1. "Scorsese Teams With Jagger For Rock Movie": The Last Temptation of Mick.

["Oscar-winner Martin Scorsese is not resting on his laurels. Just two days after the Departed nabbed him Oscars for best director and best picture, Scorsese announced a collaboration with music legend Mick Jagger for a movie called The Long Play."]

["Why wasn't a single reference to George W. Bush made by anyone--including Ellen DeGeneres in her gently laid-back stand-up routines? Probably for the same reason that I rarely heard Bush mentioned by anyone in conversations when I was recently in Rotterdam, Toulouse, and Paris. Why beat a dead horse?, the deceased in this case being the fate of the world, or perhaps innocent civilians in Iran, not a spry but clueless leader."]

["The Number 23 is the best kind of guilty pleasure: a psychological thriller that does absolutely nothing to make you take it seriously. And because it features a deliciously paranoiac plot centered on a numerological belief that all events are structured around the title number, it does just enough to win over an ex-X-Files casualty like myself. But perhaps I am more envisioning its potentialities than pondering its actualities—we are, after all, talking about a film with a lamely preposterous outcome presided over by Joel Schumacher, the notorious hack loathed by audiences and critics in equal measure. I fully realize The Number 23 is bad, but, still, after seeing its only half-deserved Metacritic rating of . . . 25, I had to offer a tentative consideration of what it could have been. Since we live in a world where collective critical gushing gets occasioned by a film as slight as Pan's Labyrinth, I think I'm entitled to one frivolous moment of partial revisionism. Indulge me."]

["An open letter to the Seattle Weekly from Michael Seiwerath of the Northwest Film Forum (posted at GreenCine Daily) should remind us, on the one hand, what's lost when local film critics are replaced by syndicated content, and, on the other, why we are so fortunate not to have to rely exclusively on pulp-and-ink-based movie criticism."]

["I've had a lot of fun over the past few years ridiculing Hollywood's lame attempts to capture—or rather avoid—the gray, style-free ennui that is life in our nation's capital. That's why I'm proud to plant a big, fat wet one on either cheek of Billy Ray's Breach, a triumph in bourgeoisie beige, so like life in the District that you'll want to run, shrieking from the theater, out of pure boredom."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.