We’re starting to hear some positive buzz about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Apparently it doesn’t rape or ruin your childhood; rather, it may make you feel like a kid again. This is what a toy/cartoon adaptation should do, we guess, but we still wish they’d made a Reagan-era-style war movie instead of a CG-heavy action blockbuster with too much comic relief. Because even when we were little we knew the property was a young person’s version of the conservative, Cold War-informed military pictures of the 1980s. And if Rambo could get his own Saturday morning animated series, why couldn’t we get a hard-R-rated G.I. Joe after all these years?

We know the answer to that question, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re disappointed. See, while others might feel GIJTROC has ruined their childhood by being too unfaithful to the action figures and show, we feel it’s ruined our childhood because it isn’t the movie we dreamed of. So that’s how the following list of films was selected. Instead of going for all the obvious remakes and video game adaptations (we’ve never cared about games), we’re focusing on movies that really turned our beloved films, comics and cartoons of our youth into something we’re now almost embarrassed to ever admit we enjoyed.
…Read more

I apologize for being such a negative S.O.B. this week, but at least it seems to help with other blogs‘ dry spells as far as comments go, so I’m going to continue my “concern trolling” today in order to announce my low expectation for this Alien prequel, for which Fox reportedly is now bringing Ridley Scott back to the franchise to direct. I have a general distaste for prequels, so I’m obviously biased. I admit this completely. But what could really be the benefit to this? So we can actually witness the back story of the xenomorphs? If this is to be like most villain origins, I anticipate finding out the aliens were all orphans and/or had lost a childhood love to disease.

Okay, fine, I’ll end on a positive, hopeful note: if Scott can make the prequel less an explanation for why the xenomorphs are so evil and instead make an Alien film that’s basically Black Hawk Down in space (or is that what Cameron’s Aliens was?), I will totally be on board for this. I do like both Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection, so I guess I’m pretty much obligated to give this a chance.

Check out the rest of the film blog reactions after the jump:
…Read more

We feel really bad about spotlighting Michael Jackson in three spots on our “Creepiest Kids’ Movies List” yesterday. If we had known he was going to die of cardiac arrest within hours of that post’s publication, we would have maybe limited his presence to one included film, if any at all.

To make up for the dishonor, we now would like to spotlight the connection he had to cinema through his collaborations with great filmmakers. Due to his talent, success and financial status, he was able to work with a number of important directors, both in movies and in music videos. Some were already prominent when MJ hired them; others were strictly music videomakers who would go on to significant feature filmmaking careers. Some collaborations were also better than others, so we’ve ranked them in order from worst to best.
…Read more

I’m not in the mood to trash Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the billionth time today, but the hot story on the blogs appears to be Indy related, so I’ll try to get through this disappointing story as quick as possible. According to Shia LaBeouf (in an interview with the BBC), Steven Spielberg has “cracked a story on” a fifth installment of the franchise, and the young actor thinks “they’re gearing that up.”

Of course that means little except that the series has survived despite having “nuked the fridge” (a term actually spawned by the ridiculousness of the fourth film), and it will continue grasping through life with some level of radiation sickness (aka further crappiness) as a result. Because I’m something of a cinematic masochist (you have to be in this line of work), I’ll probably see the next sequel, and the next, but I’ve got lower expectations for this thing than I’ve had for any movie ever greenlit.

Let’s see if any other bloggers feel the same way after the jump:
…Read more

Now that Star Trek has opened, broken some records and delighted an apparent majority of critics and moviegoers, it’s time for the backlash to begin. The complaints are not tremendous, but they have popped up here and there on the web today, and it’s worth taking a look at some of them, especially for those of us who haven’t yet gotten around to watching the thing. I’ve already learned, courtesy of actor/comedian Aziz Ansari that I should be careful in choosing where I see J.J. Abrams’ reboot if I want to see it in IMAX. What else might I be wary of before I go into the movie, in general? Let’s see what negativity is coming out of the blogosphere after the jump:

…Read more

I am all for holidays, especially those having to do with movies. But they should have some sort of meaning, whether they honor an anniversary or birthday (real or fictional person’s), inception date (remember when people celebrated HAL’s birthday on January 12, 1997?) or similarly significant event. They shouldn’t just exist to exist. Star Wars Day, which is apparently today (interestingly, mere days before Star Trek hits theaters), is nothing more than a joke turned into a pseudo-holiday, for which the only purpose is to be able to say that it’s Star Wars Day. You don’t get a free comic book out of it, you don’t get off from work to hold a Jedi-based mass and you certainly don’t get to wear your Star Wars costumes around town without getting beat up. Especially not if your only reasoning for being in droid-garb is the silly pun “May the 4th be with you.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love puns, I love Star Wars (some of the movies, at least) and I do appreciate the joke from which the thing originates. But actually trying to turn the date into an officially recognized holiday — for members of the Jedi church, of course — is just plain silly. Geeks, feel free to watch a marathon of Star Wars movies today if you wish, but please stop with the “Happy Star Wars Day” greetings already. Bah humbug!

Check out some of the bloggers who annoyed me with this nonsense today, after the jump:

…Read more

All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”

That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below.
…Read more

Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.

This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
…Read more

If you buy the kids only one new video release this week, make it Pinocchio. Obviously. But if you have enough spending money to buy two, pick up Howard the Duck as well. Finally on DVD in America (with a Special Edition no less), the infamous flop is anything but a great film. Yet it is hardly one of the worst films of the 1980s, despite its reputation.

For the past 23 years, I’ve stood by my childhood love for Howard the Duck, constantly acknowledging that I even owned Ellis Weiner’s novelization of the film. Technically, the best reason to defend the movie’s existence is that it directly led to the creation of Pixar. But this reason doesn’t influence anyone to watch the thing. So, in order to defend the movie’s onscreen worth, I’ve come up with ten points for why you should pick up the new Howard the Duck disc and not feel at all guilty about doing so.
…Read more

It’s amazing, and really quite sad, that nearly a decade after the release of The Phantom Menace, people are still complaining about George Lucas. Sure, he also messed up his Indiana Jones franchise last summer, but whatever, there’s nothing we can do about it except skip out on further Lucas productions. The diehards are still apparently with him enough to have gotten the Clone Wars TV series renewed, to continually dress up in Star Wars costumes for comic conventions, and to eventually even buy Fanboys when it hits DVD (the movie’s terrible $200,000 gross in its first week isn’t so much a reflection on fan interest so much as it’s the fault of The Weinstein Co.’s distinterest).

So, is there really any reason for the film The People vs. George Lucas, which is still a year away from release, to exist? Hasn’t the internet supplied plenty of documentation on the hatred of Lucas over the past ten years? Now that we have an early trailer for the film to look at, here’s what the blogosphere has to say on the doc and the issue in general:

…Read more

Should special effects only be used to service a film’s story, or is it perfectly fine for movies to feature extraneous spectacle? That’s a debate that comes up often among cineastes, but ultimately there’s room for both functions. Sometimes, in cases like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, both categories of effects may even faultlessly coexist in the same film. Yet there is one kind of effects employment that’s intolerable to all film-loving parties: the gratuitous exploitation for the sole purpose of brazen gimmickry. It’s this kind of effects work that goes beyond spectacle. It’s not so much a show as a show off.

For one example of this cinematic sin check out Karina’s review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she references a scene featuring an inessential and irrelevant rocket launch in the background of an otherwise intimate moment between two lovers on a sailboat. Actually, that’s apparently only a minor citation in a “a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.” Hardly the first movie to commit such a crime, sure, but Benjamin Button seems to be the most thoroughly guilty exploiter since Forrest Gump (both films, incidentally, were scripted by Eric Roth).

So, in (dis)honor of Roth’s repeat offense, let’s take a short look at the worst exploitations of special effects in the last 15 years:
…Read more

The fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition.

…Read more

Those who have spent the last three or four years following the parallel production nightmares of Fanboys and 5-25-77 would be excused for assuming that all films involving teenagers and early cuts of Star Wars films are cursed. The former, which Kevin reviewed at Comic-Con, should have been the nerd toast of summer 2007, but reshoots, reedits and a scuffle with the Weinsteins over the film’s pesky downer undercurrent mandated a number of shuffles down the calendar; it’s now tentatively scheduled to hit theaters at the end of next month. Geek excitement for 5-25-77 hit fever pitch when the film’s first trailer hit the web way back in January 2006 (and subsequently the won Golden Trailer for the best promo for a film that wasn’t actually released — yes, such an award exists). A rough cut screening (apparently, very rough) followed a year and a half later, and a year and a half after that, Patrick Read Johnson’s long MIA autobiographical epic, now simply called ‘77, had its official World Premiere this weekend at the Hamptons Film Festival, where it won a Heineken-sponsored indie auteur award. But don’t get too excited yet — it’s still not finished.

…Read more

Whether you’re a South Park viewer or a reader of many film blogs, you’ve probably seen the disturbing (though not disturbingly funny) clip of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas raping Indiana Jones. As much as I too was disappointed with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, though, I find the South Park thing more upsetting, and I’ll probably have a more difficult time getting the image of Indy in whitey tighties being mounted by Spielberg out of my head than I did erasing the memory of Shia LaBeouf swinging through the trees with a bunch of monkey friends.

Speaking of LaBeouf, he’s the star of today’s Clip of the Day in lieu of the rape thing (which I don’t want to subject anyone to, if they’ve managed to avoid it so far). Because everyone knows Spielberg loves LaBeouf — as an actor; get the rape and other related thoughts out of your head — the site Spill.com has put together a little animated montage of what it would be like had LaBeouf starred in (or were he inserted into, via effects magic) Spielberg’s past movies. I like it mainly because I’m already obsessed with the Shia LaBeouf “no no no no no” thing (see this past Clip), which works perfectly in the old movies. The Close Encounters musical version is especially great.