I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret. I text, eat, write, and occasionally fantasize while driving. So when I read this news while driving and eating a crumb cake, I almost veered off the road more than usual. Every nerd with half a hard-on for comic book movies worships at the altar of Christopher Nolan.   He gave us Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and kicks unfathomable amounts of ass. This news has me running around in a frothy geek insanity:

Via Deadline Hollywood:

Warner Bros is trying to ready  its DC Comics stalwart Superman to soar again on the Big Screen, and the studio has turned to Chris Nolan to mentor development of the movie. Our insiders say that the  brains behind rebooted Batman has been asked to play a “godfather” role and ensure The Man Of Steel gets off the ground after a 3 1/2-year hiatus.

…

Let us emphasize that Superman 3.0 is in the early stages of development. And we doubt Nolan would direct.  This wouldn’t be a sequel to Superman Returns but a completely fresh franchise.

It doesn’t even matter to me that he probably won’t direct it. If you were like me and hated the last Superman movie, Superlifter: Guy Who Lifts Shit While Kevin Spacey Acts Like An Asshole, you know how much I dreaded seeing Bryan Singer take another crack at the franchise. Just the name alone inspires faith and revelry in me, and it has to be better than a movie where Superman is an emo absentee Dad who gets shanked by Lester Burnham.

I’m not sure there’s much middle ground for people regarding the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s ridiculous, bloody, entertaining comic book Kick-Ass. As a fan of the comic, and ultraviolence in general, I’m beyond stoked that they’re keeping this movie faithful as fuck to the comic book. In a recently released Red Band trailer featuring Hit-Girl, they show just how committed they are to the source material. Twelve year-old Hit-Girl slices the shit out of thugs, drops the word “Cunt” and throws blood everywhere.

Either you’re a sicko like me, and you’re going to love this absurd approach to what heroes would look like in the real world, or you’re shocked, offended, and possibly vomiting. Check out the clip below.

I feel a bit curious even bothering to review Avatar. I feel like it is the sort of movie whose fate was decided eons ago. By the nerdigentsia. Right about fifteen months before the trailer even came out, people were totally definitely going to hate it. And for those people, you have a litany of complaints that you concocted during the first trailer, or the advertising campaign, and a lot of your criticisms are probably true. But you know what? Avatar is fucking fantastic. Despite all its indefensible faults, it’s an experience anyone who loves a spectacle should take in. Avatar is two-hours and some change of existing on a different plane, engrossed in a gorgeous, foreign world.

Haters, you go on and hate. It’s cool. But if you’re on the fence, come hither and I’ll try and persuade you.

I took my boy, and exquisite coder of this wonderful site, Bags, to see Avatar on Friday evening. Even bought him the ticket. Yeah, I’m a fucking class act. It’s worth mentioning, since right from around the time that I began jerking off uncontrollably to the original trailer, he began to express skepticism. While I was mentioning how sweet I thought the uber-mechs and the ridiculous dragons and shit looked, he muttered things like “I don’t know, the two worlds don’t seem to mesh” and “I’m just not that excited” and maybe even “It doesn’t seem as fun a way to spend a Friday night as dressing up in my Mom’s underwear.” So Bags was the perfect foil for my fanboyism. If I was guaranteed to love it, then his opinion may count for more than mine. While he was skeptical, he’s was willing to keep an open mind about the whole fucking shebang.

Bags walked out of the theater in love. I could see his erection. It was mountainous. It throbbed and I rubbed it if only because I was so happy he enjoyed the movie as much as me.

Why is Avatar so fucking amazing? You already know the answer. And either you believe in it, or you don’t. Avatar is amazing because of the zillion dollars that James Cameron spent in meticulously creating another world. Pandora lives and breathes, and you’re there alongside it, engulfed by it. I don’t even know why this movie is available for public consumption in some stone-age two-dimension version. Two-dimensions! Pfft! Fuck that, that is so last millennium.

Avatar is beyond gorgeous. People write about visuals this, and visuals that. But Avatar is more about immersion. You’re plunked into Pandora, and boy does she feel real. There are portions that take place during the night, and I swear to you this cheeseball asshole had goosebumps. Pandora is that pretty. Very pretty. Objects whirl and light up in Pandora for no good reason. Smack a flower and it brightens and retracts into itself. Why? Because it is pretty and awesome and it makes you go Ohhhhh.

I kept turning to Bags during the showing. Dude, I’d say. That looks fucking real. And at some points of absurd awesomeness, he’d just turn to me and laugh. It was a laugh of incredulous excitement. As if to say, jesus christ, this is unfathomably cool. And I’d nod and say something like seriously.

The Na’Vi? I dug them. Not only did I dig them, but I found Neytiri downright sexy. She was some beautiful exotic alien lady who I didn’t feel unjust at all in fawning over. A big beautiful blue babe that can rocket arrows into dragons and shit? Sign me up. Raise your hand if you kept trying to see if you could spot areolar.

Avatar is more of an experience than a movie. And I’m heartened by the fact that it is making a zillion dollars, because I want more movies like this. I want to be inserted, Solid Snake-stylee into some foreign world. Embedded into some exotic beauty. The entire film is predicated on you experiencing this world, which is why it makes what I’m about to say okay.

The story isn’t amazing. It isn’t. We probably all know this already. But to be fair, it’s actually a hell of a lot better than I thought it was going to be. It’s standard Uprising of the People plus preachy commentary on everything from deforestation to contractors like Blackwater running around in places like Iraq. It’s a mish-mash of slightly groan-worthy themes. But they’re all conveyed through common tropes. The savior of the people, the disenfranchised soldier, et cetera. It isn’t ground breaking, and it struggles at points.

But that’s okay, I really promise it is.

The next day after I saw the movie I was whipping fluids everywhere as I talked to my Pepsibro about it. I was all, dude, you really have to see this fucking movie. It’s very cool. Very cool. And he asked me, but like, was it a good movie?

No conversation between Pepsibones and I is complete without some sort of Socratic discourse, and I asked him, well, what do you mean by a good movie? And he responded, well like, is the story good? And my response was two-pronged: Is the story good? Yes and no. And does it matter? The story is good enough to connect one excuse for beautiful visuals to another. I would describe the storyline as functional. It serves its purpose.

As a side-note, I really have to give Big Ups to Cameron for his typical propensity for using strong women. As a fan of powerful, intelligent women, I enjoyed seeing Neytiri being a source of strength throughout the movie. It’s nice to see a female role whose personality doesn’t wilt into a messy pile of butter once the big strong dude shows up.

But anyways.

Avatar really is about the visuals. And it is the visuals that can carry the storyline as its weakest points, and glide you through some of the stilted acting. The acting isn’t piss-poor, but there’s some cardboard amongst the actors and actresses. I’ve heard this written away as Cameron’s desire to show the burgeoning disconnect between Sully’s life as an Avatar, and what is becoming an increasingly disconnected and foreign world with the humans.

Please.

I’m a lit major pal, and I know when to throw the Red Flag on intellectual masturbation. The acting is choppy because it is choppy. The dialogue sucks because the dialogue sucks. Nothing can save lines such as “We’re going to fight terror with terror!” and Cameron actually using the phrase “Shock and Awe”, no matter how much academic wanking you want to pull off. It’s cute though.

Avatar is a fun as fuck movie with flaws. There is a soggy middle section and one really awkward elf seance and some barfy dialogue. But none of that stopped me from having my eyepieces rocked with visual splendor. Take it from me, and one skeptical friend, who both left the movie theater jonesing for some fuggin’ Pandora. Slap on your 3D glasses, ditch the snark for like three hours, and enjoy hanging out in a different world.

Yeah, Japan is getting Final Fantasy XIII tomorrow. Or today, over there. Or whatever. Fucking futurists. Anyways, according to Andriasang, they’re also getting a fucking Final Fantasy XIII ad in THREE-DIMENSIONS prior to the movie Avatar. What the fuck! This is some shit. I’m over here, having to pretend to play Final Fantasy XIII by holding my PS3 controller while playing Final Fantasy VII after taking my sleeping medicine, and my Japanese gaming brethren are getting not only the game, but also sweet-ass trailers? But come to mention it, if you own it, why the fuck are you even going to the movies!

My jealously is an endless river of blood in which my hate will soak!

The above picture is Nicholas Cage looking like a douchebag in a superhero costume. But that’s okay. Because unlike if he starred as Clark Kent in Superman, the dude is supposed to look absurd in his current role. Dudebro is starring as Big Daddy in the film version of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass.

I love the shit out of Kick-Ass, even if it’s just Millar riffing once again on the mundanity of suburban life, and how all of us geeks yearn for being able to fly around and shoot shit out of our asses, and eyes and cocks and stuff. And in the forthcoming clip, we get to see how Big Daddy trains his daughter to be a superhero.

How?

He teaches her how to take a bullet, by shooting her in the chest. It’s as amazing and hilarious as it sounds. Check it out after the jump. Keep Reading »

Alright, I’m really fucking excited for Ninja Assassin. For months I’ve been anticipating a mindless bloody explosion of guts and ninja stars. Then poor reviews started coming in, and because I’m impressionable, stupid, and spaghetti-spined, I began to panic. Then I was like, wait a second. Wait, let’s just take a look at these reviews.

I began to see that all the quotes delineating just why the movie is so poor…are exactly the reasons I want to see the fucking movie! Now, if you don’t like the various things I’m expecting: ultra violence, decapitations, ludicrous amounts of blood splattering everywhere, I can understand why you wouldn’t like it. But I mean, shouldn’t context count for anything?

When you evaluate a movie, do you take into account intent, context, and audience? I’m guessing no. And furthermore, I’m not sure if you should. A different debate, for a different day. But if you’re a fucking psychopath fanboy like me, check out these review snippets, culled from Rotten Tomatoes. Keep in mind these are all from negative reviews.

The gory decapitations and gushing blood – imagine filling a million balloons with cherry Kool-Aid and using them in a water-balloon fight – turn the action scenes into an indistinguishable sea of red.

Awesome.

Working with screenwriters Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski (from an original story by Sand), McTeigue provides enough wire-fu fights and stylish gore to please the fan boys who expect ample bloodletting from an R-rated action movie.

Steven Ramos, Boxoffice Magazine

Exactly, dickhead.

As I left the theater, I found that my thumbs ached. I hadn’t realized that, during certain parts of the movie, I was pressing imaginary buttons as if trying to control some video game.

Bob Bloom, Journal and Courier

BOB, you’re so hilarious dude. The “I thought I was watching a video game” line isn’t stale as fuck and overused. You’re a pioneer of hilarity and incisive wit.

This one is simply a diverting, uncommonly violent action flick. No need for an extended critical postmortem.

Stephen Cole, Globe and Mail

Exactly. Again, I suppose if you don’t dig these things, I don’t blame you for not enjoying it. But what I have gleamed from these review snippets, because my generation doesn’t have the attention span to read entire reviews, is that these people seem genuinely shocked at what the movie contained. Were you expecting something other than super violence and madness on celluloid? Did you see the trailers? I ask this, because there are positive reviews that contain the same sort of content as the negative ones. Except, these people fucking get it:

This movie knows exactly what it is: Gonzo silliness about bodies turned into human salsa.

Kyle Smith, New York Post

I’m seeing this movie tomorrow night, on what is probably going to be a belly filled with turkey and potatoes. I hope the camera whirls so quickly and the violence is so extreme that I vomit a torrent of hot, mushy protein particles and gravy onto someone’s head in the row in front of me.

I’m fucking stoked.

Through all of its events, OCTOBERFEAST has been a commemoration of not only pop culture’s most terrifying and vile aspects, but the genuine joy derived from them as well. Just as Young Frankenstein illustrates, the combination of horror and comedy creates a synergy only rivaled by peanut butter and chocolate. But as much as I love Mel Brooks’ monster-movie homage, it is essentially a comedy that happens to use horror characters. In  truth, there exists a more even balance of horror/comedy/adventure.

Perhaps the best example of this cinematic joint-effort is Army of Darkness. Sam Raimi’s 1992 movie is the third (and best) part of the Evil Dead Trilogy. This concluding chapter picks up right where Evil Dead 2 left off — Ash, a man who has battled the possessed corpses of former friend on two occasions, has been transported to Medieval England. In order to return from the year 1300 CE, Ash has to retrieve the Necronomicon (the book of the dead featured in both predecessors). Of course, this means getting involved with warring bands of knights and battling the undead.

While this may sound like a decent flick in and of itself, the beauty of Army of Darkness is found in the protagonist Ash Williams. Unlike most heroes, Ash is kind of an asshole; he runs his mouth, tells people off, and is always trying to help himself out. Take, for example, his response to the once-possessed Sheila’s attempt to apologize for her former actions: “First you wanna kill me, now you wanna kiss me. Blow.” Such one-liners, delivered by the amazing Bruce Campbell, are nothing short of genius.

Shit. Forgive me if I’m backpedaling here, but I feel like I need to pause for clarification. Ash is great not only because he’s a charming douchebag, but because he pushes the limits of ridiculous. Just contemplate this — when first appearing in Army of Darkness, Ash has a chainsaw attached to his hand. Also, he is a big fan of his shotgun, to which he lovingly refers as a boomstick. Observe the following:

But Ash isn’t the only redeeming quality of the movie. Army of Darkness succeeds in its willingness not to take itself too seriously. Sure, there are monsters and dead bodies and all that creepy stuff. But everything in the movie is treated with a slapstick sensibility; as a result, the entertainment value is doubled, as every scary monster evokes waves of hearty laughter that is usually only heard during Three Stooges episodes. The cheesy, campy nature of Army of Darkness puts it a step above others, showcasing the fact that the movie is first and foremost intended to entertain.

I’m fairly certain that I haven’t done Army of Darkness justice. But if you believe in the power of OCTOBERFEAST, you can believe in this movie. I mean, seriously, there are lines like Yo, she-bitch! Let’s Go! & Hail to the king, baby.

Tonight is Halloween Eve — I plan on watching Army of Darkness. You should too.

This blog opened up with an AVATAR post, so I suppose it makes sense that I follow the movie. The theatrical trailer has hit the interwebz and well? Yeah, well! I don’t know. I can imagine people who have been frothing over this like it was the equivalent of their Bayonetta are going to be dissapointed. It doesn’t look like the second coming of, you know, anything. That said, I think it’s got some potential. I’ve soured on the look of the natives after realizing I’m expected to emotionally connect with them. And the dialogue, intelligently removed from the teaser, makes it seem like George “Shitty Dialogue From A Washed-Up Fuckface” Lucas had his hand in it.

That said, the visuals are bonerfying, and this is all without it being in 3D. Check it out for yourself after the jump.

Keep Reading »

With only a few days left in the OCTOBERFEAST, I’m sure that there is some speculation underfoot. After all, there are certainly fewer available spots than there are candidates with which to fill them. It’s an unfortunate fact, but not every kooky-ass, ghoulish autumn activity/movie/song/memory makes the cut, so don’t throw a hissy fit when your favorite is excluded. Maybe next year will prove successful.

I’ve had some guesses thrown my way as to what the main course of the OCTOBERFEAST will be. I could tell you, but I value the few hits OL gets every day; you’re just going to have to keep on reading. However, I will tell you what it is not: Halloween.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie Halloween is great and everything. Before  selling doo-doo yogurt, Jamie Lee Curtis was famous because of Halloween, which is saying something. I guess. Or is it? Hey, remember True Lies? Yeah, who could forget?

Anyways, Halloween is not included in the OCTOBERFEAST. Maybe it’s too obvious. Maybe I’m just surly. Or maybe it’s because the film’s antagonist is no longer the most horrifying being with the name Michael Myers.

However, what this twenty-seventh day of FEAST’ing does include is the theme from Halloween…as performed by Secret Chiefs 3.

Earlier this year, I saw Secret Chiefs 3 open up for Les Claypool. I had never heard of the band, but was quite impressed. Not only were they super tight, energetic, and generally good sounding, but they also performed in druid-robes. It was sick.

Turning to the hippie rocking out to my left, I asked about the band. He informed me of their name and the fact that they were formed by Trey Spruance. For those of you unfamiliar with Spruance, he was the guitarist for Mr. Bungle and played on Faith No More’s King for a Day…Fool for a Lifetime. So if you like that stuff, maybe you’ll like Secret Chiefs 3. Honestly, I haven’t checked out the band’s albums so I can’t really say.

But about halfway through the set, Secret Chiefs 3 busted into the only tune of theirs I’d recognize: the familiar theme from Halloween. I find the original version of the song terribly creepy — listen to those notes in the dark and you’re bound to look over your shoulder. While Secret Chief 3’s rendition isn’t necessarily as haunting, I think it brings an electricity and liveliness distinguishable from the original.

Check out the video below. The actual footage is pretty bogus, but listening to the audio while you do something else will be worthwhile.

In the words of Vigo the Carpathian, “Now is the season of evil.” Yeah Vigo, that is a pretty good way to sum up the OCTOBERFEAST.   But that doesn’t mean we can’t take the opportunity to laugh our asses off — it just has to be done with a *spooky* theme. If only there were a classic comedy that made use of some of horror’s most recognizable characters…

Oh shit. If I didn’t include this movie, Mrs. Krueger would give me a goddamn dragon uppercut. She’s never even played Street Fighter but last time she did it she knocked out an incisor. True story.

OCTOBERFEAST has reserved a more than well-deserved spot for Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Written by Gene Wilder (who also plays the lead), the feature chronicles the exploits of the grandson of the infamous Dr. Frankenstein. The descendent initially wants nothing to do with his ancestor’s legacy, distancing himself at every opportunity and making sure to pronounce his surname [Fronk-en-steen]. However, there is a matter to settle with his family’s estate, and he has to  travel to the scene of his grandfather’s crime!

Once in Transylvania, the Young Frankenstein comes across a number of characters that threaten to steal the film from him. There’s Inga, the flirtatious lab assistant played by Teri Garr who is so good looking in this movie that it really depresses me to think of how she looks now. Frau Blucher is the beyond-homely, elderly servant of the Frankenstein estate whose very name evokes the naying of horses throughout the entire movie. And then there’s Igor, the hunchbacked servant played by the kooky-eyed Marty Feldman.

While all the characters in Young Frankenstein are brilliant, there is a terrific wit emitting from Igor that just elevates him to a higher plateau. Just watch how he handles one of his duties as servant:

I’m not the type of guy who worships at the altar of the supposed classics. If anything, I miss out on a lot of cool shit because I respond to seemingly unanimous praise with an overabundance of skepticism. But Young Frankenstein deserves the acclaim. Every scene delivers and no member of the ensemble cast is wasted. Gene Hackman’s brief appearance as a lonely hermit supports this claim:

Young Frankenstein is not only a great Halloween movie, but a great comedy as well. If you’ve enjoyed Mel Brooks’ other films, try this one on for size. And if you don’t like Mel Brooks…well, then you’re probably an asshole.