A book co-authored by Facebook friend Scott Bradley — endless hours of browsing fun within, for horror fans, or anybody!

This is a Looney Tunes version of Fitzgerald’s novel, but it’s a pretty good Looney Tunes version of Fitzgerald’s novel, at least if you watch it in 3D — which is to say that it’s visually amusing and inventive, and possesses a delirious sort of momentum from shot to shot.

Baz Luhrmann has always aspired to the delirious visual style of a cartoon but his efforts have always fallen short to me — consisting mostly of lurid production design and hysterical, all-but-incoherent editing.  3D has gotten him to concentrate on making interesting, or at least diverting shots, playing with the possibilities of the format in a exuberant way.

It’s long for a Looney Tune, of course, but the acting is good enough and the story is good enough to keep your interest as you watch Luhrmann fiddle around happily with his new toy.  I imagine it would be deadly dull in 2D — you’d probably have to force yourself to sit through what is, aside from the visuals, an over-long and fairly pedestrian adaptation of a classic.

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Lars von Trier has signed Duke University porn star Belle Knox to star in his upcoming film based on the life of 19th-Century poet Emily Dickinson.

Knox will portray the reclusive spinster in a film without nudity or sex of any kind. “I want to make a prim film, a repressed film,” says von Trier.  “I want to explore the mind of a quiet genius.”

The film, whose working title is Lap the Miles, will explore “the intersection of yearning and reticence” says the director.  He thought of Knox because her first name reminded him of a one-woman play about Dickinson called The Belle Of Amherst.  “I watched many pornos of Belle Knox and saw in her an inwardness, an intelligence, which I knew would be right for the character of my dear Emily.”

The film, to be produced by Marie Cecilie Gade and Louise Vesth, who also produced Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, will be shot in Denmark.

Knox, who says she’s very excited and challenged by the idea of working in a serious dramatic film, was not familiar with Dickinson’s poetry until contacted by von Trier.  “Then I read some of it and realized it was amazing.  Quirky and funny and brilliant.  I knew immediately I could relate to this woman and feel honored that I can help bring her story to a modern-day audience.”

. . . center of the known universe.

“. . . there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.”

. . . from Walter Savage Landor.

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