Especially for those of us who were in high school at the time, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre is unforgettable. And perhaps because it’s tangled up in countless issues of teenage identity, parental responsibility, and art’s relationship to real-life violence, the incident has become a cultural monolith, inspiring everything from a raft of pop songs to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Now, Columbine is going to be a Lifetime miniseries.

As potentially terrible as this may sound at first, there’s reason to believe the miniseries could actually be great. First of all, it’s based on journalist Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a thorough, bestselling, and critically praised examination of the shootings that was published in 2009. We’re equally excited that the team behind the adaptation includes United States of Tara writer Tommy O’Haver, along with producers Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler, who head the indie powerhouse Killer Films. As long as we don’t hear anything about Justin Bieber playing Eric Harris, we’re optimistic about how this might turn out. [via The Wrap]

Back in September, James Franco scored his first The Paris Review byline with a piece that introduced the magazine’s highbrow readership to River, his Gus Van Sant-blessed cut of My Own Private Idaho. In the months since, he has reviewed Restless (an indie love story directed by Van Sant) and written a piece juxtaposing The Descendants with Breaking Dawn. Today, Franco’s latest piece arrived online, and this time he’s using the two movies that he saw over the holidays — The Artist and Puss in Boots — to look at how recent advances in CG technology will impact his own career.

“The Artist is a film about an actor who can’t use his voice in film — and Puss in Boots is an animated film that uses only famous performers’ voices (Antonio Banderas, Selma Hayek, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Bob Thorton, Amy Sedaris),” Franco writes. “Animation has been a part of film history almost since its inception, and animation with sound started at almost the same time as live-action talkies, Snow White being one of the first feature-length animated sound films in 1937. But it wasn’t until Aladdin (1992) and then Toy Story (1995) that recognizable actors started voicing animated characters with regularity. The personalities of the performers is now a huge part of the animation process, and as computer-generated technology advances, the images will only begin to look more lifelike. Pretty soon — in fact it’s already happening, just look at Tintin — it won’t just be the voices that actors provide for CG animators; it will be all the aspects of a performance.”

We’re curious: What do you think will happen to every actor who’s not Andy Serkis as technology continues to advance?

1. Last night, while co-hosting the 2011 Mayor’s Awards for Arts and Culture at Lincoln Center, the always adorable Alec Baldwin introduced himself as the city’s mayor, much to Bloomberg’s feigned dismay. All joking aside, a run for office definitely seems to be in the 30 Rock star’s future plans, wouldn’t you say? [via NYDN]

2. James Franco has signed on to play a drug dealer (again!) in a new Harmony Korine film called Spring Break; the story “follows four college-aged girls who rob a fast food restaurant to afford spring break in Florida, only to get arrested upon their arrival.” Franco’s character bails them out, and convinces them to kill his arch-rival… a murderer named Arch. [via Slashfilm]

3. After bombing in Abduction (which is currently at 4% on Rotten Tomatoes), Twilight star Taylor Lautner is teaming up with director Gus Van Sant on an indie film that’s based on an unspecified nonfiction article from The New Yorker. Lautner will also produce the project. [via THR]

4. Rick Ross says that those recent seizures that led to his hospitalization in mid-October were caused by lack of sleep, and that he’s totally healthy now. [via NME]

5. Following an alleged 30-second tryst backstage at one of his concerts last year, a 20-year-old woman in California is claiming that Justin Bieber is the father of her 3-month-old baby, and is now suing him for child support. [via NYP]

Bonus Buzz: Neil Patrick Harris’ Halloween Family Portrait

Hey there, bookworms, it’s National Book Lovers Day! How’s about celebrating by, um, watching a movie? (Our logic is less than ironclad, we’ll admit.) Sure, the moving picture doesn’t always do right by the written word, but a few fine films have celebrated literature and writers in ways memorable, thought-provoking, and entertaining; we’ve assembled ten of our favorites after the jump, with plenty of room in the comments for you to throw in your own.

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As evident from her filmography and the occasional interview, Cameron Diaz is not afraid to get raunchy. Today, she continues that tradition with the premiere of Bad Teacher, a comedy that casts her as a foul-mouthed, gold-digging teacher. Now that the reviews are in, it’s clear that critics haven’t been charmed by the film’s attempts at subversiveness — with lazy writing and an unlikable central character, the consensus is that the puerile comedy is mediocre, at best. Since Bad Teacher seems to be a bust, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite films about education, for those of us who wouldn’t mind seeing a portrayal of teaching that doesn’t involve a “sexy” car wash scene. No, Dangerous Minds is nowhere to be found (sorry, Coolio).

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Last Friday, in our suggestions for end-of-the-week time killers, we directed your attention to Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott’s “In Defense of the Slow and Boring” piece in that day’s New York Times. A response, of sorts, to Dan Kois’ lament of ingesting your “cultural vegetables” (which also inspired one of our most divisive posts in recent memory), Dargis and Scott’s two-handed article sings the praises of films that risk alienation by taking their time to tell stories (and, occasionally, to forgo even that) in a more contemplative manor. “Long movies,” Dargis writes, “take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.”

Few moments, as a film fan, are more heartbreaking than talking movies with a friend or acquaintance and hearing that one of your most beloved favorites is “boring,” or “dull,” or “slow,” or some combination of all, occasionally with the descriptor “soul-crushingly” attached. Different strokes for different folks, of course, and everyone’s sense of monotony varies (or, as a friend of mine said over the weekend, “I don”t find slow movies boring. I find action movies boring”). We’ve collected a few of our favorite movies that tend to be described in those terms; check them out after the jump, and add your own in the comments.

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The 64th annual Cannes Film Festival kicks off tomorrow. Before you get jealous, let us just clarify that we’re not going either. Luckily, Cannes makes an excellent spectator sport, even from thousands of miles away. Celebrities clamber down the red carpet in their most outrageous get-ups (Europeans seem to enjoy this kind of thing), audiences actually boo the movies that suck, and the industry buzz around the festival is a great predictor of which films we can expect to see in American art-house theaters later this year. Although Cannes is always packed with great global cinema, the class of 2011 looks particularly promising, with entries by everyone from Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier to Pedro Almodóvar and Gus van Sant. Check out our ten most anticipated Cannes films after the jump.

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A couple weeks back, we took a side-by-side look at the US and UK book jackets for several of our favorite books to see if you could, indeed, judge a country by its covers. Then we got to thinking about the posters that different countries attach to American films that make their way to their shores; there’s plenty of classic Hollywood advertising iconography out there, but more often than not, studio marketing departments play it very safe when they’re advertising their movies (simple designs, big pictures of actors’ faces, etc.). Independent artists and designers are having quite a bit of fun nowadays taking an artier pass at classic movies’ posters, but what about foreign distributors? We recently stumbled upon Cruzine’s brief history of the film posters of Poland and Czechoslovakia, complete with wonderful examples. Join us after the jump to check out how the East saw the films of the West, and which designs we prefer.

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1. After taking home more than 50 percent of the vote, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been named Chicago’s new mayor, and no one is more excited about it than Twitter’s @MayorEmanuel: “FIFTY FOUR MOTHERFUCKING PERCENT, BITCHES.” [via Gawker]

2. Mark your calendars: Lady Gaga announced earlier this morning that the music video for “Born This Way” will debut online on February 28 at 11 am EST. If it just so happens to look a lot like Metropolis and stars a cat, then we’re going to have to boycott out of respect for Madonna and David Fincher (who we just discovered directed the “Express Yourself” video!). [via HitFix]

3. Because co-hosting the Academy Awards apparently wasn’t enough action for one week, James Franco has a new show opening at LA’s Gagosian Gallery on Saturday night. The exhibit, titled Unfinished, includes a 12-hour long reworking of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, renamed Endless Idaho, that features behind the scenes and deleted footage. Eight works on paper done by Van Sant will also be on display.[via Movieline]

4. In spite of rumored delays, multiple sources are now reporting that Apple will unveil the iPad 2 at an event in San Francisco next Wednesday. The updated version will be thinner with an improved display, a front-facing camera, and FaceTime video-chat support. [via The Daily Beast]

5. Ozzy Osbourne has been named this year’s Record Store Day Ambassador, a position held in 2009 by the Eagles of Death Metal front man Jesse “Boots Electric” Hughes and in 2010 by Them Crooked Vultures’ Joshua Homme. The annual event will take place on April 16. [via Billboard]

Bonus link: How to properly organize a bookcase

There’s been a lot of talk about how 2010 has been an awful year for film. In fact earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, novelist and screenwriter Joe Queenan dubbed it the worst movie year ever. While we don’t necessary agree (just look at The King’s Speech, Toy Story 3, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, and Black Swan), we do know that the upcoming year looks even more promising. After the jump check out ten of the films that already have us excited for 2011, and be sure to add anything that we’ve missed in the comments.

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