Short shorts.

(While David Hudson is traveling, these film news tidbits will be even shorter and occurring a bit less often -- but we'll get 'em up here when we can.)

This has nothing to do with anything, but since I've been too cranky here lately, I wanted to mention something that's made me happy. From The DVD Journal, comes word that Warner Brothers is finally getting ready to put out their first DVD releases from their substantial animated holdings, starting with The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-disc box featuring 56 all-time classics; a two-disc The Looney Tunes Premiere Collection, which will offer 28 shorts with the debuts of Warner's major animated characters; and two other discs. These are out October 28 (sufferin' succotash). Do you remember laserdiscs? They were those things shaped like records, but shinier, that played movies, like DVDs, except they weren't DVDs, and now they've become the BetaMax of our era. Anyway, my dad had a laser player, and bought a few Looney Tunes collections that were incredibly wonderful, even if they were a bit randomly arranged. I miss those discs, and my crappy VHS dubs, which were taken from when a lot of these classics were still being shown on TV in the late afternoon, just don't cut it. So, besides the obvious -- What's Opera Doc?, One Froggy Evening, etc -- what Looney Tunes/WB cartoon would you most like to see on a collection?

180 degrees from that: Stephen Frears' new film, Dirty Pretty Things, is opening around the U.S. this month. It stars Amelie ingenue Audrey Tatou, who I would happily watch do her taxes for 90 minutes. But what's interesting, and maybe even important, about the film is how it depicts London as seen by, and changed by, immigrants. Patrick Goldstein, in the LA Times, sees a trend with this film and two others (by Michael Winterbottom and Jim Sheridan) about immigrants in the U.K.

Goldstein makes a connection with working class film in the early days of cinema. It's an interesting little piece. And IndieWire offers up an interview with Frears, in which he sounds extremely cranky, like some character from a Nick Hornby novel. But it is amusing indeed to hear him talk about both the organ trade (which sounds like something from Monty Python -- "live organ transplants," but is in actuality no laughing matter) and about the fact that the guy who created the TV series "How to Become a Millionaire" also wrote the script for Dirty Pretty Things (!).

Also in the LA Times (a newspaper I grew up reading and still miss when stuck reading the SF Comicle, whose Sunday Datebook section takes about 5 minutes to read): Funny, I was just thinking about the topic of deceased filmmakers whose work, whether finished or incomplete, is unearthed and produced into a posthumous salute of sorts. F'rinstance, Krysztof Kieslowski co-wrote the script that became Heaven; and now Akira Kurosawa's script The Sea Is Watching has been made into a movie by Kei Kumai. The Times' offers up a review of the Kumai film by Kevin Thomas, who, frankly, is probably my least favorite, or least trusted, reviewer there, but his review is quite good. On the other hand -- a friend of mine saw it at that San Francisco International Film Festival and both he and his wife, who is from Japan, found the film pretty snoozeworthy. From the coming attraction, it looks lovely but unremarkable.

I have mixed feelings about scripts produced posthumously. On the one hand, as a wannabe scriptwriter myself, the thought of one of my early dreadful drafts, of which I have shoved in a drawer many times, often with good reason, being unearthed without my knowledge, consent or ability to either edit or set aflame... is deeply disturbing. On the other hand, the thought of some film great whose passing still saddens me, especially someone like Kieslowski, who was taken too early from us, the thought that they still somehow live on, is very hard to resist. Especially when someone who knew the person is involved in the unearthed project -- like Krysztof Piesiewicz, with Heaven. But there are times when it would have been better to leave well enough alone. Same thing happens in publishing: When Robert B. Parker "collaborated" with Raymond Chandler on Poodle Springs, or especially when they published Douglas Adams unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt, when many people who knew Adams felt he would not have been pleased with the publication of this rough book. On the other hand, as a huge Adams fan still a bit stunned by his untimely death (what death is timely come to think of it), I can appreciate how other fans could feel that any work of his keeps his flame burning.

Still, I think I come down on the "Against" side. What about you?