More specials: Ten mistakes. Frodo onstage. Pixar rats out. Paste. Porn. Lips. And James Cameron.

More Tuesday specials:

MUST READ
At Town Hall, Erik Lokkesmoe powerfully sums up ten… count them, ten… big mistakes that conservatives tend to make when they meddle (or fail to meddle) in the arts.

(Thanks for the link, Bubba.)

YES, BUT DOES BILL THE PONY GET TO SING A SOLO?
At last, The Lord of the Rings – The Musical opens to raves!
Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly a musical…

“… the world needs to know what the concept is. It’s not a musical. It’s not a Stratford production. It’s somewhere in between. If you come expecting a new Les Miz or Oklahoma — it’s not. But I think they’ve pulled out the poetry and the themes better than the movies.”

THE NEXT PIXAR FLICK (AFTER CARZ) WILL BE…
… about a rat.

PASTE SCORES AN AWARD!
Plug plugs Paste! (That sounds like something bad, but it’s really something awesome.)

DONE IN SECRET
Paste Magazine’s Andy Whitman on the plague of pornography.

LISTENING CLOSER TO LIPS
I’m not at all excited about the fact that the new Flaming Lips’ album is supposed to be full of Dubya-bashing songs. But that first single is almost irresistably cool. The only thing bugging me about it is the way the riff sounds borrowed from U2’s “Dirty Day.” I just had to register my enjoyment and my complaint.

DO YOU LOVE ALIEN? THIS’LL MAKE YOU EITHER ANGRY OR SAD OR BOTH.
From a new AICN interview with James Cameron:

QUINT: I remember before Paul W.S. Anderson did ALIEN VS PREDATOR it came out that you kind of made an offer to do another ALIEN film with Ridley Scott…

JAMES CAMERON: Yeah. Ridley and I talked about doing another ALIEN film and I said to 20th Century Fox that I would develop a 5th ALIEN film. I started working on a story, I was working with another writer and Fox came back to me and said, “We’ve got this really good script for ALIEN VS PREDATOR and I got pretty upset. I said, “You do that you’re going to kill the validity of the franchise in my mind.” Because to me, that was FRANKENSTEIN MEETS WEREWOLF. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other.

QUINT: Milking it, totally.

JAMES CAMERON: Milking it. So, I stopped work. Then I saw ALIEN VS PREDATOR and it was actually pretty good. (laughs) I think of the 5 ALIEN films, I’d rate it 3rd.

QUINT: Ummm…

JAMES CAMERON: I actually liked it. I actually liked it a lot.

QUINT: You know, I hate it when movies don’t abide by the continuity of their series…

JAMES CAMERON: When they make up their own rules.

QUINT: Exactly. They did that a lot with the alien incubation time, where from egg to chestbuster it happened…

JAMES CAMERON: In minutes, yeah…

QUINT: That kind of stuff really pissed me off with the movie…

JAMES CAMERON: Well, it starts to become a video game. It’s like, “Okay, that can be in him and that can show up over here…” It becomes more metaphorical or more comic book. I don’t mean comic book in a negative way, I just mean that it’s working at a kind of mythic, metaphoric level as opposed to really trying to immerse you in reality.

I mean, I felt when I was making ALIENS I think the same thing Ridley was doing with ALIEN, which is… “I’m going to make you think this is real.” Even though it is completely ridiculous deep space adventure. We were going to make you feel like it’s real. It’s a question of does the film take itself seriously or not.

KRAKEN: So you still thinking about doing something with it?

JAMES CAMERON: No.