Well, this is one music industry biopic I’m actually excited to see, and that has some chance of not disgracing or white-washing the person being portrayed: Benedict Cumberbatch is set to play Brian Epstein. Per The Hollywood Reporter:

Todd Graff wrote the screenplay, whose focus is not a story about The Beatles from Epstein’s point of view but the story of Epstein himself. Sometimes called the “fifth Beatle,” Epstein signed the band in 1961 — before Beatlemania hit — and died in 1967 from an accidental drug overdose. He was a closet homosexual and suffered from gambling and drug addictions — and was many times the glue that held the band together. The producers describe the project as the story of “the man who threw the biggest party of the 1960s but ultimately forgot to invite himself.”

Further signs of optimism: Graff wrote and directed the excellent Camp. And Tom Hanks is going to produce through Playtone, a decision that produced the excellent and mysteriously underrated That Thing You Do.

That movie looked at an American band in the same era as the rise of the Beatles, and told its story through the perspective of the band’s drummer, a late addition to the group, rather than primarily through the perspective of their manager, played by Hanks. But it had a nice, deft sense of what it takes to wrangle young men who are just getting famous, and of the commercial structure that elevated promising bands in the era. Hopefully, this look at Epstein’s life will have those same nice grace notes, and get away from the Lennon-McCartney cliches, without wallowing too much in Tragic Gayness.

The bridge is yours.

-The only reason I’m sorry to be in California is the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in its broadcast decency case today. Let’s hope the decisions are as amusing as the video games case.

-Apparently, being a radio host means you have to be more sedate than a blogger. Who knew?

-Rick Santorum signals support for stronger copyright protections, if not SOPA.

-The Pawnee City Council race just got even more adorable.

-Tom Hanks will make us a web television series because why not.

-Yes, this is pretty much how I feel about New Girl:

On Tuesday, Erica Newland wrote about how Ghostwriter beat the competition in its prescient depiction of the internet. Yesterday, I revisited Hackers, and explained why that movie’s attitude towards openness became the norm for the rest of us, even if we’re not elite computer nerds. Up today, You’ve Got Mail, the first mainstream romantic comedy about internet dating — of a sort.

Online dating is a sufficiently established part of American culture now that publications like the New Yorker devote long features to the algorithms behind different pairing services, and it doesn’t actually feel like hucksterism when Match.com claims that one in five relationships now begin online. Part of what’s fascinating about watching You’ve Got Mail again is because the characters were still figuring out things like instant messaging, much less the conventions of getting to meet someone online and figuring out the tipping point at which you were interested in meeting them in the real world. The truth is that some of the questions the characters ask, like “Is it infidelity if you’re involved with someone on the internet?” are ones we still struggle with today. But some things have changed — today, urban New Yorkers don’t have to worry about a busy signal making it impossible to make a cybersex date.
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The first in an occasional series in which I consider what a movie from the past says about art and politics now.

I’m not really sure where I got the idea that The Man With One Red Shoe was a good movie. I imagine it’s mostly because it’s part of the narrative of the rise of Tom Hanks into that mid-career period before stuff like The Terminal where it seemed like he could do absolutely no wrong. But it’s not very funny, either as a comedy about a naif, or as a comedy about the intelligence. In some ways, it feels like the same “Oh, goodness! There’s a dead body in the closet!” joke, repeated over and over again, though the choreography in a scene where a bunch of CIA agents accidentally sap each other is a nice bit of physical comedy and reasonably entertaining.

I think the problem is largely that, while The Man With One Red Shoe is based in a specific sort of conflict, as a CIA director tries to ward off a coup by embarrassing his departmental rival, the specific circumstances the CIA is in are actually rather general. The movie came out in 1985, a couple of years after Ronald Regan’s “Evil Empire” speech. And while the movie’s villains are meant to be stupid for thinking that Hanks’ naive violinist is actually a Soviet spy, the movie stops short of insisting on the goofiness of faceoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the way, which is what the conflict between KAOS and CONTROL did so effectively in Get Smart.

And though the initial scene involves drug smuggling, there’s nothing about the humor that’s particularly derived from the War on Drugs. The movie comes out just a few months too early to be based on the big Associated Press investigation of the CIA’s involvement in the Contras’ cocaine trafficking, but clearly the possibility that the federal government might be running drugs was in the wind, and it might have been a specifically funny route to try out. Instead, there’s a “we get everyone in a shipyard high” joke, and the movie’s on to the next one:

When it comes to both fear and laughter in movies about intelligence and national security, specificity is useful. And political specificity can lend a particularly sharpness to that bite.