Merry Christmas

...and a very Happy New Year to all the idiots who don't know what day it is. To the rest of you, hope you get lots of candy when you go Christmas Trick or Treating.

How to Prevent The World's End

Regular readers know that I have recently embraced all the stupid, lunatic, unproven, unscientific, thoroughly, utterly, totally batshit insane theories that the upcoming Roland Emmerich movie is a documentary and the world will end in 2012. Yep, totally on board. Still, that doesn't mean we should all sit around and do nothing. If there's a way to prevent the almost certain doom of the entire planet, it just might be worth a shot. Sure, if you already have weekend plans, don't cancel them or anything but if you can pencil something in that would save the world, please do so. I have compiled a handy list of actions that you, an average, less-than-intelligent* person can take that might make a difference.

1. Hold A Bake Sale -- There aren't many problems in life that can't be at least eased by a bake sale. If your school's cheer squad is able to pay for a trip to Tulsa to participate in National Cheer Championships thanks to bake sales, holding one should raise enough money to at least pay for fortifications against global tsunamis for your town.

2. Convince Sexy Celebrities To Strip For Your "Stop 2012" Campaign -- Sexy celebrities love to take their clothes off in public but even they can't do so without a reason. That's why so many "Good Causes" have naked celebrity ad campaigns. Therefore it should be zero trouble to convince people like Keira Knightley and Jessica Alba to let you take provocative nude pictures of them to prevent the end of the world. This will do absolutely nothing to stop the global catastrophe of 2012 but it will make you feel better for a little while.

3. Write Bitchy Comments On Message Boards -- As anyone who has ever done so knows, nothing, and I mean nothing, is more effective at turning the rest of the world toward your way of thinking than to leave an anonymous comment on the internet. Feel free to use the following sample:

U all suk and Im gonn laff my ass off in 2012 wen u all dye. plus u r ghey thats what yur mom said last nite when i waz boning her in the ass

4. Hand Out Pamphlets -- After anonymous internet comments, the method pretty much guaranteed to convert people to your cause is to pester them into taking a copy of your literature. Stand outside a supermarket or, better yet, go to their homes and preach to them about how the world will end in 2012 before getting them to give you a few bucks for your pamphlet 2012 World's End: How Could A Race That Died Out Thousands Of Years Ago Be Wrong?

5. Develop A Machine Called The Get-The-Hell-Off-Earth-inator -- Pretty much speaks for itself.

Knowing that all of you will now devoted to saving the planet means I can now stop doing it and play video games. Thanks all.

*Don't be offended. You think the world's gonna end in 2012 cause some dead Mayans and a stupid action flick said so.

Look At My Briefs -- 10/29/09

Today is the anniversary of the start of the Great Depression. The best...no, the only way to celebrate such an event is with another edition of brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

It's official. Every movie ever made will eventually be remade. I suppose we can expect to be seeing remakes of Gremlins and Weird Science at some point. After writing that sentence, I did a quick search and hey, lookie here.

Thanks again America for sparing me the annual ritual of pulling out my own hair in frustration over yet another Saw movie opening at #1. I love it that a thoughtful, psychological, low budget horror film in its fifth week of release whose support came from what was basically a bottom-up grassroots movement beat out the big name studio crap offerings of both Saw and The Vampire's Assistant. I'd have actually been happy if the vampire movie had beaten Saw VI but the fact that some indie flick with no recognizable actors won the day makes this whole thing even sweeter. By the way, if you are a fan of the Saw films, you're wrong.

It takes a long time before this guy stops coming up with excuses for hating the song "Imagine" and finally hints that he hates it because it's an, "ode to atheism." It's difficult to trust the judgment of anyone who ignores songs like "Up, Up and Away" or "MacArthur Park" to slap "Imagine" with the Worst Song Ever label but it gets even more difficult when the guy doesn't just come out and admit it conflicts with his religious beliefs.

With Halloween approaching, which scary movies to watch this weekend is a subject of much debate in households across the nation. Some go with classics like The Exorcist or Halloween (the original, not the stupid remake). Others go with modern day gore fests like Saw or Halloween (the stupid remake, not the original). As for me, and I seem to be the only one on the planet who thinks this, nothing scares me quite like Sunset Boulevard. Yeah, I know, stop laughing. To this day, I'm terrified of the ending (stop reading now if you've never seen it and, if you haven't, you should be at a video store renting it). The immortal image of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond, a woman who has completely lost her mind descending the stairs as the crowd simply stares, no one knowing quite what to do, scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I suppose that's why it still chills me today and maybe I would have reacted to it differently had my first viewing happened when I was an adult but still, it's a creepy scene. You can watch it on YouTube and judge for yourself.

What A Strange Time It's Been

It's hard to believe that two weeks have since I have seen a movie in which Jon Favreau touches himself. Twice.

Look how different the world is now. The economy is down. Unemployment is up. We're stuck in two Middle Eastern wars. Oil, something which flows freely from the ground, is being sold at ever increasing prices. My local supermarket ran out of Mallomars and I ended up having to drive a mile down the street to get some.

Is there anyone out there naive enough to think all of that "just happened" in the last two weeks? How could we as a society have allowed Jon Favreau to stroke himself publicly? Don't say, "No one could have predicted all this." Damn it, someone must have known!

What's been done to repair the damage and prevent it from occurring again? If you said "exactly jack and shit" you'd be right. Has Congress passed or even proposed any legislation to stop Jon Favreau from spanking it onscreen in the future? No. This is almost certainly the result of intense lobbying on the part of the film industry that. Favreau not only has a role in next year's Iron Man 2 but he is directing it as well.. Couples Retreat, the movie in which he whipped it out and dared anyone to tell him to stop, opened at the #1. Based on that, do you think he has any intention of keeping it in his pants in Iron Man 2? Especially since he's directing the damn thing?

Perhaps by next summer the Couples Retreat DVD release will have made us sufficiently desensitized to the image of Jon Favreau erect and sweaty. Somehow, though, I doubt it. I predict that, after the release of Iron Man 2, a movie which will surely contain a scene of what happens when Favreau's character is left alone with a Victoria's Secret catalogue, the Dow will drop below 1000 and we'll declare war on the Vatican. When that happens, don't say no one predicted it.

V-ry Interesting

The first sentence of today's offering was going to be, "New media is a wonderful thing," but then I realized that's not true. A more accurate statement is, "New media can be a wonderful thing." It's a blunt instrument that can be used for both decent and horrific purposes. A good example of this is the common practice of showing extended previews of new television shows online. When Flash Forward and Torchwood: Children of Earth did this, it worked very well because their previews were interesting, action packed and made you want to see more. More importantly, they weren't stupid.

Which brings us to Hulu's preview of V.



If you are outside the United States you probably couldn't see that so you might want to take this as a sign from God to move here now. You God fearing Americans, on the other hand, just got your first look at the new television show V, a remake of a mediocre television show of the same name that was on back in the 80s. (You can keep reading, non-Americans. I'll describe the video.)Remaking lame decades old science fiction actually has had a decent track record in recent years so there's no reason to judge it harshly for that reason. No, the reason to judge it harshly is its actual content.

The premise of the show is that technologically advanced alien visitors come to Earth and take us over not by bombing the shit out of us but rather by being our saviors. Their truly nefarious purposes will only become apparent after they have become a fixture in our lives. That's what the show's publicity says, anyway. According to the show's first nine minutes, the visitors think the best way to make a good first impression with us is to have ships the size of several city blocks show up unannounced over our major cities, an act that immediately causes world wide panic. The first indication the ships are there is the earthquake-level devastation caused by the turbulence created by their ships. This makes a large crucifix fall down and nearly kill a wheelchair-bound man before it shatters. They also cause military aircraft sent up to investigate these ships to crash in the middle of crowded urban areas. Surely all this makes the world's population say, "What shouldn't we love about these aliens?"

My favorite part of this clip, though, is the military barricade. The Army or National Guard or whatever has set up a barricade around the part of Los Angeles over which the alien spaceship is hovering. Lost actress Elizabeth Mitchell plays an FBI agent whose son is on the other side of the barricade and she's trying to get to him but the soldier manning the barricade tells her that no way, no how is she ever in a bazillion years going to be allowed into that part of the city. Luckily for her the soldier has the attention span of a fruit fly and she manages to slip past him after he is easily distracted by a nearby scuffle. Now comes the part that really gets me. It turns out there are just as many civilians wandering around on the restricted side of the barricade as there were on the other side. The barricade really served no purpose other than to briefly provide Elizabeth Mitchell's concerned FBI mom with something to do for about 90 seconds.

Anyway, FBI mom finds her son and together they witness the aliens once again trying to endear themselves to us by recreating that scene from Independence Day where hovering spaceships suddenly open up. The clip ends there but, if you've seen the ads for V, you know that, instead of burning the cities with FIRE FROM SPACE you instead see Morena Baccarin's pretty, soothing face telling everyone that everything is cool and that they've brought intergalactic chicken wings for the entire planet to munch on. It's something along those lines.

It's possible that the producers of V said to themselves, "Let's get all the stupid shit we're ever going to do out of the way in the first nine minutes of the first episode and construct a smart, exciting television show from then on." It's possible, but I doubt it. Instead, I think that the makers of V, much like the alien characters they have created, either aren't capable of making a good first impression or didn't think it was important.

Activity Summary

Paranormal Activity deserves a good review for no other reason than denying the latest stupid and disgusting chapter in the stupid and disgusting Saw series the #1 position that the producers of said series probably thought was their constitutionally guaranteed birthright. Perhaps the fact that Paranormal Activity is a pretty decent horror film had something to do with it.

Paranormal Activity is this year's low budget indie flick turned mega hit. The way it became a hit is similar to the methods used by last year's indie hit, the Christian melodrama Fireproof. Instead of a $50 million ad blitz, it became popular through alternative marketing that caused a word of mouth groundswell. Unlike Fireproof, this movie has gone beyond a narrow audience and has exploded into the mainstream.

Paranormal Activity is part of the Blair Witch "found footage" genre and it takes that to an extreme. If you were involved in set design, lighting or some other technical aspect of the film and wanted your family to see your name in the opening or closing credits, your out of luck. The movie opened with a title card thanking the families of Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston for the use of this footage at the beginning and one at the end telling what eventually happened to them. In between is digital video footage taken by them over a three week period chronicling their encounters with some sort of evil spirit.

The action starts the day Micah bought a camera. He and Katie, his live-in girlfriend, have been witnessing what seem to be supernatural events. Nothing too amazing, mind you. They hear bumps and footsteps, their car keys somehow wind up on the floor, that sort of thing. I do want to thank the producers for acknowledging the fact that Micah's camera was more more expensive and sophisticated than most hand held digital cameras that people get for home use. Details like that are usually easy to explain but really stick out when no one bothers to do so.

Micah and Katie bring in a psychic to try to find out if they actually have a ghost and, if so, what does it want? I think in the context of the story he was supposed to be a legitimate psychic but, like real life "psychics" he doesn't actually seem to know or do anything that could be described as psychic. He asks numerous questions about their lives and relationship that, had he asked me, would have elicited the response, "Um, being a psychic, shouldn't you already know this?" Anyway, Katie says that she's been having strange experiences like this periodically since she was eight causing the psychic to conclude that simply leaving the house wouldn't do any good since the haunting is connected to Katie, not the house. This also spared the audience from having to hear some guy shout out, "Why the hell don't they just leave?" The psychic suggests not antagonizing the ghost/spirit/demon/whatever (nice advice, genius) and also says they should stay positive and that they should not try to communicate with it since that, "opens a door." Micah waits about ten seconds after the guy has left the house to start daring the spirit to come out and show itself.

Things start getting worse after that. The strange footsteps get louder and more frequent. Doors open and close. Lights go on and off. Katie starts sleepwalking. A ouija board inexplicably catches fire. And Micah and Katie, partly from fear and partly from lack of sleep, start going crazy. The filmmakers use their low budget to their advantage and show us very little of the action preferring to have Micah and Katie react to the aftermath. I want to again thank the filmmakers for not doing that lame horror movie trick of opening a door and something like a cat suddenly lunge out. There are many times when they go looking for this thing. You're always afraid that a door will be opened or that a flashlight will suddenly reveal some shape moving out of the darkness. I think the reason that doesn't happen is because then the characters would ignore the, "leaving will do no good," warning, run screaming out of the house and the movie would be over. Also, the people who see this footage later would lose any to plausibly explain this. There's never really a time when you can't find some way to say this is a hoax or the work of a mentally ill person right up to the shocking and abrupt ending.

Paranormal Activity is a very good movie that held my attention so well that I forgot to eat the nuts-raisins-yogurt chips trail mix I bought (don't laugh, that stuff's awesome with a fraction of the fat of movie theater popcorn). It earns its R rating not for showing people being torn apart by oh so clever Rube Goldbergesque torture contraptions but for use of the F-word that escalates as the tension and fear mounts for the characters. Thus I am left with pleasant memories of a truly atmospheric and psychological horror film as I munch on some tasty leftover trail mix so it's a win-win for me.

How Hollywood Thinks

In the original Philip K. Dick short story The Minority Report the character Jon Anderton is described as a fat, bald 60 year old man. When Steven Spielberg read that and wondered who would be the perfect choice to play Jon Anderton in his upcoming movie version, he naturally thought of this guy.



And that is How Hollywood Thinks.