Jon's Show Notes on The Passion podcast

• First of all, I suggest that anyone who's interested in The Passion at all read Stephen King's masterful editorail on it from Entertainment Weekly. It is one of the finest bits of film writing I've ever read.
• Download the new Interpol album from , you will not be dissapointed.
• The "secular" inspired by The Passion album is, in my opinion, really awesome. If you don't want to buy the whole album you can buy the best song, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' "Darker the Day" from .
• You can also download the opening music from the show, "The Real Sin Savior" by Apologetix from .
• Speaking of it, The Blair Witch Project is almost certainly the most successful independant film of all time. It had a total budget of $60,000(including studio marketing after it got picked up) and worldwide gross of $248 million, for a whopping 413,000% profit! Comparatively, The Passion had a meger 2000% profit. Deep Throat was low budgeted, but its $600 million box office figure was almost certainly created by the mafia types who ran porn theaters in the 70s. For Deep Throat to have made that much money in its initial run every man, woman and child in the USA would had to have bought a ticket, twice.
• If you're interested in HALO 3, then check out this awesome teaser, created by the director who may or may not be making a HALO movie(the story changes every other day).
• I think the demon figure that Justin and Don mention in The Passion is a filmic reference to The Exorcist's Captain Howdy.
• You can learn a bit more about Passion plays here, and see what happens when people take this sort of thing way too far here.
• That "untitled" 1-18-08 movie that Justin and Don were talking about? It's produced by J.J. Abhrams(Felecity, Lost, Alias, M:I:3, forthcoming Star Trek re-boot), directed by Matt Reeves(Felecity) and written by Drew Goddard(Alias, Lost). The working title is "Cloverfield," and all that is really known is that it is a monster movie shot with hand-held home video cameras, as in The Blair Witch Project. At the San Diego Comic Con Goddard mentioned that he wanted to make an american monster movie that had a monster that would be as iconic and popular in the USA as Godzilla is in Japan. Good luck, but I'm skeptical. I thought King Kong was already a pretty popular home grown monster. Plus, I don't know if introducing a monster in a hand-held style movie will make it an icon of American culture. The internet is all abuzz with hype about this movie, generated mainly by the producers simply refusing to say anything. If it is all shot on home video cameras they were probably able to shoot the whole thing under the radar and do most of the crazy stuff in computer effects. My favorite theory is that it is really the Ultimate Internet Phenomena Movie. Perhaps some blend of LOLCATS, ORLY and the Something Awful forums, in narrative form. I'm kind of dissapointed it is none of those things, just another J.J. Abhrams dead end(see Lost) with a cool concept, tons of internet hype, but no delivery. We'll see if Abhrams can pull it through this time, although it is kind of sad for the other guys involved that Abhrams is getting all the publicity. You can see the first poster from the movie here, and some guy has posted a youtube video with a fairly interesting analysis of the trailer and speculations on the film's plot. Save This Page