Thursday, September 16, 2010

Look At My Briefs -- 9/16/10

We finally have some cool weather up here in the Adirondacks. This means the ghost of Revolutionary War soldiers will soon rise from the ground and haunt the living. The traditional method the locals use of warding them off is to read another edition of my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

This writers of SFX Magazine somehow manage to force J.J. Abrams to spill the details of the next Star Trek movie. For example, the next Star Trek movie may or may not have Khan and Klingons, may be funny and won't make you want to slash your wrists. Well, that was quite a scoop and certainly worth a read.

While we still have Roger Ebert with us, I mourn the fact that cancer has robbed us of his voice. At least he's put together a new show devoted to reviewing movies. They're not Ebert but they still look pretty good.

I liked the look of this trailer for The Tourist at first. Hell, all they had to say was that Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp were in a movie together. Problem is that it turns into one of those stupid, incompetently made trailers that reveals a crapload of the plot. I know everything about this movie except who Johnny Depp voted for on American Idol and Angelina Jolie's favorite Ben & Jerry's flavor. I hope it's Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch because that's my favorite and it would be a good place to build a relationship between her and me. Anyway, yes, I'll probably still see it if only so I can say the lines along with the actors.

The trailer, with it's lame Tom Cruise joke and the teenage girl with the sensibilities of a world weary 30 year old standup comedian, for Easy A looked so stupid to me that I thought about writing a sarcastic post tearing it apart. Now it looks like it's going to be good. I may not always be right but I at least want to always be right on this blog.

It's a coincidence that I saw Forbidden Planet again just two days before Cinematical posted this article about it. I'm always amazed when I see science fiction treated seriously on film because, for the most part, filmmakers hate science fiction. They consider it a lesser form of storytelling and an excuse to make very stupid movies since they think the very medium in which they are working is stupid. As Cinematical said, Forbidden Planet is very dated in look, pacing and the way it treats women but the wonderful concept of a magnificent race called the Krell being destroyed by that which was supposed to make them gods still holds up. I don't look forward to the planned remake set for 2013 even though Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski is writing it. Hopefully it won't be another Day The Earth Stood Still.

At one point in this article about the rise of Christian cinema, Big Hollywood's Dan Gifford asks, "Should Hollywood be worried?" I'll answer that question: No. Independently made Christian films will never be a threat to the major Hollywood studios. The main movie audience is young people who enjoy their vacuous thrills and hot sex and don't particularly enjoy it when a movie starts telling them that those things make Jesus cry. As for people like I who may appreciate a more mature, thoughtful film, there's another problem: Christian films, for the most part, suck. They're almost always simplistic melodramas that flat out start preaching to the audience at some point. Occasionally one will be a modest hit, a category that even the crown jewel of contemporary Christian films, Fireproof, falls into. That movie was very profitable but only because people either worked for a pittance or nothing at all. That's not a business model Hollywood is eager to embrace.

Oh look, another fucking zombie movie. Yes, Sam Raimi is involved, which means I must amend that first sentence to read, "Oh look, Sam Raimi is involved in another fucking zombie movie."

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