Look At My Briefs -- 1/28/10

There is now something in the world called an iPad. This means the world is looking for security and meaning, something it can only find in another edition of my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

So, Sam Worthington may star in a Dracula movie that mixes the Bram Stoker story with the real life drama of the guy Dracula was based on, Vlad the Impaler. This is what Variety said about it:

Universal is keeping the logline under wraps, but story explores the origin of Dracula, weaving vampire mythology with the true history of Prince Vlad the Impaler and depicting Dracula as a flawed hero in a tragic love story set in a dark age of magic and war.

I can't wait to see how one takes a guy whose contemporaries saw fit to stick him with a nickname like "The Impaler" and transform him into a hero, flawed or otherwise, in a tragic love story. We've all had bad breakups. Most of us don't do anything to rate being called The Impaler.

I wonder if they've also maintained the mindbogglingly stupid feel of the original too.

Dear makers of Lost: As your final season is about to begin, you may think it would be super cool to leave several questions forever unanswered. "Hey, let's never tell them what the Smoke Monster really is or how Jacob lives so long. Ha ha." If you do that, you'll only have yourselves to blame when you are sitting on an international flight next to me and I don't shut the hell up about any of that. Also, it would be a really, really bad idea to send everyone to the "real" Earth where they can live simple lives and fuck Neanderthals.

It's not a good sign that I keep forgetting what's coming out in theaters this week. I honestly can't remember now. I could look it up but that seems like cheating.

Oh great, another fucking zombie movie...no, wait, it's a zombie TV series. Looks interesting too. It's being developed by Frank Darabont, the guy who made The Shawshank Redemption into a nearly perfect movie and who also made The Mist into something I wanted to use for target practice. What does that mean? It means we don't have anything close to a guarantee on this show's quality. This does look like it has potential anyway and I suppose that's all we can ask.

The movie business really can be a rhetorical knife fight sometimes. The director of Saw VI, Kevin Greutert, was hired to direct Paranormal Activity 2 but was yanked from that project when Saw franchise owners Twisted Pictures decided to exercise their option to have Greutert direct a seventh Saw film. I'm sure Twisted Pictures saw this as a way to give a huge middle finger to Paramount for daring to make a horror film that way outperformed their dumb little series of torture porn films for a fraction of the budget. What they ended up doing was rehiring the guy who had a hand in tanking the Saw series while denying him a chance to do the same thing to Paranormal Activity. Frankly, I can't see Paranormal Activity 2 being any good unless everyone who buys a ticket automatically gets a free blow job while the movie is playing.

Ah, turns out this week's big budget offerings are the Mel Gibson comeback film Edge of Darkness and the new romantic comedy Leap Year...um, The Ugly Truth? The Proposal? Never mind.

Zelda Rubinstein died Wednesday. Or did she? Oh, right, this site doesn't have sound effects. Some chains rattling right about now would have been cool. Please reread this paragraph's first two sentences and imagine a wolf howling or something. Thanks.