blues Brothers would say, only God knows, but the goal of his mission is clear: to paint me and the movie I directed, Angels & Demons, as anti-Catholic.

For a $5 donation to his organization, Mr. Donohue will send you his glossy new booklet (Angels & Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic), in which he writes that I and the people who made this thriller “do not hide their animus against all things Catholic.”

He’s been making these assertions for years, going back to the theatrical release of The Da Vinci Code. He stepped up his campaign more than a month ago with a series of press releases. And there he goes again, in a Daily News op-ed last Friday, saying that Dan Brown and I “have collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church….”

Let me be clear: neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic. And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome. After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?

Mr. Donohue’s booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction (if it were a documentary, our talk of massacres would have referenced the Inquisition or the Crusades). And if fictional movies could never take liberties with reality, then there would have been no Ben-Hur, no Barabbas, The Robe, Gone With The Wind, or Titanic. Not to mention Splash!

I guess Mr. Donohue and I do have one thing in common: we both like to create fictional tales, as he has done with his silly and mean-spirited work of propaganda.

Mr. Donohue’s op-ed and booklet also suggest that we paint the Church as “anti-reason.” There is plenty of debate over what the Church did or didn’t do with Galileo, but I for one do recognize that the Church did much throughout the ages to encourage and preserve education, the arts and the sciences.

Had Mr. Donohue and his allies waited to see Angels & Demons before criticizing it, they would have seen references to struggles within the Church between faith and science, but they would also have seen clear signs of support for the pursuit of science at the highest levels of the Vatican. Indeed, one of the first scenes of the movie depicts a scientist at the high-tech CERN laboratory…and he is a priest.

And it’s a two-way street. As Dr. Rolf Landua of CERN said during my visit to their facilities in February, “Most physicists which I know are very, very tolerant towards all kinds of religious beliefs, many of them are themselves religious believers….When you look at the scientific way we are looking at these questions, you come to the conclusion that there’s always some part which we cannot explain.”

Even the current “faith vs. science” debate over embryonic stem cells is briefly depicted in Angels & Demons in a balanced way.

But since Mr. Donohue has, in effect, smeared me by claiming I am smearing his Church, I want him to know this: I have respect for Catholics and their Church, and know they accomplish many good works throughout the world. And I believe Angels & Demons treats the Church with respect — even a degree of reverence — for its traditions and beliefs.

I know faith is believing without seeing (and a boycott would be disbelieving without seeing). But I don’t expect William Donohue to have faith in me, so I encourage him to see Angels & Demons for himself. Then he will finally witness, and perhaps believe, that what I say is true.

Ron Howard is the director of “Angels & Demons” and is co-chairman of Imagine Entertainment