MISCELLANEOUS MISCELLANY – AGAIN: DUKES KICK SOME BASIC INSTINCT ASS WHILE MARTY HAS DINNER INSTEAD OF WATCHING MILLER WHO IGER WILL WANT FOR ABC WHEN HE SHOULD JUST PICK-UP SOME MUSICALS

A couple items caught my eye this afternoon and I thought I’d throw them up here:

• A while ago, I wrote about the horror of Jessica Simpson becoming Daisy Duke on the big screen. Today, there’s much better news from Hazzard County: two “jackasses” have been cast to play Bo and Luke Duke. I actually think Johnny Knoxville and Stifler are potentially great ideas for the obvious campy film this will be. I still think they’re going to run into trouble trying to deliberately out-camp the original series, so at this point a lot depends on attaching a writer and director who each have strong comic skills. Of course, Todd Phillips didn’t help Starsky & Hutch much, and Dukes of Hazzard seems to be heading down the same road.

• Still, I’m more encouraged by that news than by word that Michael Caton-Jones is now attached to direct Basic Instinct 2. I wrote about this awful idea back in July when the movie first got back on track. I don’t mean Caton-Jones is such a terrible thought, but this whole movie should never happen. Nobody cares. But speaking of this director, what the hell happened to him? Around the turn-of-the-’90s, he was making some really interesting films like Scandal, Memphis Belle and This Boy’s Life. Even Doc Hollywood was a pleasant little trifle. But Rob Roy was just bland, and The Jackal was utterly unnecessary, and not very good. I never saw City By the Sea, but that was in large part due to the fact that nobody else did either so it came and went. I wish he could get back to the provocative material of his earlier films; vanity destined-to-be-a-flop crap like Basic Instinct 2 just tells me that he can’t get a good job.

• In what must be a major coup for the show, even if it means there will likely be just one man speaking and very quickly, IFC’s Jon Favreau-hosted series Dinner for Five has been renewed for a new season, and the first episode will be a special from the Lake Placid Film Festival (which happened in June) featuring Martin Scorsese. I’m actually not into IFC’s little chatfest. Every time I turn it on, I get relatively bored pretty quickly, especially since the conversation often has little to do with movies — at least the times I’ve turned it on. That should be especially interesting since I’ve never seen Scorsese talk about anything else. (I’m sure he does in his private life, but on camera?) Of course, I could sit and watch and listen to Scorsese talk about film forever. Between documentaries like Il Mio Viaggio in Italia and actually seeing him speak at various events, I’ve already done so and never failed to leave the experience without learning something. So you better believe I’ll be tuning in when these episodes start airing early next year.

• I don’t know how I didn’t hear about this until today, but thank you Gothamist Arts for giving me the heads-up about the first edition of the NY Musical Theatre Festival which starts Monday. In addition to what should be a glimpse at much of the new musical theatre talent coming-up the ranks, the festival is devoting a few days to musicals on film, including Lars von Trier’s and Bjork’s brilliant but incredibly depressing collaboration in Dancer in the Dark and John Cameron Mitchell’s fantastic adaptation of his own stage show Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Like Gothamist, I am particularly interested in seeing the film festival hit The American Astronaut which had a brief release that I missed a couple years ago and still hasn’t found a DVD distributor. I’m also keen to catch Neil Young’s Greendale, which I also missed during its short release earlier this year. And that’s just the films.

• For some inexplicable reason, CNBC has renewed Dennis Miller’s talk show which, according to Variety (sub req’d), averages a whopping 213,000 viewers a night. Yet the Variety story also quotes CNBC execs as saying the show “is the cornerstone of its redesigned lineup.” I guess considering that the networks McEnroe has twice registered a zero rating, Miller’s show deserves to be “the cornerstone.”

• And last but oh so definitely not least: This just in, Michael Eisner announces he’ll step-down as head of Disney when his contract ends in 2006. This comes on the heels of the news that Eisner thinks Robert Iger should be his succesor to head the monolithic entertainment conglomerate. That would be a brilliant idea because as I wrote back in April, Iger, more than anyone, is really responsible for the tremendous long-term slide and bottom-feeding of the major networks in which ABC currently finds itself. I have always been amazed at his dramatic rise from ABC programming head, to head of network to #2 man at Disney, but here it is? Disney stockholders, take note: sell!