Everyone’s familiar with Ernest Hemingway 1952 story The Old Man and the Sea – the classic tale of a downtrodden old fisherman who ventures out to sea where he hooks a marlin that won’t give in too easily. The story turns into an epic struggle between man and fish, as well as a triumph of wills.

Artist Marcel Schindler has created a stop-motion animation of his illustrative narrative of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. You can watch the 4-minute video here below.

Last week, we reported that Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich had been cast as Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens in the upcoming HBO film Hemingway and Gellhorn.

Now, Rolling Stone has posted a photo Ulrich as Ivens, along with his fellow castmates Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen on set of the film in San Francisco.

Check out the image here at top; Ulrich is on the far left, complete with beret and director’s camera.

I honestly don’t know how to take this news. But here it is… Lars Ulrich, co-founder and drummer of Metallica, the man that fans either love to hate or hate to love or some variation thereof, has been cast in a film. Yep, that’s right; Ulrich is stepping up into acting having been cast in the HBO movie, Hemingway and Gellhorn.

Hemingway and Gellhorn is a biopic being executive produced by James Gandolfini (Mr. Soprano himself!) and directed by Phil Kaufman. The HBO film will focus on the romance and marriage between Ernest Hemingway (portrayed by Clive Owen) and Martha Gellhorn (portrayed by Nicole Kidman). The plot will follow the two through the Spanish Civil War and afterwards.

Also included in the casting are Molly Parker, Parker Posey, and Peter Coyote.

As always, the sad news seems to come all at once. It’s being reported that the highly-private legendary author J.D. Salinger has passed away at the age of 91. The cause of death was of natural causes, and indications are that Salinger was healthy until recently when illness took on.

The author was something of an enigma. His classic, The Catcher in the Rye is a book that’s so prominent that it feels like it has been around for hundreds of years, even though it was only published in 1951. Over the past few years, just discovering that Salinger was still alive somewhere on this planet felt like some sort of fictional mythology created in his legend, but it was all so true and fascinating to think about.

Salinger himself had a story worthy of books (and a film we’re all but guaranteed to see some day). He was born in Manhattan in 1919 to a Jewish cheese salesman father and a half-Scottish, half-Irish Catholic mother. His father wasn’t big on his talents as an actor and writer and pressed that he learn business, which saw Salinger head to Austria to work at a meat-importing company. This ended up being a close call as he eventually left Austria only a month before the Nazi forces invaded and took over. Not long after this he fell in love with a girl who eventually went on to marry Charlie Chaplin.