Is there hope that "Friday Night Lights" will keep shining?

If the perhaps final "Friday Night Lights" that aired a few weeks was indeed a finale, it would certainly be an odd way to go out.

In ways it did feel like an ending of sorts, with Smash (Gaius Charles) finding out he just might still have the chance to play (very small) college football and show honcho Peter Berg even making a very funny appearance as an old flame of Tami Taylor's (the simply fantastic Connie Britten) who gets into a drinking and then wrestling match with coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler.)

But it also, of course, had some aspects of a perfect cliffhanger, with Street (Scott Porter) waiting to find out if he will be a daddy and Lyla (Minka Kelly) and Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) perhaps about to start knocking boots again. (If this all sounds rather like a tawdry soap opera, it often is, but like "The Last Picture Show," it's also a fantastic portrait of life in small-town America.)

And I tell you all that to tell you this: NBC, which has until now shown little inclination to bring the show back for a third season despite its rather attractive demographical (is that even a word?) numbers, may be having a change of heart.

In order to salvage my favorite network TV drama (by far), NBC is currently in negotiations with the CW, Comcast Entertainment Networks, TNT and DirecTV to see if it can find a "shared window" plan which would have the show air on multiple networks (which I can only assume would divvy up the production costs, too.)

NBC is apparently asking a high price (especially for a show that it seems to have so little love for), but here's hoping someone takes the bait and saves this TV gem.

Be Kind, play wide?

I was so psyched until Wednesday morning when my local multiplexes updated their weekly movie offerings that, with the arrival of Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind," we would finally have the first truly great (or at least really fun) movie of 2008.

Well, as some of you who live in a small city (well, town, really) like me might be finding out, apparently putting Jack Black and Mos Def in a movie all about the love of movies isn't enough to insure any kind of distribution at all. I will apparently have to drive almost 60 miles this Saturday morning (which I will definitely do) just to see it at the rather palatial AMC Southlake Pavilion south of Atlanta.

There's no real point to this portion except to let me vent a little, which is also a welcome release. I do have to ask, though: What in the world does a movie have to do to play in anything except "select cities"?


Fincher set to dive into a "Black Hole"

Complain about its length or its lack of focus if you have to, but for my money there were very few movies (only four, to be exact) better than David Fincher's "Zodiac" in 2007. And I'd put even money on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," his take on the F. Scott Fitzgerald tale about a man who ages in reverse through the 20th century, being among my favorites of this year too.

And now comes word that he's attached to a new project that seems right up his alley. Though I can't claim to have read the "Black Hole" series of graphic novels by Charles Burns, they seem, from what little I've been able to piece together, to exist in that splendidly sordid realm where Fincher feels most at home.

In the graphic novels, at least according to Publisher's Weekly, the setting is Seattle during the early '70s. A sexually transmitted disease, the "bug," is spreading among teenagers. Those who get it develop bizarre mutations—sometimes subtle, like a tiny mouth at the base of one boy's neck, and sometimes obvious and grotesque. The most visibly deformed victims end up living as homeless campers in the woods, venturing into the streets only when they have to, shunned by normal society. All I can say to all that is bring it on!

In case you need any more inducement to get geeked up about this, here's what Daniel Clowes of "Ghostworld" fame has to say about Mr. Burns at Amazon.com:

"Charles Burns is one of the greats of modern comics. His comics are beautiful on so many levels. Somehow he has managed to capture the essential electricity of comic-book pop-art iconography, dragging it from the clutches of Fine Art back to the service of his perfect, precise-but-elusive narratives in a way that is both universal in its instant appeal and deeply personal."

Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman are writing the script for this project which would should definitely keep Fincher on a roll.

Now that's a lead

In a good article about movie studios bringing their video game development in-house that you can read here, the Wall Street Journal leads off by revealing what may (or may not) be the plot to Pixar's 2010 release, "Toy Story 3":

In Pixar's coming movie "Toy Story 3," Woody the cowboy and his toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, leaves for college.

Now, if that is indeed the case, it does sound like a fun way to bring a new batch of kids into the franchise. That plot summary, however, does differ wildly from what's up at the IMDB:

The adventure continues as Toy Story 3 makes its way into theaters in 2010. In this new adventure, Buzz Lightyear has encountered a malfunction and is being sent to Taiwan to be fixed. It appears that these malfunctions are occurring with toys all around the world! Now, Woody and a group of his friends are on a mission to save Buzz's destruction.

No matter which one is right, we'll have to wait a couple of years to find out, but isn't it so much more fun to wonder about such silly things than say, whatever work you have to do? Peace out.