Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

Got to see The Avengers in IMAX 3D. UNF. Worth it, worth it, worth it. The movie has purchase on my soul now.

I am sick, but two of my favorite teams are winning: Boston, and whoever's playing Miami, so, bonus. Orlando will be sitting the rest of this one out, sadly enough. Wah. Throat scratchy, sounding like Christian Bale Batman. Uncool So here's something cool to alleviate it.

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Didn't like The Avengers? Then maybe you should just lay down and sit this one out. Yes, you'll probably notice a bit of...repetition, you know, because Nyan Cat and owls aren't repetitive enough on their own.

One pic is somewhat spoilery for the film, but not a game-breaker, I don't think. Feel free to correct me. Consider this impetus to see it. You got sick days, use 'em.

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Hrm, so that was interesting. More on that later. Right now it's only 93 degrees and I can actually function, so just to break up the predictable sea of Cyrillic spam, here's actual content. Brace yourselves.

I've been digging through Rifftrax lately (short definition: commentary tracks of pure mockery), and I have to say, it's made (some) unwatchable movies watchable (I really can't recommend seeing the Twilight movies any other way) and introduced me to some particularly hideous cinematic misadventures -- two so bad that they appear on Wikipedia's list of films considered the worst. And rightly so.

First there's The Room, an incompetently-implemented vanity vehicle for its (sigh) writer, director and star of indeterminate accent and negligible talent. Allegedly cost $6 million to make, absolutely none of which shows on-screen, and everyone emotes and enunciates as if they'd just taken gulps from a punchbowl of quaaludes. It's a romantic drama without drama or romance or...redeeming qualities, really.

For the love of God, keep annotations enabled while you watch this.



And yet there's still Birdemic: Shock and Horror. Ever wonder if there's a quality of film that even SyFy won't show, or a level of special effect too embarrassing for basic cable? Here's a film with much loftier ambitions than The Room and even less watchability -- awful editing, acting, narrative and, without a doubt, the worst special effects I've ever seen. Period. If your four-year-old shot this on a Handycam you'd sit them down and gently encourage them to try again or, perhaps, take up piano instead.

I'm sure the director is quite enthusiastic, but enthusiasm does not necessarily translate to coherence or quality. Referred to by its director as a "romantic thriller," the veracity of which I will leave to you.





There, now Green Lantern doesn't look so bad, does it?

From a comment on Deadspin: “In high school I was (and perhaps still am) a recidivist quoter of Neilsen’s lines in Airplane! and the Police Squad/Naked Gun series. When graduation came around, I had some additional invites left over, and decided to send one to him just for shits and giggles. While he didn’t attend, he did send a nice congratulatory note and an autographed picture.

Years later I ran into him at a country club in Arizona, and I brought up the invitation and his nice response. He actually remembered it and was kind enough to spend a few minutes to chat with me. I saw him a few times after that, and each time he remembered me and took the time to talk and catch up. An awesome comedic actor and a great guy. RIP, Leslie.”

Twilight corn maze. Headline: 'Twilight' fans can get happily get lost in corn.

Yes. Yes, they can.

I've made many, many questionable choices in my life, but one of the more glaring has to be the night I rented both Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens and watched them back to back.

No, not for the expected bouts of night terrors -- but because of two films that share a universe (or really even the vaguest sense of continuity), there aren't two as disparate as those two films. The former is an excellent deep-space Jaws, taking the unseen and unfathomable adversary to even greater extremes and with enough surprises to make for a pretty much unforgettable cinematic experience in and of itself. The latter, though, I have to say, has lodged in my heart as Cameron's best film, one that solidifies the species's mythology and vitality to such a degree that not even four abysmal follow-ups can kill the franchise outright. But it's not even the same genre as Alien -- it's an action-adventure of horrific nature, and when the first slow-paced, mostly expository act transitions into the second, you're invested in the foul-mouthed, entertainingly-flawed survivors (played by people you've never heard of before) in a way you just weren't with the ill-fated crew of the Nostromo.

And even after almost a quarter of a century, it holds up. Some of the effects are a bit dated, which is to be expected, but the performances and the script are still extremely tight, even with the Director's Cut. Yes, I'm watching it in DVD-quality for the first time, and it's a treat, having worn my VHS copy down to mulch long, long ago. And it's funny how cliché so much of it seems now -- space marines, squad-based combat, dropships, power loaders, the corporation, hive mentality -- when no single piece of media did more to establish them as cliché than this film (with Starship Troopers being a close second). But they work. My sole regret is seeing them in tandem -- that's never going to allow Alien to achieve in my mind what it really should be. It had years to solidify its place in the nexus of sci-fi and horror, and it had five minutes before the tape rewound and I popped in Aliens and Jim Cameron cranked the carnage up to crazy-go-nuts. (If Superman can have his franchise rebooted back to pre-Richard-Pryor days, surely they can rewind Ripley to even the first trailer to the Aliens sequel.)

So I'm hearing the hyperbole that's bubbling into the blogosphere re: Cameron's upcoming Avatar, and nothing I'm reading is making me feel it just yet. I'm sure the technology's going to be impressive, I'm sure we'll see millions of dollars in each frame of the film, but Cameron worries me. I'm no longer surprised when filmmakers become outed as fetishists, mistaking the technology for the craft, but in Cameron's case, I'd have a more tangible sense of loss if he disappears in a blizzard of CGI and a maze of render farms. He's shown more range and more depth than most filmmakers who've tumbled into the Lucas Pit, and I have more faith in his imagination than most. Fingers crossed.

But whatever December holds, I can always curl up with my colonial marine comfort food. "Someone wake up Hicks."

Via MGK: Girl dying of vascular cancer wants to see Up, but is too ill to go to the theater. Pixar to the rescue. But the details of this piece transcend any base summary, believe me: 94 inches, seven hours, eyes closed, the book.... Steel yourself before you read it, but know it won't do any good.

Star Trek is every bit as good as I'd heard. I know, I can't believe it either. And I've been subjected to enough continuity reboots to loathe it on principle (and when I loathe on principle, I raise it to an art form). My two gripes, one simple, one not: ( let me show you them. )

State of Play: the last newspaper movie?

The film doesn’t so much lament the fall of the print media as the core of its story – it simply references it occasionally with bitterness. At the same time, the film is wrestling with everything that is wrong with the mainstream print media – internal bias, editorial control over a story, the interruption of ongoing police investigations for the sake of the scoop, the lean towards tabloid journalism and the desire to sell papers above getting the story straight.

...And really I might have let it slip past as a character quirk of a reporter watching his industry fade away – except that the film ends on a dour note with a loving, almost nostalgic look at the printing and distribution of a newspaper – from typesetting to curb. It was like one of those sequences you would see on Sesame Street when you were a kid or something. Only tinged with sadness. And while excellently assembled – I mean you could almost smell the ink on your hands – it certainly leaves one pondering the death of print.