Here’s a mildly disorienting development - apparently, James Wan almost got the Green Hornet gig. The Saw director momentarily posted an update on his Facebook profile which was caught by the Eagle Eyes of Larry Carroll MTV’s Splash Page. It read: Damn you Michel Gondry *shaking fists* Oh well the better man won.

That’s right, he did. But it also seems that Wan is likely to work with Rogen in future. The writer-star said:

Well, we were just given the mandate to bring the studio directors we were fans of, and the discussion would begin from there. So yeah we definitely talked to him. I would definitely love to do something else.

It reads like Wan was so close to the deal that he hadn’t even been told he was out of the running. This “Don’t Call Us” stuff is just bad manners, don’t you think? Hopefully Wan was kidding and he didn’t really learn he was out from a cold, tinny story in Variety.

Idle speculation time - suit up. So… perhaps Wan will end up helming the horror screenplay Bill Hader was talking about back in January? Or maybe this genre stereotyping is the unholy offspring of a red herring and a white elephant and Wan will just make a comedy with Rogen? Only time, and maybe Facebook, will tell.

I’m in a minority, I think, when it comes to my take on Saw. I never liked it one jot. I considered it to be an absolutely bankrupt exercise in meaningless, distancing and irrelevant stylistic tics riveted to a script eaten through with ridiculous contrivances, conveniences and coincidences. The most galling part of the whole enterprise was the short term memory issues apparently suffered by each character, with key pieces of their back stories only recalled when required to push the plot along.

Dead Silence made just the same amount of nonsense as Saw, but was considerably better executed and at least had the nifty conceit of signaling each spook-out with a period of quiet that could be broken by loud and sudden violence at any time. That’s a horror movie gimmick to slay for, so kudos to Leigh Whannel and James Wan for that. And, of course, everybody knows that ventriloquist dummies are creepy - about two thirds as creepy as clowns.

I think we should just take a moment at the end of this post to reflect on the fact that Michel Gondry is directing the Green Hornet film and, at the time of my typing, Stephen Chow is still attached to star. If that doesn’t prove the existence of a flying spaghetti monster, I just don’t know what does.