What happened to Neil LaBute?

While watching the trailer for Lakeview Terrace I kept saying to myself, "This looks bad. Real bad." So when I went to IMDb to look up which director was behind Terrace I was distressed to find out that the very talented Neil LaBute is at the helm. Ouch.

LaBute stumbled big time in 2006 with his remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicolas Cage and Ellen Burstyn. The film died a slow death at the box office and was met with a harsh critical reaction. The saddest part of the whole ordeal was that Wicker Man was obviously a miscalculated attempt on LaBute's part to reach out to mainstream audiences.

Now, with Terrace, he follows the Wicker Man debacle with a movie that looks equally bad and which reeks of a unique voice trying to cram itself into commercial restraints. I have no problem at all with LaBute trying to step into the mainstream, but does he have to pick such crappy projects?

What hurts almost as much as LaBute picking bad projects is that after his pitch-perfect performance in Little Children, I know that Patrick Wilson would have been great in one of LaBute's trademark satirical indictments of the interaction between men and women instead of being wasted in Terrace.

Has Stone jumped the shark by casting Corddry?

Since the news was announced Wednesday, I can't shake the feeling that Oliver Stone may have jumped the shark a little bit by casting Rob Corddry in the role of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the upcoming biopic W.. It's been keeping me up at nights and causing me to wake up in a cold sweat.

I was pretty optimistic about the project up to this point. And now...well, I don't know. Dont get me wrong, I have no objection to Corddry trying to branch out into dramatic roles, or any other comedian trying to do the same thing. More power to 'em. I just don't like the fact that Corddry was once a reporter on The Daily Show and he will now be playing a member of the press in a serious drama. Granted, he can't have more than a handful of scenes in the film, but is anyone else out there worried that those scenes will come off as an SNL skit and totally disrupt the tone of the movie?

There Will Be Blood on the small screen

Since buying the two-disc edition of There Will Be Blood on DVD Tuesday, I've had the chance to watch it once. I saw the film twice in theatres and I was worried it might lose some of its power on the small screen. It hasn't. Paul Thomas Anderson has made a masterpiece through and through. If anything, watching the film on the small screen allows for more of the subtleties of Daniel Day Lewis' Academy-Award winning performance to shine through, while the fire-breathing dragon elements were what stuck out most on the big screen. With Blood, Anderson has truly entered the directing echelons (not that anybody doubted his talent before). Let’s hope he stays there.