About that Star Wars teaser trailer.

I thought a lot of it was great, but like many people, I'm really not fond of the lightsaber cross-guard design featured. Unlike most of those people though, the way I feel about it has nothing to do with whether or not it's practical, useful, or even possible within the scientific logic of Star Wars.

Have you ever had a friend who started trying too hard to be seen as cool, and even though their affectations may have impressed others, you actually thought they were a lot cooler when they were just being themselves and weren't trying to impress everyone?

The "what haven't we done with the lightsaber yet?" trend reminds me of that. Characters having multiple lightsabers, lightsabers having multiple blades, lightsaber staffs, lightsaber nunchakus, Wolverine-esque lightsaber claws, helicopters with lightsaber rotor blades, etc.

You know what's really cool? A regular lightsaber. And I think that scene would have been cooler if it just had one of those.

Maybe I'll change my mind after seeing it in the context of the movie.

Elizabeth Peña

September 23, 1959 - October 14, 2014

I was sad to hear about the passing of Elizabeth Peña, especially considering how young she still was.

In my adolescence, I became somewhat obsessed with an influential horror movie she was in called Jacob's Ladder. I've talked a little bit before about how as a teenager, I'd watch movies at night when I couldn't sleep. I would go through phases where I'd just watch one movie over and over every night, and then after a couple weeks or so, I'd switch to a different movie. Jacob's Ladder was one of the movies I did that with. In hindsight, that probably wasn't very good for my state of mind. I was so interested in the movie that it was also the first screenplay I ever read, and I used to be able to recite whole sections of dialogue just from seeing the movie so often.

I always thought Peña's performance as Jezzie in the film was quite striking. She had a way of jumping naturally back and forth from caring and beautiful, to frightening and rather ugly, sometimes even blurring the lines between the two. She also made me fall in love with the name Jezebel.

#‎ExplainAFilmPlotBadly‬

I saw people playing a fun game on twitter today, so I joined in for a couple.

A drunk author with a receding hairline stays at a hotel with his family. His son rides a tricycle.

A police chief goes to the beach, then goes on a fishing trip with two other guys, but their boat's not big enough!

Shirley Bennett joined in as well. #ShirleyExplainsAFilmPlotBadly

Robin Williams

July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014

The death of actor Robin Williams was of course quite a shock.

Like pretty much everyone around my age, I grew up with Williams due to his roles in movies like Hook, Aladdin, and Mrs. Doubtfire. But my two favorite performances of his are in movies I didn't see until I was much older.

I had trouble sleeping (insert Insomnia joke here) when I was a teenager. I would just lie in bed, watching the same movie over and over again every night. I'd go through different phases where I'd watch a certain movie every night for around two weeks and then I'd pick a different movie from our very limited collection of DVD's or cassette tapes. For some reason we had a copy of Good Will Hunting on VHS, so that was one I regularly watched on school nights when I couldn't sleep.

I hated English class all throughout high school. I could go on and on about why, but this isn't the place for that. Once in a while though we'd read a good book or watch a good movie. One teacher who I didn't even particularly like showed us a few things I still love to this day, including a movie that affected me profoundly: Dead Poets Society. It always amused me that rather than attempting to inspire his own students, my teacher showed us a movie about another teacher inspiring his.

Summer Classic Film Series 2014

A local theater (or 'theatre' as they spell it... for some reason I can't see it spelled that way without hearing Tobias Funke say it in my head.) has been playing several classic films this summer. My friend and I decided to go see a few. Rear Window, King Kong, and Creature From The Black Lagoon. I had already seen them before, but never on the big screen.

The picture quality of all three films was gorgeous, but the sound could have been better. I think the acoustics in the theater were to blame. There was this reverb with a long decay, like in a cathedral, and it made the whole soundtrack muddy, especially the dialogue and sound effects. And that's a shame, because I love the attention to detail in the sound design of Rear Window. The sounds of all the little things happening at the apartments. By the way, how wonderful is it that the score's mostly made up of the beautiful piano piece L.B. Jefferies' songwriting neighbor is composing throughout the film? I love all of the quirky neighbors too, and the voyeuristic little glimpses we get into their lives.



King Kong and Creature From The Black Lagoon was actually a double feature, and I thought that was a really cool pairing. Both are influential black and white monster movies. Each monster infatuated with a beautiful woman.




Creature From The Black Lagoon is of course a Universal Monster movie, and it's easily one of my favorites of those that I've seen. Its influence on Jaws, one of my favorite movies period, is undeniable. I'm really amazed by how well the gill-man still holds up. Something about the material of the suit, and the way various parts of the head move makes it just seem like a real creature to me instead of an actor in a costume.



I have of course mentioned in a post before that the stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien in King Kong inspired a young Ray Harryhausen. So I was thinking about how, in that way, it was kind of linked to the triple feature I saw at another local theater last year. The only thing that doesn't really hold up in King Kong is the close ups of Kong's face, which were done using a large bust of the ape's head. The stop-motion is still beautiful to me though, and I'm an absolute sucker for stop-motion dinosaurs.



My friend and I gave spare tickets to a woman and her two children. She thanked us multiple times, but if I understood, I guess the kids weren't particularly thrilled to be seeing a black and white movie. They had said they were probably only staying for one movie, which is understandable because they were playing pretty late. About a minute after King Kong ended, and I was back to reality, I remembered them and wondered what they thought of the movie. I turned around to ask, and they were already gone. And so I was left wondering...

Wondering out into the wasteland...

Oh, I'm sorry. I got distracted by how great the Mad Max: Fury Road trailer is.

Adolescent Genetically-Altered Martial Artist Chelonians

At the end of the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the Shredder suit opens up, revealing that Krang was controlling him the whole time.

Spoiler Alert: I'm just kidding.

Ben Affleck as Batman and Superman.

Back in August when Ben Affleck was cast as Bruce Wayne in the upcoming Man Of Steel sequel (Superman vs Batman or Batman vs Superman or whatever it's going to be called), I made a post in which I said this:

                    A CINEMATIC MIND
          I can't wait until they release the first photo of him in the new
          batsuit so that I can put it together with a photo of him wearing the
          Superman suit in the movie Hollywoodland, in which he played George 
          Reeves, the actor who portrayed the titular superhero in the
          television show Adventures of Superman. Of course, now I can't help
          but to imagine a Ben Affleck Batman fighting a Ben Affleck Superman.
          You know you'd pay to watch that.

Well the other day Zack Snyder shared a photo of Affleck in the new batsuit on twitter, so here you go!

Avatar vs Halloween II: Land Of The Lost

I got these cheaply made wallets at a 99 cent store a few years back simply because the images on them amused me. And now I share them with you.



Do you remember that part in Avatar with Will Ferrell and Danny McBride? Me neither. It's probably because they weren't in it. I'll admit that I enjoyed Avatar, but do you think their inclusion would have made the movie better?



Then there's this masterpiece. Interesting font choices here. You may notice what appears to be Michael Myers wielding his kitchen knife in the bottom left corner of the image. So is this a face-off between James Cameron's Avatar and Rob Zombie's probably terrible (I only saw the first one. Malcolm McDowell and Brad Dourif couldn't even make that movie worth watching.) Halloween II? Or is this actually the second Avatar vs Halloween movie? If so, did the first one really do well enough to warrant a sequel?

I'm not really sure what the story is behind these, but Avatar, Halloween II, and Land Of The Lost all came out in 2009, so it's obvious to me that whoever was behind these wallets was trying to take advantage of what they hoped would be successful movies. At least one of them was a financial success. If you're into mashups of movies that no one cares about anymore, you might be able to still find these, but don't expect to actually use them as wallets. The first time I opened one of these to use it, the velcro ripped right out of it. It's pretty sad when your velcro is stronger than your stitching.

Bloody Dreddful

I was recently reading about filmmaker Danny Cannon, and I found something that completely baffled me.

When Cannon was a teenager, he entered a contest in the comic 2000 AD to design a poster for a possible Judge Dredd movie. Inspired by Blade Runner, his poster said it would be directed by Ridley Scott, have Harrison Ford playing Dredd, and have Daryl Hannah playing Anderson. I saw the poster itself, and I found it rather underwhelming. I was expecting to see a drawing or painting of Ford as Dredd. Someone who's good at art needs to make a new version of that poster. I can't because I suck at art. Anyway, I'm way more interested in the concept. It sounds like it would have made an awesome movie. Harrison Ford playing Dredd? I never say this, but... Shut up and take my money!

Now here's where it gets confusing. Cannon went on to direct the 1995 Judge Dredd movie starring Sylvester Stallone. Why didn't he try to make it like a Ridley Scott movie and cast Harrison Ford? How could the guy have that vision and then make that sub-par Stallone movie? I'm so confused. I'm guessing it was studio interference or something.

I was thinking about it, and honestly, that recent Dredd movie with Karl Urban sounds a lot more like Cannon's original concept to me. It's got Anderson, it has a Dredd who is probably about as intense as if Ford had played him, and it definitely has a Blade Runner feel to some extent. Now that I think about it, it seems to me like the people who made 2012's Dredd must have been like "Hey, remember that poster Danny Cannon made for that 2000 AD contest before he made that mediocre Dredd movie? Yeah, the poster was underwhelming, but wasn't the concept cool? Let's make our movie like a modern equivalent of that."

I feel like maybe this post makes me sound like a dick. If for some reason you actually read this, Danny, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be mean. If it wasn't for you, maybe "Dredd Song" by The Cure wouldn't exist, and I like that song. Let's get FroYo sometime.

My Christopher Walken Supercut: He's not dancing.

To cash in on the Christopher Walken Supercut fad, I'm cutting together clips of him playing Russian roulette and clips of him talking to children about hiding uncomfortable hunks of metal up his ass.

Okay, I'm not really doing this.

Maybe they've always been with us.

You've probably seen Ellen's "selfie" from the Academy Awards. I don't know who made this, but I thought it was funny enough to post.

Just so everyone knows, I'm not Laurence Fishburne either. Not yet...

If Lana and Andy Wachowski ever make another movie in The Matrix series, maybe there should be a scene where a character tells Morpheus that he was great in Pulp Fiction. "We don't all look alike!"

2014: The Year Of Chris Pratt

I've been a big fan of Chris Pratt for years because of his role as Andy Dwyer in the television show Parks And Recreation. Since then, I've seen him in a few movies, such as Moneyball and Zero Dark Thirty. Sports movies and war movies typically aren't my cup of tea, and it's not like he had a large role in either movie, but he was quite good in both. I also thought he was hilarious in the trailer for Delivery Man. It looked like a good movie, and I really like seeing Vince Vaughn in a dramatic role (or should I say dramedic role because it is what some would call a dramedy?), so I ended up seeing that when it came out. Pratt had a much larger role than I've previously seen him in, and he was great, but he was still just playing a supporting role.

This year is special for me though as a fan of Pratt. He's the lead in two big movies coming out that I've been very much looking forward to seeing.



Even though I've had a LEGO obsession all of my life, I initially wasn't that interested in The LEGO Movie. The marketing of the movie has completely sold me though, and it's possibly my most anticipated movie of this year. All of the trailers and TV spots have been hilarious. I loved Pratt's character, Emmet, ever since the first teaser trailer, when after a long expository monologue by another character, he says, "I think I got it, but just in case, tell me the whole thing again. I wasn't listening." That's an awesome line, and it was such great delivery. Pratt seems perfect for this character. I am so very excited to get to see The LEGO Movie in a couple of weeks.



Pratt is also in this summer's Marvel movie Guardians Of The Galaxy. Even though I am into comic books, I know almost nothing about these characters. I've been interested in the movie ever since first seeing the beautiful concept art though. Pratt is again the lead in this movie, playing the character Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord. While most fans probably know Pratt as the slightly chubby Andy Dwyer, he has really transformed his appearance for this movie, much like he did for Zero Dark Thirty. I know I haven't seen any footage of the movie yet, but Pratt looks very believable to me as an action star, and I'm looking forward to seeing him in that kind of role. Guardians Of The Galaxy comes out on August 1st, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Next year we'll be seeing him in Jurassic World as well, but now I'd very much love to see Pratt lead a movie, in a purely dramatic role.

The Philip Seymour Hoffman

July 23, 1967 - February 2, 2014

It was very sad to hear the news today. The guy was an incredible actor.

I don't know if anyone will appreciate this silly story, but the sad news today made me think of it. Back when my best friend lived near a Domino's, we ordered food on their website a few times when I was visiting him. You could design your own custom pizzas, which we liked doing, and then you could give your order a name and save it so that you could order it again if you wanted. The first time we did that, for some reason we named our order after an actor whose performances we admired. We named it The Philip Seymour Hoffman. We later named another order The Dame Judi Dench.

Three actors from the Star Wars movies were in Tim Burton's first Batman movie.

For that reason, each of them had a pretty substantial presence throughout my childhood. You most likely know about at least one of them...



Billy Dee Williams of course played Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, and many people know that he also went on to play district attorney Harvey Dent in the 1989 Batman movie. Although the character of Dent becomes Two-Face, Williams never got a chance to play the villain. The role was recast for Batman Forever, and I always thought it was a shame that Williams didn't get to play Two-Face. I think he would have done a great job.



It's much lesser known that actor Garrick Hagon, who played Luke Skywalker's friend and fellow rebel Biggs Darklighter in A New Hope, was also in Batman. He played the father of the family who gets mugged in the beginning of the movie. It's a little bit difficult to recognize him without his Biggs moustache. He's not the only X-Wing pilot who traded in his helmet for a fedora though...



William Hootkins is probably most well known for playing overweight pilot Jek Porkins in A New Hope. Fans of Star Wars seem to mostly think of him as a joke, but to be fair, Jek's creators obviously did too. I mean, they put the word "pork" in his name. Guy never stood a chance. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I've also noticed that his character in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Major Eaton has the word "eat" in his name. If you look through his credits on IMDb, you'll also see other rather unfortunate names. Unless there's some kind of word play I fail to recognize, I think Burton was a little more kind, for Hootkin's played corrupt police lieutenant Max Eckhardt in Batman.

Rewind

I still don't have a Blu-ray player, but I just dug out and hooked up my old VCR. I guess I'm a hipster now?