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If David Lynch had directed ‘Return of The Jedi’, would we have seen a different ‘Star Wars’?

I wasn’t aware of this fact nugget: that indeed he was asked by Lucas to direct ‘Return of the Jedi’. Lynch’s comment on his refusal to be part of Star Wars:

  “Because it was George Lucas’ film. He had already designed these little–bears; he had already done all this stuff. I didn’t understand why he wanted another director to come in. It would really be George’s puppet on a string and I couldn’t see what my value would be. So it was very friendly. I was flattered that George even wanted me to. But I think he should direct those himself. They’re his things.”

We may have ended with better dialogues, as Roger Ebert finds out (once again) in his review of ‘Sith’ (most of it positive):

 “To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.”

The day before yesterday, my wife happened to receive hundreds of e-mails: yes, she was also one of the millions targeted by Sober.Q virus/spam.

The mails received are pretty harmless: all of them link to several German pages expressing the outrage of the Dresden 45 bombing by the Allies. The E-mail bombing: A nuisance that’s what it is. However, people not familiar with the specific topic (the legality of the firebombing): you’ll find hundreds of articles about it on-line.

Something I noticed the other day: when you leave the XBox running with no game in it, after a couple minutes it starts to talk in some kind of language. Others suggest it’s a demonic language.

Really: I’m not making this stuff up. I wonder if they, Microsoft, added this feature to the XBox 360.

I‘ve been reading and watching the Huffington Post the last couple of days, and while it hasn’t had good reviews (Technorati), it certainly has interesting posts and articles.

And before people call her full of crap, think of this article she wrote (presumably) herself: someone who manages to link to (or even has read or heard of) Everything2 is obviously not an idiot¹.

^1.Disclaimer: I contributed to Everything2 too.

Yesterday, on a show televised by MTV, Microsoft officially unwrapped the XBox 360 and revealed the specs to the outside world.

I’ll just link to the Slashdot discussion thread, where you’ll find links to all the other news sources covering the Xbox 360. The most interesting articles come from the hands of the BBC and Engadget (Engadget actually has the Colony video).

A couple of thoughts: I was surprised when reading that the new console was going to have a pretty advanced version of the PowerPC. The first thought that raced through the mind was that Microsoft needs that power to have a PC emulator running in case they want to emulate the XBox. Remember: the XBOX runs a stripped down version of Windows 2000 (or, some others say, a multimedia enriched version). Looking at the (official?) specs of the XBox 360, it just looks like that the developers of Microsoft have managed to port Windows to the PowerPC. Or maybe that port was always available.

Tomorrow, Microsoft is going to unveil its next XBOX platform, supposedly called XBox 360. Gates has mentioned this particular event a couple of times too, convinced as his of the impact it will have on our lives™.

Uh. Apparently, the whole show has already been taped by MTV. No pictures though: that’s to keep us under the impression it’s a live event. Really.

The Spiegel illustrates the problem with disaster movies made in Hollywood. In an interview with Spielberg and Cruise about their upcoming ‘War Of The Worlds’ movie, the following fragment sticks out:

Spielberg: We wanted to make a film in which people join forces, across all borders and despite all their differences, in order to fight against an enemy who is not of a human nature.
SPIEGEL: But the film is set almost exclusively in the United States. Does it really describe a global catastrophe?
Spielberg: It describes a global catastrophe from a subjective point of view. The audience experiences the war from the perspective of Tom’s character, from the point of view of an American docker. But we leave it in no doubt that the entire Earth is threatened.

Pure entertainment.