Movie Minesweeper - The Mr. Sheen Edition

- Christian Tramitz is to play FBI Agent Jerry Cotton, fictional hero of German pulp fiction in a new film series.

- Daniel Waters has won a best director award. That's very encouraging. The gong was for his film Sex and Death 101 which played at the Seattle Film Festival. If I could blow glass I'd make him a nice bauble too - for his Heathers screenplay which is, I'd say, the best script. Ever. How do I get to see Sex and Death 101?

- The IESB have a heap of License to Wed clips and a behind the scenes featurette too.

- No link for this one, I'm afraid, but John Travolta has been speaking to the UK tabloids and he's revealed that the Dallas movie isn't dead after all. He's meeting a new director soon and is very keen to get the wheels moving again, with a possible shoot start in January.

- Matthew Vaughn's MARV films, in which he is a partner with Kris Thykier, have signed a three-year first-look deal with Sony. The projects currently in development? A World War I drama, a Spaghetti Western and two comedies. The MARV men see themselves as a reply to Working Title, and I think they've every chance of similar success.

- A 21 disc set of John Ford films is coming in December. Yes - 21 discs. Suddenly the Blade Runner special edition has competition for pole position on my Christmas list.

- Richard Linklater has earned himself a ten-year supply of wine.

Sabiston's Fatbits

Bob Sabiston was the animator-come-tech-pioneer that made Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly possible. Sadly, neither of those films lived up to their incredible, impressionistic rendering style.

The two films between them featured some of the most imaginative tracing I've ever seen - and if that sounds a little glib, then maybe I am being a shade too cynical. There's no denying, however, that neither of Linklater's rotoscoping experiments would have been one half as interesting without Sabiston's input. I wonder what they would have been like without Linklater's input instead?

One of Sabiston's latest inventions is a piece of illustration software for the Nintendo DS called Fatbits (changed to Fatdees for Europe?). Below is just one page from the instruction manual, to give you some idea what it can do. The example pic at the top of the post might give you an even more persuasive indication.

Click upon the manual page to make it bigger (ie., readable).


[EDIT: A video of the software in action has appeared on YouTube]