From the “Errr… what?” files, days-old news that James Franco will be guest-starring on ABC’s daytime soap opera General Hospital, for a two-month stint beginning in November. Strange, sure, and a bit of a step down from the Spider-Man flicks for which Franco remains best known to mainstream audiences. But this is a guy who’s always marched to the beat of a different drummer, as evidenced by everything from his choice in projects (Milk, an upcoming Allen Ginsberg biopic) and squirmy disregard for interviews to his low-fi directorial debut, The Ape, which was about a corporate drone and would-be writer struggling with his roommate — a raunchy, talking gorilla with a penchant for loud Hawaiian shirts. Studio films like Tristan + Isolde and Pinepple Express notwithstanding, this route to mid-aged stardom — very loosely the same sort of flirtation-rejection that Johnny Depp engaged in with Hollywood for years — is the much more interesting path to take. And make no mistake, Franco has the chops to be a perennial Oscar nominee.

Rich Juzwiak has gone and done the hard work and heavy lifting for me, putting together a five-minute clip of wonky, non-receptive cell phone calls that spans 66 films over the past… what, seven or eight years? It’s a particularly modern problem — isolating characters in a technological era in which isolation is all but obsolete — that screenwriters have labored over and had a lot of difficulty reasonably cracking, but the clip-fest really runs the gamut, from those movies that play it smooth and loose (The Ruins, Turistas) to those that overstate their case (The Hills Have Eyes). The trophy for Most Amusing Write-Around, incidentally, probably goes to Hatchet, for its exclamatory “No bars… I hate the South!” This sidestepping of technology bugs the crap out of me when it’s handled badly, sure, but most studio films are only concerned with eliminating cell phones from thriller/horror storylines, and then moving on as quickly as possible. And empty coffee cups are still my number one target.

Is it just me, or can the fact that NBC is using Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming” to promote Jay Leno’s forthcoming 10 p.m., five-night-a-week talk show kind of be taken as a dig at Conan O’Brien’s rocky-out-of-the-gates stewardship of The Tonight Show? Leno hasn’t been gone that long, really; it’s not like he’s a prizefighter coming out of retirement, or an actress coming back the small screen after a couple years of maternity leave. It’s just a weird song choice to me. Aimed at the segment of the old Tonight Show audience who wouldn’t know the Masturbating Bear from Comic the Insult Triumph Dog, the subtext seems to be, “Yeah, yeah… we know: but now you’ll get Jay earlier, and can go to bed at 11:10 after catching some local news, instead of 11:50, after his monologue!”