Look At My Briefs -- 1/21/10

It's hard to believe that it's been a week since I last did my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs. Well, hard to believe unless you have a calendar.

My knee jerk reaction to a U.S. version of the British science fiction show Torchwood is to simply assume it will suck, especially since the original U.K. version second series was basically a broken show that didn't get fixed until last year's five episode powerful mini-series Children of Earth. Then again, the article in THR says that Russell T. Davies is on board, at least in some capacity, and that John Barrowman may reprise his role as Capt. Jack Harkness so maybe...no, I can't see it. American network television would never allow some of the stuff Torchwood has done, especially the Children of Earth storyline. It was too brutal.

It took until the second commercial break for me to give up on Fox's The Human Target. It just wasn't any good. A predictable plot combined with lame jokes with just a dash of flat out stupidity tossed in made me think it would be a good idea to turn off the TV and read for a while. The stupid happened when the titular character, Christopher Chance, spotted a poisoned drink meant for the woman he was hired to protect. He then leaves the drink, a piece of evidence that could have identified the killer, laying around and an innocent person drank it and died. Even Jackie Earle Haley's menacing performance as Guererro couldn't get me to watch this after that epic moron moment.

I don't think a remake (at least they're not calling it a reboot) of True Grit should have been done. That being said, if there's one thing that could get me excited over this it's that it's being made by the Coen brothers. Maybe if Quentin Tarantino had done it I'd be even more interested, but not by much.

The movie Extraordinary Measures comes out tomorrow. This is being marketed as a true story about a couple whose children were dying of one of those diseases that hardly anyone gets so hardly anyone tries to find a cure for it. They manage to find a researcher from Nebraska played by Harrison Ford who seems to be their only hope. This actually did happen. A real life couple found out their kids were dying and contacted pretty much the only guy on the planet who could help them. This person was not a minor researcher from Nebraska but rather a prominent doctor at Duke University from Taiwan. So yeah, a true story.

Normally the only way to read an extended rant at a movie site saying that Martin Scorsese, David Lean, Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock are four of the most overrated directors of all time is to go to the comments section where it would have been written in all caps by a guy called JackEnOff69. At Big Hollwyood, however, you can read this sort of trolling on the front page. The good news is that the normally compliant commenters at Big Hollywood are giving the writer, future serial killer Ben Shapiro, such a spanking that editor John Nolte felt he had to defend him and, in the process, shows us all why his filmmaking career never took off when he glorifies movies like Saving Silverman and Deuce Bigalow over the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Good filmmakers try to copy the style of Alfred Hitchcock. Makers of movies seen by pretty much no one try to copy the style of Saving Silverman and Deuce Bigalow.

For reasons unknown even to me, I have a soft spot for religiously themed action films (odd since I'm not at all religious) which is probably one reason I liked The Book of Eli. This is why I'm holding out hope for tomorrow's release of Legion even though hope is fading due to the fact that, as of this writing, no reviews have shown up on Rotten Tomatoes. This means it probably wasn't made available for advance screenings which means either the producers are trying to hide the fact that it's horrible or it's so awesome that the producers wanted to give other movies coming out this week a break and not have what surely would have been a record setting number of stellar reviews ruin their chances for making money. I wonder which scenario will be true.