Just incidentally, though DVD sales are now slowing, the thing that most terrified me about the digital revolution was when I was in a Target about four or five years ago, and overheard a woman perusing the comedy section exclaim to her husband/boyfriend, “Ohh, Wagons East! Wait… do we already have that one or not?”
Category Archives: Amusements
Now That’s a Party…
Driving back from a screening earlier this evening, Elvira — who must earn, like, 80 percent of her annual income in October — was on the syndicated show Loveline, on KROQ out here in Los Angeles, and talked a bit about her groupie past. The high point of the evening, though, was when she made passing mention of a time — date uncertain, presumably the ’80s — when she went to L.A. strip club The Body Shop with Esai Morales, Nicolas Cage and Pee-Wee Herman. I think I know how that evening ended, but if any of the concerned parties or others present at the time care to set the record straight, I’d be happy to listen…
Michael Bay Blasts Awards Ceremony
Transformers director Michael Bay, no stranger to speaking his mind, let loose on the Hollywood Film Festival’s awards ceremony upon its conclusion last night, calling it the worst awards show he’s ever attended, which of course then raised the immediate question… wait a second, how many awards shows has Michael Bay been to?
“I’ve never seen such a rude awards show,” said Bay. “Could you believe that? I’ve
never seen a show where everyone talks through the first seven awards.” If they were anything but purchased, I suppose people might care a bit more. Still, points for calling a spade a spade. I guess $700 million in worldwide box office will put a little swing in your dick…
Ben Affleck on The Daily Show
Fraternal relationships were under the microscope on The Daily Show last night, when Jon Stewart rightly questioned this statement from a bearded Ben Affleck, about his relationship with younger brother Casey: “When we were younger we kind of grab-assed around a little bit, like most people probably do with their siblings.” Errr… what?
Affleck was more than a bit off his game; unlike Matt Damon’s appearance earlier this summer, this chat had little wing-ding charm, though it was funny when Affleck mentioned how he was being asked the same junket questions about sibling fights, and had thus concluded that all journalists have horrible relationships with their brothers and sisters. Not so, Stewart insisted. “We just don’t think very hard about our interview questions. We’re not very good at what we do…”
Michael Caine Pimps Sleuth
Michael Caine was on The Late Late Show last night, and his shared across-the-pond heritage with host Craig Ferguson made for two delicious segments, in which he didn’t even mention his work on The Dark Knight, as he did here. In addition to a very funny taped bit in which Ferguson reenacted the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally…, in costume, as Caine and Sean Connery (the latter showcasing his “O face,” for what it’s worth), Caine made his pitch for a gender-inverted Alfie remake (Alfina, with his cad recast as the strict father of an out-of-control daughter). He also shared some great memories about Connery, and waxed philosophical about the nine years of theater at the beginning of his career (more on this later this week, from a chat I recently had with Caine), saying he didn’t miss it since he regarded “theater as a woman who didn’t give a damn about me and movies as a mistress who I could do anything with.”
Sylvester Stallone on Rambo IV
A few pictures from the fourth Rambo flick have been released, but Sylvester Stallone is finally getting out there and pressing a bit of long-lead flesh for the film… well, still without saying much. At the Las Vegas premiere of Resident Evil: Extinction, Stallone talked, in this short video clip, about (what is ostensibly) the final installment of the franchise, saying, “It’s a lot more realistic and hardcore than the last one,” before adding, “He’s in a grumpy mood and going to let it all out.” Probably not in a break-through therapy session, one imagines…
Sure this smacks of going to the well one time… well, several times too many, but Stallone, against long odds, pulled off a marvelous feat with Rocky Balboa; he showed that he really grasped the base appeal of the character, and went back to his roots in an interesting way. While there’s a bit less to work with in John Rambo, and the whole action pitfall trap of trying to make sure a suitable explosions quotient is met, some budgetary constraint might actually result in a halfway thought-provoking revisitation of the character. Certainly this is generally preferable to other career twilights for Stallone, be it continued straight-to-video teamings with Renny Harlin, entering politics or ending up the glad-handing celebrity judge on some reality show.
Air-Quote Superheroes Sniff Fame
The shenangians of the costumed panhandlers on Hollywood Boulevard continue to provide me no small amount of amusement, so naturally this trailer for Confessions of a Superhero, a documentary about their seemingly strange lives, whets one’s appetite for the full-length version of the film, directed by Matthew Ogens and presented by Morgan Spurlock. The self-delusion runs syrup-thick throughout, but for me, the best line may be, “I just sold my Super Nintendo, got me a Greyhound bus ticket and headed out here.”
Kevin Costner Reads Blog About Himself
It’s been brought to my attention that If I Blog It They Will Come has experienced success in their quest to get Kevin Costner to visit a blog about himself, and take pictures of said Internet visit. (And with such a happy-time grin, too!) I’d heard about this site — very earnest and reverential in their entreaties — but not the culmination of their efforts, so congrats to them. I wonder if Costner opted for the dangled promise of a free T-shirt. Now on the clock for the site’s second mission: Robin Williams, who according to writer-director Phil Alden Robinson was actually Universal’s first choice for Field of Dreams, believe it or not.
Kevin Costner, Wonderfully Zonked
I was breezing through a working Word file last night and stumbled across this pulled, set-aside tidbit below from Kevin Costner, from the press day for this summer’s Mr. Brooks. His response is to a question about whether he thinks there’s a “killer gene,” or a predisposition to
serial killing that is passed on from parent to child. What’s notable, really, and got me laughing, is that in a straight reading of the quote Costner almost sounds bat-shit crazy, but I distinctly remember it not coming off as such. To wit, though, his reply:
You hear of alcoholism being passed on in genes and stuff like that. I think we’re
the generation that’s just learning about what gets passed on. I mean, our eyes
are opening every day as to what… We go, ‘Oh my God’ …I mean, just about the
time we think a protein diet is the right one, somebody goes, ‘So wrong! So
wrong!’ I mean, every diet, everything’s got something — somebody goes, ‘Wrong!’ you know, four years later. What’s clear is people live under enormous pressure.
There’s too many of us in the city. There’s too many of us… Look, it’s weird
out there, it’s weird out there. I mean, we’re all like some number, you know?
One out of every somebody gets assaulted, and women have it worse. It’s like, ‘What
the fuck?’ I mean, we’re like a percentage of something going bad somewhere. It’s
terrible.”
On Hot Chicks with Douchebags
Sure, there’s 16 hours or so left, but for what it’s worth, I think clearly this is the site of the day.
On Airport Security on Screen
Good Luck Chuck isn’t going to win any awards, that’s for sure, especially for real-world accuracy and honesty, but one thing I did really appreciate in the movie was its airport security bit. Films have been struggling, ever since September 11, with ways to portray the new hassles and humor of air travel. In Good Luck Chuck, when Dane Cook’s Charlie is making his requisite madcap dash to the airport to win back Cam (Jessica Alba), he gets stuck in a security line, with first his shoes and then a pocket full of change setting off the metal detector. Sensing Charlie’s urgency, the wand-waving guard instructs him to take off his pants to hurry matters along. When Charlie starts to oblige, the guard quickly interrupts him: “Why would you do that, you weirdo?” On one level, it’s a silly moment, nothing more, but it’s also a smart, sly goof on the sheep mentality we’ve come to embrace at said security checkpoints.
Oh, Racial Epithet TV Replacement!
To bone up on the Resident Evil franchise in advance of the release of the third film in the series, I recently TiVoed 2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which introduces Mike Epps’ jive-talking L.J. The result? This poorly dubbed bon mot of edited-for-television hilarity, when he’s queried about his weaponry: “Motivator please — my stuff is custom!” Two words there, naturally, are substitutions…
100 Alices Fulfill Geek Wet Dream
Resident Evil: Extinction, Screen Gems’ corporate master Sony pulled a page from Eminem’s MTV Video Music Awards playbook from a few years back, decking out 100 models in the same red-slip-and-combat-boots get-up sported early in the movie by the franchise’s main character, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich. This is much better than the alternate plan, which called for 100 Oded Fehrs.
Jovovich was on hand, of course (below center, getting groped), but could hardly squeeze back into such a costume given that she’s expecting her first child, with fiancé and Resident Evil screenwriter Paul W.S. Anderson, in just under a month. The 100 Alices, meanwhile, were just happy that O.J. Simpson was out of town. Actually, probably pretty much everyone was happy that Simpson was out of town.
Steven Seagal Achieves Higher Learning
While meta-action fans anxiously await his turn as “Cock Puncher” in the Untitled Onion Movie, Steven Seagal is still wheeling and dealing, thank you very much. Per The Hollywood Reporter, his rather amazing auteurship will continue with A Higher Form of Learning, an action thriller from Insight Film Studios and Cinetel that Seagal wrote and will star in. This comes on the heels of Prince of Pistols, Seagal’s recent directorial follow-up to 1994’s On Deadly Ground — which helped Michael Caine make mortgage payments, and also featured Billy Bob Thornton. A Higher Form of Learning reportedly centers on a detective who travels the world
in pursuit of serial killers. Before long, he finds himself walking in Memphis, hunting two
murderers while also chasing his own demons. As of press time, there was no word on whether said demons were masters of sartorial weight control…
Sean Penn Digs MC Hammer
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder provides the bulk of the rumbling, original song soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, though alt-rock Americana tunes of yore are also carefully folded into the margins. The most bizarre soundtrack inclusion, though? MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Seriously…
Ryan Seacrest is Douche-tastic!
Random fact: a Google photo search for Ryan Seacrest yields 76,400 responses, while a same-minded search for the phrase “Ryan Seacrest is a douche” produces 8,460 results.
I realize there’s not perfect overlap, but that’s 11 percent of the original total, which seems hilariously high… and yet also not quite high enough.
Oh, Orenthal… (Again)
So O.J. Simpson is being held without bail in Las Vegas on charges related to an alleged armed robbery of sports memorabilia.
Las
Vegas police arrested Simpson in his hotel room, saying he was part of
an armed group that burst into a room at another hotel Thursday night
to steal thousands of dollars worth of collectibles. Oh, Orenthal… <insert deep sigh here> I hate to play the prophet card, but here we go…
Alien vs. Predator vs. English
In 2004, franchise mash-up Alien vs. Predator grossed over $170 million worldwide (seriously), but rankled longtime fans of each series with its PG-13 rating. Now, in an attempt to keep the merged franchise alive, 20th Century Fox is turning to a cast headlined by people with the last names Pasquale, Aylesworth, Paetkau and Horsdal for this holiday season’s follow-up, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. (I’m not sure about the size of parts, but the most notable casting addition may actually be Shareeka Epps, the young girl from Half Nelson.)
Stepping behind the camera for departed and disowned AvP director Paul W.S. Anderson are Colin and Greg Strause, brothers with visual effects backgrounds who grew up in Illinois, where apparently English was not spoken as their first language. After confirming to Dark Horizons that the movie will be rated R (insert fan-boy cheers here), older brother Greg says of the prospects for a sequel: “I’d like to do another one but I’d like to do it in
space. The next one either has to be more of the bridge after this and
before Alien, or you could do something after Aliens. We have a
pretty finite ending to this, but we have a cliffhanger per se; it’s a
setup.” Good to know…
Dick, Emmy Share Box
The raunchy R&B parody “Dick in a Box,” from Saturday Night Live, has scored an Emmy victory at the recently held Creative Arts Emmy Awards, besting a couple songs from a musical episode of Scrubs, among other competition.
Last December’s fake music video about ornately wrapping up a part of the male anatomy and presenting it to a loved one as a holiday present, certainly aided in the meteoric rise of SNL cast member Andy Samberg, but an astute friend of mine pointed out — and I believe he’s right — that the piece could ultimately end up most helping out crooner/episode host Justin Timberlake, because it gives him a credibility with guys that he couldn’t buy, no matter the number of Alpha Dogs that he does. What’s most brilliant about “Dick in a Box,” of course, is the kernel of devastating truth at its core: guys really do wish that, 1) we could put that little effort into gift shopping, and 2) that women would be that enamored with our junk.
Wanted: Vinessa Shaw, Nude
Well, this has delicious potential: Deadline Hollywood
Daily’s Nikki Finke is reporting that… well, that would be too much
of a gloss, really. Straight to the point, she’s obtained an email from Hollywood-Elsewhere blogger/columnist Jeffrey Wells to 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, in which Wells
shares his thoughts on the movie and then solicits the filmmaker for nude and/or scantily-clad photos of Vinessa
Shaw, who shares a Yuma love scene with Russell Crowe. He even kind of pleads for said pictures, actually.
Tone and intent are the great mysteries of many Internet correspondences, having the ability to send everyone scuttling back to high school days of yore, when across-classroom glances and askance looks were dissected with a combination of fervor and fretfulness. So here the intent (at least from one side of things) is pretty clear, but without comment (yet) from Mangold and further context, the nature in which this was received is a bit hazy. Still, there’s the matter of professionalism (a perhaps silly notion when it comes to self-published entertainment journalists, I know), and while a quid pro quo is never explicitly proffered (nor, in my mind, really hinted at), at the very least this email seems exceptionally stupid and probably a little bit unethical to boot, because you’re asking a director to violate his trust with an actor and/or enlist others (per the email: “as one good hombre to another … you don’t have to be the guy who
passes along the stills — just tell the still photographer or the editor
or whomever caught her as she posed”) in a conspiracy to do the same.
Wells’ balls-on-table email response from the Toronto Film Festival, in which he sarcastically calls Finke’s post a brilliant, Earth-shaking exposé, leads with, “It
was seriously scummy of you to have run an off-the-cuff,
one-guy-to-another letter about wanting to get a jump on photos of a
hot actress that may or may not turn up on Mr. Skin a few weeks or months down the road,” and is reproduced in full under Finke’s original post.
On Ad Quote Hyperbole
I’m calling out Horror.com’s Staci Layne Wilson, who gets blurbed in ads in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times by saying, with regards to Rob Zombie’s Halloween, that it’s “even better than the original.” (By point of comparison, usual lover-of-all-moving-images Earl Dittman chips in with the
comparatively mild, “A shocking masterpiece, with twists and turns
around every corner!” Umm… by definition, isn’t that what corners
offer?)
I was suitably intrigued by Wilson’s bold (and patently false) proclamation, so I went to check out her review; it’s not as bad as one might surmise from the blurbed bit, though the gist of Wilson’s praise seems to be that Zombie is a “potential genius” (her words) for the manner in which he makes his Halloween both similar to and different from John Carpenter’s original film. Brilliant, that! Also, I have no idea what she means when she starts talking about soul-mirrors.
All this will pass, naturally, but Wilson’s comments will in my mind cling to her, kind of like the time Fred Topel got blurbed by calling Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows the “best sequel ever.”
Did Eddie Murphy Bang All the Spice Girls?
Hey, so I was just thinking, I guess because I heard that the erstwhile Scary Space is going to be on the next installment of Dancing with the Stars, does her love child with Eddie Murphy mean that he had sex with all the Spice Girls? Because, ya know… I heard that if you wanna be her lover, you gotta get with her friends.
Teabagger Vance, Anyone?
Hey, I just thought of something: if there’s any imagination left in the adult industry at all, there really should be a porn flick called The Legend of Teabagger Vance, right? I mean, I know it’s a dated reference by today’s standards, but still, if ever a legit title were perfectly suited to filthy send-up…
UPDATE, 9/1: Ahh, this sucks. I queried a friend in a position to know and he responded thusly: “This is strange, because I literally just this morning read a thing online that listed that as one of the WORST porn titles in history, but now I can’t find proof anywhere that it actually exists.” For now, the mystery continues…
Sean Connery Is the Man Now
It’s a happy birthday to Sean Connery, who turns 77 today, and in my mind celebrates by wandering around and declaring himself the man now, dogg.
Hey, do you know that Connery wears his socks inside out? He once explained it to me thusly: “Well, there are those threads on the inside that always bother your feet and get tangled on your toes. So this is more comfortable. Really, who cares what it looks like.” Seriously, true story…
Joke of the Day
What… like, really? This is actually this law firm’s web site address?