A Brooklyn teacher has been placed on administrative duty after buying a bunch of copies of Frankenstein and selling them at discount prices to his students, whose hearts are the only thing he says he touched.
Rupert Murdoch has wanted to throttle the gasping corpse of the New York Times ever since the day he overpaid for the Wall Street Journal. This is his passion. His first solid step is his previously announced New York local news hires at the WSJ. Today, John Koblin reports that he's not just grabbing a dozen reporters to put out a metro section; he is, in effect, building a competing local paper—complete with three dozen reporters, a $15 million budget, and a boatload of New York Sun veterans.
Whatever your impressions of would-be bank robber and generally overrated fantasy maven Guillermo del Toro, his new long-term pact with Universal can't be the kind of thing that rouses too much confidence in his growth and versatility — even among fans. After his five-year commitment to The Hobbit, the filmmaker will reportedly return back to his Hellboy backers for four films in as many years. And if/when we ever write our book on the End of Ideas epidemic sweeping Hollywood, his unique stretch from this year's sequel Hellboy II to one of three remake possibilities in 2017 may be worth an entire chapter's worth of consideration:
