Toyota's offshoot brand Scion was designed to appeal to teens and early twenty-somethings looking to buy their first cars. Their web site is so cool it makes cool people feel like nerds. It makes me feel like... what's one level below a nerd? Okay, maybe two levels. Anyway, I bought one of their cars a few weeks ago. Unfortunately for Scion's much wished-for youthful image, so did a lot of other people a wee bit outside the target age range. Variety reports that instead of breaking out the Geritol, Scion will try to appeal to the youth market by hiring Roman Coppola (CQ)to direct a series of short films called The Fist of Oblivion to run on the automaker's site starting in November. Its star will be an ex-cop kung-fu master who's hunting down a friend who framed him for a crime. Also, he's a puppet.

In what appears to be the exception that proves the rule of the old saying "Don't put the cart before the horse," South African director Jonathan Liebesman is in the final stages of negotiations with Columbia Pictures to direct their upcoming project Battle: Los Angeles, which he won by going out to locations in August and not only shooting sequences and plates, but adding CGI aliens and creating a pre-viz alien invasion sequence just to pitch to the studio. Seems like a lot of money and work for a job he didn't even have yet.

Ah, the fun you could have with the new trailer for W., Ollie Stone's biopic of our current president! The latest trailer's use of scenes, music and credits can all be pulled apart for your enjoyment. The strangest thing about it is that it seems to be missing Stone's penchant for controversy. Sure, it has several scenes with different film stocks, like Natural Born Killers, and scenes of binge drinking set to George Thorogood songs, but other than that, it comes off rather ordinary. Until you start reading between the lines, that is.

As Odie Henderson pointed out recently, Spike Lee seems to have a thing for getting into fights. According to Variety, Lee's Miracle at St. Anna is being derided "as mispresentation of the facts" by Italian veteran organizations after a press screening yesterday in Rome. Lee didn't really start the latest skirmish, but he's not exactly being Mr. Diplomat about things, either. He responded by telling those critical of his film: "I am not apologizing for anything. I think these questions are evidence that there is still a lot about your history during the war that you [Italians] have got to come to grips with." Pretty much the best way to make sure people don't come to grips with something is by telling them to come to grips with something. It's like telling an angry person to calm down. Does that ever work?

There have been many rumors about who would play Robin Hood in Ridley Scott's upcoming Nottingham. Scott needed someone who could match wits with Russell Crowe as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the latest rumor is that Scott finally found someone who fits the bill: Russell Crowe. [I haven't seen casting that inspired since Jean-Claude Van Damme played twins in Double Impact! - Zach]

When you think of the upcoming Thor movie from Marvel, the first director that comes to mind is probably not someone best known for his Shakespeare adaptations, right? But that's exactly who might end up with the job, since Kenneth Branagh is in talks to direct the movie. Not that Shakespeare can't be a big-old action film (after all, Branagh's own Henry V was plenty action-packed and bloody) and big-old action films can't be Shakespearean. But it's not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of part of the Avengers, of which Iron Man is a part. And Iron Man is awesome and everything, but definitely not Shakespearean. He's too futuristic, and he's a superhero in a suit and all of that. Not exactly Shakespeare's specialty.

Universal Pictures set sail this morning, armed the harpoon guns, and took aim at a classic. According to Variety, the prey was Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which Universal will film as a "reimagining" with director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) and scribes Adam Cooper and Bill Collage. The writers "revere Melville's original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure." Cooper calls it the original "action-adventure revenge story," for which they will get to "capitalize on the advances in visual effects". According to the report, "Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive." At this point, poor dead Herman Melville crawls out of his plot at Woodlawn Cemetery and is about to capitalize on the advances in Google to look up the offices of Universal Pictures.

Nicolas Cage is a busy man -- very busy. He's got 10 films slated for release over the next couple of years. While I'll readily admit to anyone that I enjoy quite a few of Cage's pre-1990 movies, I'm hard-pressed to come up with an explanation as to why he's gotten so much work since then. There have been a couple of good performances in the nearly 20 intervening years, but there have also been those so wooden that I thought he would turn out to be the titular character in 2006's The Wicker Man. Well, add film #11 to the slate: Variety reports that Cage is set to star as a 14th century knight transporting a suspected witch in Relativity Media's Season of the Witch. Did a real-life witch lose a bet or something?

Spike Lee is far better known for what he does off the screen than what he puts on it. It's a shame, because Lee is one of the few directors working today whose style permeates every movie he makes. Like Scorcese's work, one need only look at a few shots to immediately peg a Spike Lee Joint. And like the people IN Scorsese's work, Spike Lee appears to relish picking fights. After settling the fight he had over WWII movies with Clint Eastwood, Spike has now set the stage for one with penis-obsessed director-producer Judd Apatow. For what Apatow has done to shame my Johnson, he deserves to get punched out.

I've seen all of the Star Trek movies and watched every episode of the original Star Trek series -- heck, I even read novelizations of most of the episodes in James Blish's series of Trek books (Star Trek 1, 2, 3, etc.). And I have never, ever heard Captain Kirk mention his Uncle Frank, and now I know why. In J.J. Abrams' relaunch of the Star Trek property, due out May 8, the audience is introduced to Uncle Frank, Kirk's alcoholic, abusive uncle. And according to actor Brad William Henke in an interview with Collider, Frank slaps young James Tiberius around when he's a kid. (Henke is probably gonna get slapped around, too -- by J.J. Abrams, for talking about this controversial detail when he was supposed to be talking about his role in Choke.)