by Ryan Syrek

• In news cool enough to make you swoon, weak-in-the-knees or light-headed, the Omaha-based band The Faint have been announced as the curators for the 2012 Local Filmmakers Showcase to be held Oct 19-25 at Film Streams (filmstreams.org). It’s the third time around for this extravaganza, which is open to residents and natives of Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, a region heretofore renamed as the “Farming Filmmaking Free-some” (that may not catch on). The Faint will be selecting the works that get included in the 90-150 minute program, so if you’re looking to get your bribes in, now you know who to call.
• The San Diego Comic Convention, which now is to comics what MTV is to music, has officially reached lunacy status: somebody died. That’s right, a wayward Twilight fan was killed while crossing the street in front of the convention. This launched a series of jokes on Twitter and around the interwebs that confused insensitivity with comedy. Combine this with vain, sexist moron Daniel Tosh’s recent stand-up incident that included humor-free rape “jokes,” and you have yet another reason why the Oscars should add comedy categories: it’s really hard to do it right.
• Will Smith wants to direct. And he doesn’t want to direct just anything; he wants to direct and star in a movie about Cain and Abel in which Cain is a vampir-ish dude. I don’t care how good the movie is, I can only hope Smith will also rap the theme song: “Bitin’ on Your Brother.”
• Channing Tatum wants to make a Magic Mike sequel. And he wants to make it “bigger.” This news brought to you by the Society of Jokes That Write Themselves.

Cutting Room provides breaking local and national movie news … complete with added sarcasm. Send any relevant information to film@thereader.com. Check out Ryan on Movieha!, a weekly half-hour movie podcast (movieha.libsyn.com/rss), catch him on the radio on CD 105.9 (cd1059.com) on Fridays at around 7:30 a.m. and on KVNO 90.7 (KVNO.org) at 8:30 a.m. on Fridays and follow him on Twitter (twitter.com/thereaderfilm).

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