sillstaw

I'm guessing that ShamWows and Slap Chops sell like hotcakes, and he gets a decent cut.

I liked it. It's kind of pulpy, so if that's your thing, go for it.

I have no idea why it is that, whenever teachers make kids watch movies in class, they always choose the worst ones. I remember being in a history class where we watched "Newsies" (this was a high school class, I should mention) and "Far and Away." I know there are restrictions on what classes can watch, but come on.

No way. "Black Snake Moan" is a lot better than "Snakes on a Plane." Although it would've been pretty funny if it had been called "Snakes on a Chain."

My favorite story from that was how the movie originated as a pitch for a "Mad Max" ripoff for Roger Corman's production company. Corman (best known for making movies like "Attack of the Crab Monsters" on small budgets and short timeframes) rejected it, saying, "Are you crazy? This would cost us $5 million!"

I think the problem with the movie trying to be in on the joke is that, by the time everybody involved decided to do so, the movie was near completion. They couldn't go back and make the whole movie a big in-joke (which might have worked better, or about as well, who knows), so they could only change a few things here and there. They could add in a topless woman, they could add in a guy screaming, "Fucking snake! Get off my dick!" and they could add in Samuel L. Jackson saying that he was tired of something (I only vaguely recall this line), but they couldn't change enough of the movie to make them feel like anything other than last-minute additions.

It must have been so confusing when you got "Freaks" from Netflix and you were wondering why there were rich dwarfs and limbless guys going around instead of Mr. T as the bearded lady.

Fun fact: Sherman Hemsley invested about $3 million of his own money in this movie. Its disastrous reception is part of why he eventually had to declare bankruptcy. Also, he sings the theme song under the credits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7gp8HAc190

The poster/DVD cover/whatever for this is amazing. Movies need more guys in machine-gunning wheelchairs with Tommy guns. Also, I'm quite surprised this isn't an Asylum production.

Whoever wrote that just told the Internet more than he probably should have.

What kind of astonishes me is that the director of the movie, Mathieu Kassovitz, made a really good movie called "La Haine," and then made a French blockbuster called "The Crimson Rivers." You'd think that, after making at least two good movies in France, it'd be easy to make a good movie in America. Then he makes "Gothika," and five years later comes out with "Babylon A.D.," a movie so bad that its initials actually spell out "B.A.D." (In fairness, he claims Fox interfered with the movie so much he was never allowed to shoot scenes the way he wanted to.) Since then, he appears to have stuck to French films.

Mutually assured destruction.

I probably should have said that it was surprising to anybody who thought the troubled production meant people would stay away. It's hard to remember sometimes that most people who go to the movies don't really care about what happened behind the scenes short of somebody getting killed.

It's not even 3 o'clock on the West Coast and already Variety has called it the latest Hollywood bomb. Astonishingly, Ryan sz's predictions from earlier in this thread have been 4 for 6 so far. I'm surprised that "The Great Gatsby" appears to have done okay for itself; I'd heard pretty much nothing about its box-office business, but Wikipedia says it's made $142 mil domestically and over $300 mil worldwide. As for "World War Z," I don't think anyone saw that one coming. We'll need to see how "The Wolverine" does next weekend, but otherwise Ryan seems to have gotten a decent return on his predictions. ETA: The only prediction he's made that doesn't count is the "300" sequel, which has been delayed until March. This is the first I'd even heard about that; apparently, Warner Brothers' marketing strategy for the movie is to release it as quietly as possible.

To quote Michael J. Nelson's "Movie Megacheese:"

I think it would likely work better on FX, where they could have somewhat more extreme content. It's just not Alan Moore without sex and drug use, and you can't do that on network television. (I'd also add extreme violence, but given that Fox is where the pornographically gruesome "The Following" airs, that seems like less of a problem.) Honestly, I'm mostly just eager for the show because it means Alan Moore will get snippy about American TV.

From the director of "Mac and Me!" Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dY-kACvfgc

And then, to really throw people off, it came out half a year before "Air Force One" and three years before "Reindeer Games." (I assumed you were speaking figuratively, but still.)

I'm kind of amazed that my initial post ended up predicting the wrong kind of crazy this movie would be. Also, the AV Club pointed out that this movie has a lot of similarities to Depp's earlier Western "Dead Man." It blows my mind to think that a Jim Jarmusch film could be recycled into a $200 million-plus summer tentpole movie. Minus, of course, the black-and-white photography, William Blake allusions and, oh yeah, an actual Native American playing the lead Indian. The impression I got from that story about her phone conversation/interrogation with a Native cast member was that of, "I'm getting paid to do this, so why should some blogger decide to talk about how problematic it is?" I almost got the vibe of a black person defending a minstrel show that he performs in.

One of my favorite bits from Michael J. Nelson's review in "Movie Megacheese":

This is nothing new, even for superhero movies. (Notice how the climax of "The Avengers" starts just outside a Farmers Insurance office.) These movies are expensive as hell ($225 million for this one alone, probably before advertising and such), and the studios want some money to be provided by somebody just in case the movie flops and they lose a ton of cash. It's one thing to do a comic book issue or graphic novel that's about something considered minor about a character (or a side-story/imaginary story/whatever); drawing things on paper is fairly cheap. But when you're investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a movie, you kind of have to get to the stuff the mass audiences apparently want, which in a movie like this translates as "big action scenes." Krypton probably would not provide much in the way of fun, physics-defying fights, which is what the audience apparently wants from a Superman movie. (Also, because it would mean that Superman—the character most everybody knows from this franchise—is stuck as a non-powerful baby for most if not all of the movie.)

He didn't leave the States; he took the movies out of circulation. He wanted to outlive Jodorowsky and then re-release the movies to keep more of the profits; if the director outlived him, he'd get the rights back. Some agreement must have been reached, because the movies were eventually released on DVD before Klein's death. (Jodorowsky is still alive, and recently had a movie premiere at Cannes.)

Only semi-related, but what the heck: I was on another movie board where a gay guy was vocally against "300" and Zack Snyder. Snyder had made a remark in an interview about the villain's flamboyancy along the lines of, "What's scarier to 20-year old guys than a huge guy who wants to have his way with you?" He said that he talked about this to a gay friend of his, who only had two words in response: "Banana hammock."

Seeing as how the winner of the Cannes Film Festival this year is a three-hour lesbian romance in two parts with explicit sex scenes, I'm going to say that yes, it is. And it sounds awesome. The answer, surprisingly, is John Lennon. He saw the director's previous insane movie, "El Topo"*, and got record executive Allen Klein to not only release that movie, but to finance "The Holy Mountain." (Allen Klein is also responsible for both movies all but disappearing from America for decades, because he wanted to outlive Jodorowsky and make more money off the movies. Needless to say, Klein was kind of an awful person.) * Which I wanted to like, but couldn't get over the impression that there was a surprising amount of homophobia to it.

I love that the movie starts off with a drug deal going wrong, and it leads you to expect that it'll be about a rock-'n'-roll band that fights against drugs using their martial arts skills... but the band never really learns that everybody they're fighting is involved in the drug trade. They just fight people off because they're being attacked, so the drug thing is completely extraneous. (Although it did give us the delightful phrase "stupid cocaine," so there's that.) Incidentally, Y.K. Kim recently tweeted that he's beginning work on a new movie. I honestly hope he doesn't pull a "Birdemic 2" and try to play it like a joke that he's in on. (Actually, it would be amazing if he ended up making a movie that had nothing to do with martial arts, like doing a romantic comedy or something.)