Yes Hugo, you are a god

In the category for best picture ever taken of a real man:














Keep in mind this guy is Megatron, V, Elrond and Agent Smith.

The only logical next step is for him to play Zod and then fly to heaven and take over as Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

Classic That Guy of the Week

This Guy, Glenn Morshower -- he's played the military dude in every movie made since they started making talkies. He's also a motivational speaker in real life. One of my favorite That Guys.










From the IMDB trivia section: "As an actor he has played the role of no less than 53 different law enforcement/military personnel: 22 Police/Law enforcement officers; 21 Military Personnel; and 10 Government agents. Recently he has played the role of quite a few Secret Service Agents."

I'll go ahead and say what we're all thinking: I think this guy could get us out of Iraq by Wednesday.

It Might Get Loud

Oh hell yes.

Must Love Jaws

Nice. /Film gets credit for the find.

Ponzi: The Bernie Madoff Story

IDEA: Bernie Madoff Biopic
TITLES: Ponzi, Get Rich or Die Tryin' or, simply, Asshole
CASTING: I see three ways out of this - Bradley Cooper as Madoff, with great aging makeup; Cooper as the younger Madoff and Stanley Tucci as the thief in winter or, most outrageously...Saul Rubinek for the whole picture.
TRAILER: Studio logo. We HEAR a room of investors fretting over their money. Suddenly, the room goes DEAD. CU on a pair of patent leather Italian shoes walking, panning up to reveal the wearer in a Brooks Brothers suit. This is BERNARD L. MADOFF. He leans over, palms splayed down onto the table. "Hi there. I'm Bernie Madoff. Now who wants to make some goddamned money?" Punch into the O'Jay's For the Love of Money and this disco just got hot.

C'mon H-town...let's light this candle.

From the Vault: Little Superstar

Still one of the four or five best videos of the YT era.

Casting Aspersions

Some random casting thoughts:

For a Robert Frost biopic and/or film wherein Robert Frost appears, I would go with James Fox (or his brother Edward, for that matter). Were the Brothers Fox not available, Michael Moriarty with a wig would work -- there's something reminiscent of Frost in his eyes.








If anyone needs a Hitler in the next few years, I'm thinking Michael Emerson from Lost. He's an excellent actor (Emmy lock this year?), and the eyes and mouth line up for me. Stick a toothbrush 'stache on the man, and you've got your cinematic "Biggest Jerk Ever".

Han Solo P.I.

Phenomenal.















Also, don't miss the side-by-side comparison to the original Magnum opening.

Terminator VS. Star Trek

Things wrong with Terminator Salivation:

1.) Christian Bale needs to go see a throat doctor or oncologist. Seriously, I'm worried about the kid.
2.) Open heart/ heart transplant surgery in the desert. C'mon guys.
3.) Where in the hell are they getting all these submarines, A-10s, morphine, and firearms? Wouldn't the machines IMMEDIATELY wreck shop on all that stuff like 10 minutes after they nuked the planet?
4.) What happened to the laser canons from T1 & T2?
5.) Wasn't Bryce Canyon Dallas Texas Howard a veterinarian when she was played by Claire Danes in the last one? Is it an easy jump from cleaning dog teeth to performing major organ transplants in the desert? Because I need work, and I'm pretty sure I can clean dog teeth.
6.) How does Nick Stahl morph into Christian "tracheotomy talker" Bale? No amount of growl-talking, battling and sexing BCDTH can do that to a man.
7.) A Terminator picture without Arnold is...kind of like an Indiana Jones picture without Harrison. You're sort of missing the point.
8.) Why would the Machines be harvesting people? Did they watch the Matrix too many times? Are they just bored? Seriously, just wipe out the meat bags and be done with it.
9.) There is never a compelling primary villain.
10.) It didn't need to exist.

Thing right with T4:
1.) Anton Yelchin's killer, dead-on mini Michael Biehn. The kid is the goods.

Things wrong with Star Trek:

1.) It's too awesome.
2.) Bruce Greenwood almost causes an implosion from his effortless cool (he should have been the next Harrison Ford when Harrison Ford retired from being Harrison Ford after Clear & Present Danger.) Harrison Ford sounds like the name of a car dealership.
3.) Uhura should have been in every frame.

Frederick Reginald Ironside

First, he fought The Visitors.
Then, he fought The Tom Cruise.
Later on, he fought The Bugs.
This summer, he fights The Bale AND The Machines.













He's Michael Ironside, and he's replacing Chuck Norris in all my Chuck Norris jokes.

The Millennium Falcon, Intergalactic Growth Chart

As an experiment (and an excuse to break out The Beast from time to time) I thought I would chronicle our daughter's first year against Hasbro's BMF (that's Big Millennium Falcon, you scum and villainy.)

8 WEEKS:















8 MONTHS:














ONE YEAR:

Best Sequel Ever

The Empire Strikes Back and Godfather II just got they asses handed to 'em.

Good Work, If You Can Get It

This is my daughter's daily schedule; she's 11 months old:

7:00am: wake, eat breakfast & vitamins, play
8:30am: morning nap
11:00am: wake & play
12:00pm: lunch
1:00pm: afternoon nap
3:30-4:00pm: wake & play
5:30pm: dinner
6:15pm: bath, pajamas and books
7:00pm: lights out
repeat

There's also various undocumented "snacks" involved, and much of the "play" time involves being pushed and/or driven about town in grand luxury. I know the American education system is lousy, but my math tells me that's about 17 hours of sleep.

She has the amazing capability to make me feel, alternately, like Justin Timberlake and Amon Göth - no small feat.

Bumper Sticker of the Week

"Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in heels."

So True

Amy Ozols kind of nails it in this week's Shouts & Murmurs. The Ambien line really had me laughing in the lavatory.

Buzzed, by Noah Baumbach

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.
The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.
—The Times.

Oh, my God, get over here . . . hurry . . . come on come on come on. Taste this nectar, taste it, taste it. . . . Slurp. . . . Is that not, is that not the best fucking thing you’ve ever had? Like nectar of the fucking Gods! It’s like the greatest hits of nectar. A double-album greatest hits, like those red and blue Beatles records where they’re looking down at us off a balcony but they have facial hair in one of them. Oh, my God, I just flew over to this, to this lily. Look at me on the lily?! Is that not, is that not so weird? I’m like buzzing around and then I land. . . .

Read more...

Here is the trailer for Spike Jones' adapatation of Where the Wild Thing Are...looks terrific.

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/where-the-wild-things-are/trailer

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

I had thought, after leaving the packed-house, Friday evening Cinerama screening of X-Men: The Last Stand that the movie was not all bad. The people I saw it with liked it, the crowd gave up the applause and so I got fooled by the mob mood of it all. Yet, throughout the movie I remember being under-whelmed and confused by the disjointed tone and utter lack of dramatic punch throughout the movie. Then, over the weekend I saw parts of Bryan Singer’s sharp first and brilliant second contributions to the series, and read over some Marvel comics, and realized all at once that this new movie was not just a lame duck, but an exceptionally bad picture – a real disappointment, in light of the tremendous momentum that Singer had built at the conclusion of part two. Where the second film had been crisp, charming and propulsive, this new one is muddled, bland and inert – and there is a good reason behind its stagnancy.
The story goes that Tom Rothman, the head of production at 20th Century Fox (the film’s producers) had engaged in some kind of personal vendetta against Singer, who had left Fox and the X-Men series (temporarily in Singer’s mind) for Warners and their Superman project. Rothman was allegedly incensed and charged ahead with the movie, rather than wait for Singer to return later to produce and/or direct, and continue his great work. This kind of ego-driven, megalomaniacal decision making always spells disaster in the filmmaking business.

For a brief moment the project had looked to be back on the right track even without Singer – the promising new director Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) had come on board and seemed to have a smart read on the material – he had facilitated the (very savvy) casting of Vinnie Jones as the henchman villain Juggernaut – but then Vaughn suddenly departed the project for “personal reasons”, which can be interpreted in any number of ways. With the production already underway and a deadline to beat on the horizon (that is, Warners and Singer’s Superman Returns on June 30th) Rothman, instead of stepping back and re-assessing the lay, barreled on and brought on a hired gun helmer – the capable, entirely unimaginative film-school product Brett Ratner who, it must be noted, is himself a casualty of the same long-gestating Superman project that ultimately lured Singer away from Fox (an impressive list that also includes Tim Burton, Kevin Smith, J.J. Abrams, McG and, allegedly, Michael Bay and Robert Rodriguez.) Ratner, rather than making the movie his own, simply picked up the pieces and shot a big-budget effects picture and X-men 3 became a bastard movie, belonging to no one father, and having all the traits of a bastard – namely a vague, unfocused anger and a lack of belonging.

There are some neat tricks (a prelude sequence set in the past uses a great effect to remove twenty years of age from Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s faces) and a handful of guffaws, but it is not a successful movie (despite that $100 million-plus opening weekend, whose 60% Sunday drop off in sales is a very telling fact). The whole effort is nothing more than another vacuous, paint-by-numbers studio seat-filler, and a meaningless conclusion to a “trilogy” – if ever there was a franchise that should not have been constrained to the George Lucas trilogy mindset, it is this one, with its rich, endless already written plotlines and multitudes of characters and realities. This could have been a wonderful, slowly developed masterpiece of six or seven movies. Instead, Rothman and Ratner have rolled it all into one, 90 minute headache, neutered Hugh Jackman’s great Wolverine characterization (the virile engine of the other two pictures) and carelessly killed off three of the best characters (it’d be the equivalent of killing off Han, Leia and Yoda right in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back.) Above and beyond any bad plot concerns, the actors simply have nothing to do because the movie is designed to be quick, flashy (not even good flash) and clear out the theater for the next showing. Quantity, not quality, and the wasted promise of yet another great franchise by Fox (I count the eventual Predator and Alien debacles as two of the most spectacular examples of banker shortsightedness in film history – imagine what could have come from those original germs.) It has the effect of making you feel like Wolverine is giving you the middle claw.

John Wood
June 01, 2006

300

300

This new film 300 is a glimpse into the window of the future of filmmaking. It is a film, like Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City from a couple of years back, that was composed almost entirely within the camera and the digital computer; that is, the actors were filmed almost exclusively against the process know as green screen, in costume and with minimal props and sets, and the rest of the world was built within the computer. Some critics have noted a dislike for this new stage in moviemaking, an assumed deviation from the old process of location shooting and massive set building. While the older method will, one hopes, continue to flourish for years to come, the limitless vision enabled by the new digital process will surely allow for grander and more robust films than we have seen for some time. The Lord of the Rings utilized this tool to great effect, revealing an epic scope that was, previous to the advent of the digital revolution, beyond prohibitive – it is a simple matter and dollars and cents: the grand epic has become too costly to stage in the real world.

300, like Sin City, is based on the graphic novel work of writer-illustrator Frank Miller, and like Sin City attempts a literal, moving recreation of Miller’s pages. Miller himself was a revolutionary figure in the history of comic books – his bold re-imagining of Batman forever changed the temperament of the Dark Knight into a harsh harbinger of justice, unrestrained by the social laws that for so long defined the superhero. It is only fitting that two of his masterworks (Sin City and 300) should serve as templates for the next stage in filmed entertainment.

300 revolves around the actual events of the Battle of Thermopylae, or the “Hot Gates”, wherein a small band of three-hundred Spartans and some few thousand additional Greeks made a stand against the encroaching conquest of Xerses of Persia. Led by King Leonidas of Sparta, this small phalanx of citizen soldiers stood in the way of millions, and for a few days at least, held them at bay. There had never been a fighting force like the Spartans, trained from the time they could stand to fight or die, baptized in combat. To them, a “beautiful death” in battle was the highest honor. Before the end of the days long siege by Xerxes, the Spartans had cut their way through thousands of Persians, their bodies stacked high on the battlefield. It is one of the greatest battles ever fought in history, and it could nto have been a pleasant thing.

Director Zack Snyder, taking his inspiration from Miller’s book, give us a brutal, blood soaked vision of primitive warfare – limbs fly heedlessly about, spears pierce the chests of man and beast alike and growls and howls of death and victory. It is definitely not a film for all tastes, by which I mean mostly teenage boys and grown boys of the 25 to 35 year old variety will like the film.

BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK:

"Paddle faster -- I think I hear banjos."

Almost as funny as "Frodo Failed -- Bush has the Ring."