Week of 2008-03-29 17:00 to 2008-04-05 16:59

Scott Timberg at the LA Times has a cool overview of a favorite of mine, James Ellroy, covering the difficulties the writer has had with Hollywood…and vice versa. While LA Confidential did well, at least with the critics, others of Ellroy’s works just haven’t translated.

Only the most die-hard Ellroy fan resented that the film resembled his labyrinthine novel — with its dozens of characters, thick historical context and overlapping subplots — only slightly. It’s considered one of the finest films of the ’90s and one of the greatest film noirs since the genre’s 1950s heyday.

But since then, when it comes to movies, it’s been more crying than laughing for Ellroy fans.

Read the article at “Hollywood’s James Ellroy enigma”

A new film opens a week from today (April 11th), for the first time with a screenplay by Ellroy himself: Street Kings. Very interesting cast: Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Common, and The Game.

See also: James Ellroy at IMDB.

From the AP comes a curious item about the potential of Belize having its World Cup qualifier in LA or Houston:

Belize is working to stage its home World Cup qualifier in June against Mexico in either Los Angeles or Houston, the head of the country’s soccer federation said Wednesday.[…]

Belize doesn’t have a stadium that meets FIFA standards for the first leg of the two-match series on June 15, Mexico’s opener in qualifying for the 2010 World Cup.

I imagine getting tickets if it’s here in LA would be a smidgen difficult.

Now this is just all kinds of awesome.

(Thanks to Alex for the find.)

It seemed like every time I switched over to the Galaxy opening game (during commercials in the Dodger Coliseum game) the Colorado Rapids had scored another goal. Not the best start to the season, but maybe it was just the altitude.

While I’m at it planning movie marathons for next year, March 31, 1999, was the release date of The Matrix, thus 2009 will be its 10th anniversary. I think I’ll have to do a mini-marathon and watch the trilogy on 3/31/09, sort of an appetizer for the big honkin’ AvP marathon in May.