Turns out the whole premise behind Be Kind Rewind isn’t based in scientific fact! In the movie, Jack Black–with a brain magnetized by a civil disobedience act gone wrong–erases all the tapes in a Passaic, NJ video store, thus impelling the re-shooting of all the movies destroyed.

According to professional spoil-sport Jeremy Berlin, no way, Jose. He cites Jerzy Bodurka, a Polish physicist who works at the National Institute of Mental Health:

Overall, soft brain tissue has weak diamagnetic properties and cannot be magnetized to [that] level. If it could, then the kitchen, the mechanical shop, the hardware store, and many other places would be very dangerous environments for all human beings. So the answer to that question is NO.

In a few dozen years, or perhaps sooner, when nanotechnology, robotics, and power-generation technologies advance into something like a human-machine hybrid…such a hybrid [could] have a part of its body–say, an arm-equipped not with a deadly gun or flamethrower (like that cute-but-dangerous lady aka Terminator 3) but with a magnetic conduit.

That explains so much.

Layoffs at the LA Daily News were announced late yesterday. Reporter Brent Hopkins blogs:

Corporate will cut 22 jobs in Editorial by the end of the week, bringing us down to 100 people in the newsroom. They’ll be spread between management and rank-and-file, but the numbers will vary depending on who volunteers by noon tomorrow.

Editor Ron Kaye will continue in his role.

Alex Gibney’s Oscar winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, has stirred up some questions in the doc. film making world. On a forum frequented by non-fiction filmmakers, someone asked:

I’m curious if anyone knows how Taxi to the Dark Side was financed?
The cinematography and interstitials/graphics make it look like a
high-budget government training video. I wondered whose purposes it was serving?

Responses included:

When was the last time anyone saw a “high budget government training video”?

and

…a training video on torture, especially if it
featured some of the people interviewed in the film, would make a
provocative companion piece.

Gibney’s Oscar speech:

Thank you very much, Academy. Here’s to all doc filmmakers. And truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I’d make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, that simply wasn’t possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us: Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a Navy interrogator, who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light. Thank you very much.

HBO will show the film in September.

Bill O’Reilly asks

What’s the difference between Arianna Huffington and the KKK?

Thread count.

Heard It Through The Grapevine: We wondered if the Buddy Miles obit would mention the fact that he gave voice to those claymation California Raisins in the lede. It did.

Skywalker Ranch. With Real Nerf Herders: Reporter Geoff Boucher gets a rare look inside Skywalker Ranch. Apparently, it’s really a ranch. Our favorite paragraph: “My wife, Tracy, and our two kids, Addie and Ben, come up on my third day at Skywalker to see the place (how I could I tell my 10- and 6-year-olds: “Wait at home while I go to Skywalker Ranch”?), and they adore the library and the animal collection at the stables (which began, I’m told, when Linda Ronstadt gave Lucas a cow as a 40th birthday gift). At the firehouse, they giggle with joy at getting a ride in the sweet new $450,000 engine (painted in USC cardinal, no surprise) past the vineyard (the grapes are shipped off to Coppola’s winery, again, no surprise).”

Con-Spears-acy Theories: Did someone drug Britney Spears? We don’t know. But we have another question: Did someone on the photo desk swap out this new-standard mug of Spears for one that had her chin zit airbrushed out? We’ve seen this photo a thousand times (seriously, LAT, One Thousand Times), and this is the first time we’ve noticed said pimple. Which makes us suspicious…

We love edgy. Don’t get us wrong, FBLA is the edgiest. We bow to no one in our love of the inappropriate. Bad taste is our right word at the wrong time.

But a fashion shoot at a Holocaust memorial? (Thanks, Glossed Over.)

Of course, there’s always ANTM’s homeless and fierce photo shoot, which was probably based on Diana Ross’s dizzy turn as a fashion superstar in Mahagony (which has nothing to do with Kurt Weill and everything to do with Tony Perkins).

Continuing on with this trend, model hopeful Fatima and her backstory of growing up in Somalia, must have made Tyra nearly faint with excitement. If Tyra loved the fat suit, the ol’ beggar woman costume and the drag king stunt, wait ’til she tries female genital mutilation on for size.

Marc Silver, a reporter for Nat’l Geo. (and ANTM fan, go figure) asked an expert about FGM and ANTM and got some interesting answers.

Was Fatima overstating the case when she said she could not have sex with a man?

Maybe she meant that she can’t find pleasure, which is what women sometimes say when they’ve been mutilated to that extent. Some men bring a knife or a goat horn to the wedding bed to open the woman up [for intercourse]. So probably that’s what she means.

In today’s Morning Call Time podcast, Steven Spielberg postpones his Chicago trip with Aaron Sorkin and Sacha Baron Cohen, Toby Stephens and Shaun Cassidy announce they’re inseparable, and Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain move into Joss Whedon‘s Dollhouse.

Click here to subscribe to mediabistro.com‘s Morning Call Time… or check us out on iTunes!

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True Hollywood Story isn’t dead yet–this Saturday E!’s offering an “unauthorized” look at Renee Zellweger. It’s produced by Michael Lynn, the master of this genre, and one of the network’s few Emmy nominees.

And for the first time ever, you’ll hear how Renee and Kenny Chesney really hooked up! Of course, if we’d produced it, you’d see that scene acted out by Ken and a Bratz doll, in a haze of smoke.

THS has already covered the whole Texas Chainsaw Massacre oeuvre.

Saturday, March 1st from 6-7 PM Eastern/Pacific Time.

Trend watch: knock her up to seal the deal. Baby daddies are sowing their seed everywhere, it seems.

Britney Spears is allegedly preggers by maybe-husband Adnan Ghalib (can she even spell that?):

“Britney is Adnan’s dream come true. He knows that if he has a child with Brit, he’ll be made for life,” one friend of Adnan’s tells the Star.

and that’s what a friend says.

One time hotshot Jeff Stein is hitching his wagon to Angela Janklow’s star, with a baby on the way.

Who wouldn’t want a mini-version of these guys?

Apparently the new Tribune Co. owner is no fan of the Democratic party. E&P notes that on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, Sam Zell “attributed much of the current economic woes to fear-mongering by Democratic foes Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

In unrelated Zell news, The journalistic curiousity drops his beloved F-bomb on the D.C. buro of the Chicago Tribune while the Chicago Sun-Times urges baseball fans (i.e. the whole city) to pressure Zell into not selling Wrigley Field’s name out to the highest bidder. Good luck with that.

*Cartoon courtesy of stolen from David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.