After nearly four years of YouTube, I’ve had enough of abridged movies. You know, where a user edits together only the necessary plot points of a film for a video called “(movie title) in 60 seconds.” But I must make an exception for the British rap duo The Anomalies. Those guys (DJ Mayhem and MC Mouthmaster Murff, specifically) know how to do condensed classics right. By rapping the plot synopsis.

Earlier this year, they released an abridged version of Predator with rhymed narration. It was pretty funny. Now, they’ve come out an even better rap for RoboCop. It’s longer, it has a steadier rhythm and it utilizes the film’s dialogue far better than the Predator rap did. Plus, it’s so comprehensive at 10 minutes that I wonder why the film ever needed to be 102 minutes. Seriously, are there any necessary scenes excluded?

Too bad it takes 9 months for the guys to make something so brilliant. I’m anxious to see what movie they tackle next. Fortunately, I could watch this video over and over and over to tide me over. Check it out for yourself after the jump, and be warned that it features the film’s very NSFW language.

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• Julie Taymor is directing a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which will star plenty of Oscar-caliber performers, including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Djimon Hounsou and possibly Geoffrey Rush (Also: Russell Brand as the jester, Trinculo!). Taymor’s version should be interesting considering her postmodern take on the Bard’s Titus Andronicus for her film debut, and she’s already revealed one twist by casting Mirren in the lead, as a gender-reversed “Prospera”. But I bet it still won’t out-arthouse Peter Greenaway’s film version of the play.
• Forest Whitaker, who has already portrayed jazz saxaphonist Charlie Parker on the big screen, will play Louis Armstrong in a biopic obviously titled What a Wonderful World. Whitaker is also directing the film, though, so don’t expect this to be quite as Oscar-baited as it seems.
• Hollywood is going ahead with more than 40 major projects that will each lack strike protection despite the continued possibility of an actor walkout. According to Variety, the studios are indeed worried about the financial ramifications of a SAG strike, but they’re more concerned about not having enough tentpoles to release in 2010 and 2011. Because moviegoers will put up a fuss if they don’t get their Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 and remakes of RoboCop, Fame, Footloose, Clash of the Titans and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• Oh, and we can now add Overture’s newly announced remake of George Romero’s The Crazies to the pile, too.
• What should we do about the financial crisis? Kill the poor — or eat them? — says a new sci-fi film titled Fortuna that’s heading into production next month. Likened to Soylent Green, the pic will be set in 2100 when the middle class is gone and the rich have created a deadly contest with which to eliminate poverty.

Will Smith’s new superhero movie, Hancock, may be receiving terrible reviews, but it’s sure to make a lot of money. It is a Will Smith movie, after all. The fact that it’s an original superhero title (meaning not adapted from a comic book or other source material), however, means that if it is a success, it will be the rare movie of its kind to be such. Superhero movies may be huge right now, but really only the pre-sold properties, those with a build-in audience, make the big bucks.

A number of original superhero movies are just as worthy of your attention as the Spider-Mans, the Iron Mans, the Batmans and the X-Mens. Sure, much of the time, non-adapted superheroes are lame, as in the cases of Blankman and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. But just check out any of the following ten titles and see why it sometimes pays off to put your trust in an unfamiliar hero.

1. The Incredibles - This one did it all: won an Oscar; received favorable reviews across the board; did blockbuster business in theaters and ancillaries (its the sole original superhero movie to break $100 million, domestically, a feat it far surpassed by actually grossing more than $260 million); and featured the single greatest superhero gag (above) ever seen. So there’s proof that a superhero movie can be good and do well without being based on another property. …Read more

Late last year, we had a lot of questions about Brawndo, the fake sports drink from Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, made real by a company called Omni Consumer Products. Among those questions: Why would FOX throw their support behind the drinkable spinoff of a film they were barely willing to release? Is Omni Consumer Products, the company responsible for getting Brando on the shelves, a “real” company, or is it an elaborate Robocop joke? Finally, five months later, Rob Walker answers all those question (and more!) in the New York Times magazine:

[Brawndo] happened not because of a movie-studio marketing brainstorm. (Twentieth Century Fox released the film briefly and without much enthusiasm in 2006 before tossing it to the DVD market, where it has gained a cult following.) It happened because of an Idiocracy fan in Oakland named Pete Hottelet. A graphic designer with very particular pop-culture tastes, Hottelet has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in Robocop. In addition to Brawndo, Omni has acquired from Paramount the license to market Sex Panther, a made-up cologne from the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman (“150% More Awesome Than Any Other Cologne. Ever.”).

Read the full story here, or click through for the Times‘ Rob Walker’s attempt to make sense of it all, after the jump.

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On Friday, Danny Leigh at the Guardian linked to and excerpted from my post about Brawndo, the fictional scourge of mankind from Idiocracy, which Fox has allegedly inked a deal to produce as a real-life energy drink. Admittedly, the story does seem a little too future-world-y, irony-oblivious, Baudrillard-rolling-in-his-grave-y to take at face value, and the Guardian commenters expressed doubts.

“Er, hang on a second, is Brawndo really really real?” asked commenter JohnCooperClarke. “Have a look at the manufacturer listed at the bottom of the page - it’s Omni Consumer Products. From Robocop. A fictional big nasty corporation. Mind you, I had to Google to make sure that somebody hadn’t opened a real OCP…”

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