Early this year we featured a list of franchises in need of a genre change. The Rambo series was not one of the five selected, but apparently Sylvester Stallone thinks it’s a good idea to take a turn into sci-fi for the fifth installment of the action franchise. This, after the Indiana Jones series took a disappointing leap into alien territory last year. This, despite the fact Moonraker is one of the worst James Bond films.

The funny thing is, it’s difficult to find a straight up action or action/adventure franchise that doesn’t have sci-fi elements anymore. So wouldn’t it be nice to have these few series remain grounded in reality if they started that way? We think so. That’s why we’re going to beat Hollywood to the punch on a few action franchises that have yet to add aliens, monsters or whatever to their world.

The following five premises are completely ridiculous, and that is the point. Hopefully the series’ respective studios will thereby see that it would be a bad idea to do anything of the sort.
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Sorry for the late posting of the Bloggery, but I’ve been traveling all day to a retirement community in Arizona, and as you might guess the Interweb isn’t the hottest thing in these parts (obviously the hottest thing is the temperature, but anyway…).

So, I’m a bit late in addressing the news about Universal making a Where’s Waldo film, but it is the most fun movie topic of the past 24 hours (plus), and I just can’t let it be passed up for anything else. Mostly I just want to call back the clip of the day from almost exactly one year ago where I spotlighted a Bourne Ultimatum parody involving everyone’s favorite hard-to-find world/time traveler. And the thing I find most interesting about this actual film-to-be is that Universal is the same studio that produces the Bourne movies. Could there be at least a crossover cameo from Matt Damon? I am certain that he’d be down for a little winking tribute to that excellent fake trailer.

After the jump, check out a roundup of other blogged responses to the Where’s Waldo movie:

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I saw Christmas decorations in a storefront Sunday, so I guess it’s already time to break out the holiday movies. And it’s evidently time for distributors to release holiday fare to theaters, even if Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), which hits theaters this Friday, isn’t exactly the latest crowd-pleasing installment of the Santa Clause franchise. In fact, with such ingredients as estrangement, mental illness, alcoholism and cancer, it doesn’t seem like a very happy holidays kind of film. Even if it is actually a comedy.

But then how many holiday movies are completely void of depressing themes and scenes? I’m sure to have grown up thinking more about the homeless, suicide and family dysfunction from films set at Christmas and Thanksgiving than I did thinking about the happiness that comes with these holidays. One of the most tearjerking moments for me as a kid was certainly seeing Mickey Mouse crying over his dead son in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. It’s no wonder so many people get sad this time of year. Movies are influential, and for every bit of slapstick we see this season, there’s potentially room for thoughts of abandoned children to go along with it.

Worse for our tearducts are the films that aren’t necessarily thought of as “holiday movies,” which are typically more honest about how much of a bummer holidays can truly be. So get out your hanky and check out our list of ten most depressing holidays in movies:

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Oliver Stone has long been synonymous with political passion projects, but his latest film, W., may be his most ambitious effort yet, if only because of how quickly the thing came together and got made. Now the serio-comic biopic about our sitting president is about to hit theaters, less than ten months after anyone had heard of its inception, and it’s getting a number of favorable reviews, will possibly rule the box office this weekend, and could even garner an Oscar nomination for Josh Brolin, who portrays the man with the titular initial, George W. Bush.

But not all political passion projects are quite as successful as W. is expected to be. Some such films have been banned, while some have simply failed to acquire an audience on more democratic grounds, whether in terms of box office, critical or awards recognition. Yet regardless of the reception of a political passion project, either at the time of release (or intended release) or decades later, it may be regarded as an achievement merely for being made, because it can be a difficult task for a filmmaker, no matter how famous or powerful, to completely, without compromise, express his or her politics using such a collaborative and populist form of art as cinema.

We’ve put together a list of 10 political passion projects that were (and are) successful on both levels. They’ve been embraced by a wide audience, a majority of critics and/or the Academy, and they also manage to be as uncompromising in their political passion as is possible in Hollywood.

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Earlier this week, I recommended 10 movies for Democrats to watch. So, to balance things out and hopefully show a lack of bias, I’ve now selected 10 recommendations for Republicans, too. This was actually the more difficult task, because there are so many classic films that display conservative values — and in the 1980s alone, I think there were about a billion films promoting relatively right-wing lifestyles and ideas. Therefore, I’ve limited my picks to the last two decades, except for one underrated gem that left me with quite an impression as a boy.

• The Dark Knight (2008)
  Some said Batman is Bush, others said Cheney, but either way this past summer’s superhero blockbuster resonated with certain conservatives who saw the film as something of an argument about — if not apology for — the actions of the current administration. Similarly, this summer’s Hancock and Iron Man have been read as being particularly relative to Republican politics.
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The Golden Globes demonstrated their interest in contemporary World Cinema last year by nominating two Hollywood-produced films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, and ultimately handing the award to Clint Eastwood’s Japanese-language Letters From Iwo Jima. I was one of many who found this worrisome, but at the same time, it didn’t seem like it was totally out of left field. At least they didn’t give it to Apocalypto (nominated in the same category, thus unfortunately giving Mel Gibson a dose of “they only understand my work in Europe” cred).

At The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik says the Hollywood Foreign Press Association looks almost certain to repeat the pattern this year. Lust, Caution and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are just two of several films with Hollywood studio backing, directed by name-brand Indiewood auteurs, in a language other than English and incorporating a mix of foreign talent, that the Globes are expected to deem “too foreign” for their Best Picture category and just right for their Foriegn Language film category. This will, of course, have a ripple effect, pushing deserving non-Hollywood Foreign Language films out of consideration.

Ultimately, the problem stems from the fact that the HFPA’s field of vision is apparently so narrow that they don’t even think there is a problem. And they’re not the only ones.

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