If you happened to catch the new documentary Al Franken: God Spoke at last spring’s Tribecca Film Fest, than you are among the privileged few who got to see a slightly different cut of the film with an extra scene in which the film’s subject, political satirist Al Franken, gets the better of conservative pundit Ann Coulter in a 2004 debate. Apparently, Coulter has refused to sign a release for the scene, forcing the producers to remove the scene from the film.

Al Franken: God Spoke premiered in New York City this week and will make its way across the country over the next two months. You can find more release information at the film’s website.

The scene in questions features a segment of a debate where the two were asked by the debate moderator which historical figure they would like to be. Coulter responded first, saying that she wished she could be Franklin Roosevelt, so she could prevent his New Deal economic recovery program. Franken reposted with the observation that he would have liked to been Hitler so he could have prevented a little thing called the Holocaust.

In an interview over at CHUD, Devin Feraci spoke to the film’s directors Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, who confirmed that the scene was squelched by Coulter’s camp, though they accept some blame for the footage being initially included in the film.

“We went under the unthinking presumption that it was a public event and we could shoot it,” Doob told Faraci. “It was really, in fact, a miscommunication in our office. To use that footage we had to have permission from Ann Coulter.” The filmmakers have replaced the scene with one of Coulter and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly discussing Franken.

The film’s distributors have asked critics not to mention the missing scene in their reviews. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the rest of us from writing about it and leaving you readers up to draw your own conclusions about Ann Coulter…

When the Thai action film Ong-Bak opened in the United States, martial arts film fans finally were let in on a secret other film fans around the world already knew- that newcomer Tony Jaa could very well be the next major star in the martial arts film world. With a speed that rivals the famed Bruce Lee and an agility that recalls Jackie Chan, Jaa seemingly came out of stun audiences with his swiftness, ferocity and grace.

Now with Jaa’s second film, The Protector, rolling out across the country, there is a definite push to raise Jaa’s profile among this country’s movie-going public. In the weeks leading up to the release of the film Jaa has made several public appearances, demonstrating with his team of trained stuntmen his skill in Muay Thai or Thai boxing, showing that the skills he displays on film are no camera trick of computer generated enhancement. Such demonstrations are an extension of how Jaa sees himself as a cultural ambassador for his home country.

“Thailand is a Buddhist country and we try to bring spirituality to everything we do,” he says through an interpreter during a recent phone interview. “So there needs to be a spiritual aspect to my movies and that this is reflected in the movies’ themes. Hopefully this allows more people to learn more about Buddhism.”

In Ong-Bak, Jaa portrayed a man from a simple Thai village who journeys to Bangkok to retrieve the head of the village’s Buddha statue which was stolen by gangsters. The Protector’s plot is similar, with Jaa playing a young man who journey’s from a remote Thai village to Australia to retrieve two elephants that were stolen from his family. The plot does allow Jaa to present an aspect of Thai history- the band of warriors known as the Jaturungkabart, soldiers sworn to protect the royal elephant being ridden into battle by the Thai King.

Jaa explains that elephants are an important part of Thai culture. “Although elephants used to be used in war time, they are now for some religious ceremonies and parades. People attach a great deal of importance to them. For some they are like family. I have two elephants, named Flower and Leaf, who are like family.”

While Jaa gives his audiences doses of Thai culture and history, it’s the action that the gets them into the theater. Although the film is chock full of fights and chases, including one between Jaa and a gang of extreme skateboarders and trick bicycle riders, the action centerpiece to The Protector is a four minute long continuous shot in which Jaa battles his way past numerous opponents up four levels of a restaurant. It’s a sequence that took a month to prepare and two weeks to capture.

“It took eight takes and you could only do two a day because of the preparation,” Jaa states. “Everything had to be choreographed just right, because the camera only held four minutes of film. We would start the scene and I would work my way up but something or someone wouldn’t be where they should and we would have to start over. Sometimes we would get almost to the end of the scene and the film would run out of the camera. We originally had a white camera operator but he wasn’t fit enough to keep up with the scene so we used a Thai one instead.”

And what of those rumors linking to Jaa to upcoming Hollywood far such as Die Hard 4 and Rush Hour 3? While he acknowledges that he would eventually like to work in a big budget Hollywood film, it is not in the cards just yet.

“Right now I am working on a few projects, including a sequel to Ong-Bak which I will be directing,” Jaa reveals. “But nothing in Hollywood right now. However, if a movie would come along with a good script, I would certainly be interested.”

This past weekend director Mike Judge’s long awaited follow-up to his hit comedy Office Space (1999), Idiocracy, finally appeared in theatres, though one would be hard pressed to know it.

The film stars Luke Wilson as an army private who is cryogenically frozen and then thawed out in the year 2505 to find that the future isn’t so bright as it is dumb. It seems that over five centuries the stupid people have out bred the smart ones, making Wilson’s average Joe character the smartest man in America.

After months of being bounced around Twentieth Century Fox’s release schedule, the studio finally released Idiocracy on a paltry 130 screens in seven cities- Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago and Toronto. There were no advanced screenings for critics. There was no discernable advertising outside of a few newspaper ads. Although a trailer for the film is mentioned in a recent Esquire magazine portrait on Judge, it can’t be found online. In fact, the film’s internet presence is virtually non-existent, even on Fox’s own website.

One would suspect from this apparent lack of confidence that Fox had a dog picture on their hands and were looking to dump it quick. However, almost as soon as the film’s first Friday matinee ended reviews started appearing online and they ranged from at the worse mixed and at the best raves. As I write this, the movie even earned a 71% fresh rating over at Rotten Tomatoes.com. Certainly not the disaster one would expect from its apparent treatment by the studio.

So why is it that Fox is giving this as quiet a release as possible? The reviews have been respectable, especially for a summer which gave us such lackluster comedies as You, Me And Dupree and the two Fox releases My Super Ex-Girlfriend and John Tucker Must Die. While Office Space did not perform spectacularly during its initial theatrical run, a release many would argue Fox bungled, it would go on to earn millions for Fox on VHS and in two separate DVD releases. Advertising Idiocracy as being from the director of Office Space certainly sounds as if it would be an effective way of getting people to line up at the box office.

The film’s small release might make sense if this past weekend was just the first step in a multi-week release strategy where Idiocracy would open in further cities as word-of-mouth spread. It’s a strategy currently being employed by Fox’s own Fox Searchlight division for Little Miss Sunshine. However, there’s been no indication that there’s any indication that Fox plans to get this film onto more screens than the initial 130, basically telling fans outside of reasonable driving distance that they’re out of luck.

Maybe Judge is right. Maybe America is getting dumber and the idiots are in charge. It’s already happenedwith Twentieth Century Fox studio executives.

Although the upcoming film The Black Dahlia is being touted as based on the novel by James Ellroy, the writer of LA Confidential, Ellroy actually based his book on the 1947 Los Angeles murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short. The book supplies fictional closure to a murder that remains unsolved to this day. The case was a headline generator for months after the discovery of the aspiring actress’ mutilated corpse on January 15, 1947. The Los Angeles police investigated numerous suspects from doctors to various employees and owners of some of the nightclubs Short was known to have frequented. Even Folksinger Woody Guthrie was briefly investigated by the LAPD.

But in anticipation of renewed interest in the case thanks to Brian DePalma’s movie, which opens on September 15, the Los Angeles Times set up a special website with over 80 articles relating to the murder ranging from 1947 all the way to 1983.

You can read it all here.