The Devil Hates Dancing

If you thought Save the Last Dance, Step Up 2: The Streets or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo were far too pagan for your tastes, the good Christian people at Uplifting Entertainment have provided you with a God-friendly alternative.

C Me Dance is a story about a teenager who loves ballet, but has a terminal illness and is being stalked by the devil, presumably because she's a great dancer and the Devil doesn't like that. She's a Job in tights and a tutu. I guess the Devil never got over what Johnny did to him when he went down to Georgia.



If Christians feel that they need their own entertainment, that's their business. But if anything is defying God and making the Devil angry it's the acting in this "movie". Are teenagers do dumb these days that they'll only know a movie is specifically for them if you abbreviate words in the title? It's like the production office texted the title idea to the writers who just left it verbatim. I'm surprised it didn't turn out, C Me Dnce.

PS: I don't think I could've come up with a more perfect picture if I tried.

Remakes redux

A friend has asked why Hollywood is making a new version of Child's Play. I have no idea. No one knows. The easy answer, the answer that is partially true, is that the production company wants to make money. Kids these days, and young adults too, are very put off by things that are older than say, 2000. Think about it, a kid born in 2000 is almost 10 years old. They don't want to see the "old" movies that we used to watch way back in 1995, or 1990, or 1982...potentially the best year for movies of all time.

So, to make money, studios want to remake things with newer flair and relevancy. Cinephiles, and all lovers of movies, know that a movie is good no matter if it's in black and white, color, sepia, silent or audible. Horror movies are ripe for remakes because there is an automatic audience and the movies are pretty cheap to make. A horror movie-goer will not go see a horror movie based on who is in it, but on what creature/monster is slaughtering people. The monsters all work for scale because they're not real. That's one reason why there aren't many famous people in horror movies: It makes them too expensive. Sure there are exceptions, but there are always exceptions.

A remake is usually made of a movie that did well in the theaters or has sold well in the stores. Child's Play, for instance, is a fairly well-thought of movie series with an easily-recognizable star: Chucky. It would take less time and effort for a studio to make a horror movie where the villain has already been thought up than to hire someone to create a new bad guy. Plus, there is fan fiction all over the place. People have tons of ideas for storylines for characters that already exist. You should check out the Harry Potter fan fic with Snape and Hermione.

So a remake is cheaper, can be made faster and makes them more money because the studio is getting a whole other generation of movie-goers to see something they already created and own the rights too.

But that doesn't make it alright. Most remakes are so terrible and come from stupid board meetings where agents are only thinking of how much money the original has made that they forget that you can't replicate certain experiences.

For fuck's sake, they want to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Why would you remake a movie that has been playing in movie theaters all over the world since the first night it opened? A remake of Total Recall is coming out. Not going to make any money. Part of what makes Total Recall so great is Arnold being 1990's Arnold. You can't replicate that. What are they going to do, put a woman with 4 breasts in it to make it better? Plan 9 From Outer Space: Are things so bad that now you're going to remake a movie that only has value as the worst movie of all time? Just remember, there are a few good remakes out there, but mostly awful ones. Try to view them remakes on their own terms, unless it's impossible. It will be impossible to view the Rocky Horror remake on its own terms, so it'll just suck and I won't go see it.

Here are a few good remakes:

Ocean's 11
Teaxas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Assault on Precinct 13
A Fistful of Dollars (remake of Yojimbo)
The Thing (remake of The Thing From Another World)
The Italian Job
Dawn of the Dead
King Kong

Here are some of the most terrible excuses for remakes in the world:

Psycho (1998)
You've Got Mail (remake of The Shop Around the Corner)
The Vanishing (remade and given a happy ending for some reason)
The Ladykillers
Quarantine (remake of [REC], not even a year old when remade)
Get Carter
The Wicker Man
Godzilla
The Amityville Horror (remade to look like a J-Horror flick)

Kindle 2

Anyone out there ever heard of Amazon's Kindle 2? It is a tablet that displays and can read aloud books that you download from Amazon.com's Kindle library. The device costs $360, but the books you download cost about $10 a piece. There is a library of almost 250,000 books right now, and the Kindle 2 has 3G wireless connectivity so you can download books on the go without a PC.

I also said that the Kindle 2 has the ability to read aloud your new books to you.

Except that it might not have that ability, even though Amazon.com already advertises it as so. The only exception is that Amazon.com has said that if the book's author has not agreed to let their book be fed through the translator, that particular book will not be able to be read aloud.

See the Author's Guild of America thinks that if your Kindle 2 can read your book aloud to you then that's a violation of copyright.

But that's a recent adjustment, and the Kindle 2 had previously shipped with no caveat. Please read this article before buying a Kindle! It makes very good points about why the machine is a waste of your money at this point.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/cory-doctorow-kindle

Remakes

A loyal reader has brought up a tidbit that I wasn't planning on addressing, but now may as well write about. This bit of news is the scheduled remake of Stephen King's It. I get a lot of horror new on a daily basis, so it's hard for me to remember that everydaay, average non-horror watching folks don't know what movies are up on the remake chopping block. Before I take a specific look at It, here are some movies getting remade soon:

Funhouse
Plan 9 From outer Space (considered by many ot be the worst movie of all time)
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Monster Squad

Scanners
Escape from New York
Martyrs
The Orphanage
Let the Right One In
The House on Sorority Row
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (again)
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Hellraiser
Faces of Death
Evil Dead

Child's Play
The Birds
Children of the Corn
The Wolfman
Re-Animator
Predator
The Thing
Rocky Horror Picture Show

And that's a partial list!  But getting back to It, I'm against the remake because the original mini-series was given the best possible chance to be successful.  There's no way that a theatrical version of It could do well.  The book is 1000 pages long, and the TV version from 1988 had a running time of 198 minutes.  I sat in the movie theater for 191 minutes, but that was a whole different animal.  No one that I know of is going to sit in the movie theater for 3 hours+ for a horror movie.  Why not?  you ask.  I'll tell you.

If the movie is good (unlikely), the production company won't be able to make enough money by having a movie that long.  In order for a movie to make money everyone has to go see it, not just horror fans.  Combine that with the fact that for a 3 hour film there are fewer showings in a day and you're already making less money than on average IF THE MOVIE IS GOOD. If the movie is bad (very likely), then no one's going to watch it anyway, even horror fans.  We'll just wait for DVD. 

Current word is that Tim Curry is being courted to play Pennywise again, but no official news yet on that front.  Here's the major gripe of mine:  The televised mini-series sucked.  I liked the actors, but the production sucked...big time sucked.  It wasn't scary by any standards and didn't do the amazing book any justice at all.  The book is terrifying and great.  It put Stephen King on a pedestal next to Ray Bradbury for me.  They are the two best authors when it comes to writing convincing child characters.

The new movie will blow.  The mini-series had all the time in the world to work with the story and it blew.  The movie will be shorter and therefore even more snipped and cramped and therefore worse in quality.  That's just how I feel.

Subtitle change

I told you I'd let you know when Magnolia commented on their subtitle changes for Let the Right One In. They have commented.

“We've been made aware that there are several fans that don't like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version.”

Fantastic, unless you already bought it. But, sometimes waiting for a little bit works out in your favor.

Fun/Serious Stuff

Sometimes, when I see something that I want to rally behind a little bit, I get pseudo-political on this blog and try to get you guys aware of some stuff you might not know about. Boingboing.net, a favorite site of mine for lots of reasons, has been following closely the movements of the British government as it takes steps to "protect" its citizens from terrorists. The British government is doing everything from creating networks of CCTV cameras in large cities to arresting people for taking pictures of buildings or manhole covers.

The other day a couple of posters came out prodding citizens to report any suspicious activity in their neighborhoods to the police. Does this sound like a government-run neighborhood watch? Yes. Might that be a nice idea? Sure. But really, what's going to happen, as it always does, is that certain people will start reporting all sorts of crazy things, and nosing around in other people's business looking for "clues". Also, the tighter the laws get, the more restless people get. I can't believe we haven't figured this out right now. If the terrorists win by making people change their lifestyles, then terrorism has won out in London. Muse on this old adage if you will: Locks only keep honest people out. I've put that in this blog before, but it's true for so many different forms of control and censorship. I don't care if I overuse it, it's an awesome statement.

Anyhow, Cory Doctorow over at boingboing.net called for people to submit Photoshopped ads poking fun at the anti-terrorism posters up in London the other day. So I submitted one. It's the fourth poster down. The one with the muppet.

You can see the posting here.

As serious as the over-tightening of British laws is, I'm still really excited to have something I did postedon a website I visit every day. It's so cool!

The original posters can be found here.

WTF?!

A movie that a lot of horror fans, and increasingly a lot of movie fans, have been routing for, and positively responding to, is Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire film from 2008. If you live in Ithaca, NY, as I do, you could have seen it at Cinemapolis [- The Movie State]. The DVD came out last week with a major flaw. I wanted to buy it, but wanted to hold off for a bit...and I'm sure glad I did.

According to this article at Icons of Fright, the subtitles are all wrong. When I say "wrong", I mean abridged, elided, shortened and mangled. A lot of the tone and humor of the original script are lost in this mishap. No one from Magnolia DVD has made a statement, but when they do, I'll post a follow-up.

I know that not many out there will care, but it brings up a valid point: Who can you trust to correctly relay the spoken-language information from the screen to the audience? I don't speak fluently in any language other than English, so I have to rely on the translator to give me the most accurate subtitles they can. Just by listening to the people on screen talking as I read along I know that it's not always word-for-word, but there has to be an effort made.

Time to show off a bit

Today Yahoo! Movies posted an article featuring the 100 Movies to See Before You Die.

I would post the complete list, but that would take up a ton of room, and you can just click the link above and see for yourself. Instead I'll give you guys a chance to give me a hard time, and post the movies I haven't seen. This way you can tell me, via the comments section, why I'm such a loser or why I'm so negligent.

A Hard Days Night (1964)
The African Queen (1952)
All About Eve (1950)
The Battle of Algiers (1967)
Grand Illusion (1938)
In the Mood for Love (2001)
It Happened One Night (1934)
The Lady Eve (1941)
Network (1976)
Paths of Glory (1958)
Princess Mononoke (1999)
Rear Window (1954)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Vertigo (1958)
Wings of Desire (1988)
The World of Apu (1959)

So that brings my total of seen movies to 83...not bad. And some of these I've seen parts of, just not the whole thing beginning-to-end.

My favorite thing of the week

Good things come in small packages

A potentially interesting movie is coming out on March 27th. The film in question is The Sinful Dwarf. I have no idea if this movie is supposed to be any good or not, but it sure looks like it could be a hell of a lot of fun. A user on imdb.com gave The Sinful Dwarf a 6 out of 10 and said it was a good time.

The film is from Denmark with the completely non-famous Torbin Bille playing "Olaf, the dwarf". I like that the official credits make sure you know that he's the dwarf. We need that kind of clarity in films these days. According to Bille's imdb.com bibliography, he passed away in 1993. That's too bad because the title alone warrants a remake. Here's a proposal for an unmakeable movie: The Sinful Dwarf 2, starring Torbin Bille and Herve Villechaize as warring brothers trying to duke it out in the cutthroat world of 3 ft. tall gigolos. (Did I mention that the plot of The Sinful Dwarf revolves around the titular sinful dwarf kidnapping teenage girls and keeping them in his attic? "Gigolos" just seem like the perfect theme for a sequel.)

Here's the trailer. This week's catchphrase for me might have to be "dwarfsploitation". The tagline, as you can see from the poster above, is: The mother of all dwarfsploitation films. Can you be the best of something for which there is no competition? (I also want to mention that at no time did the word "dwarfsploitation" get noticed by the computer as being misspelled.)

You'll all find some words on this movie in this spot in early April.

When cool things happen to people who feel sometimes like they exist in a universe of their own belonging

Don't be thrown by my attempt at humor in the title of this post. I am not "going Emo" or anything like that. I'll keep my body tattoo-free and black-hair-dye-free. It's just that when you like things that other people can't stomach, sometimes that part of you who enjoys horror movies feels just a little lonely...

And then you submit the contents of your blog to a horror website that you visit daily because said site is looking for new writers and they write you back and tell you that they like your stuff and that your piece on Last House on the Left was "great"! Even if I never hear from them again, I'm in an elated state from that compliment.

So I guess this means I need to actually watch the last hour of Frontier(s) and get that review up, and then try to find time between my two jobs to watch more horror...the girlfriend is going to be ecstatic. Oh, this means more horror video games too. And more horror books. I think maybe my next read (after The Stand which is currently on the nightstand) will be Deathtroopers! Or maybe something sooner, since that one comes out in October...

If you are interested in where I'm applying to write, go to horror-movies.ca.

Whither thou knowest

I saw Knowing on Sunday afternoon. It's the kind of movie where you find yourself wondering how you got to be watching a movie like this in the first place. The ending, without giving anything away, is crazy and surreal and not needed, but right. Also, the movie kind of blows, also it's kind of awesome. Confused? There's no knowing how you'll feel about it until you go see it. It's definitely not time wasted.

Nicholas Cage is getting eerily competent at playing characters who are trying to act normal but aren't coming off as normal. To illustrate my point, let me give you some trivia from The Shining: Jack Nicholson wasn't the top choice for the role of Jack Torrence. Many people involved with the film wanted Jon Voight to play Torrence. The issue with Nicholson was that he seemed so crazy all the time anyway, that most movie-goers wouldn't understand or comprehend his characters' gradual slipping into insanity. A valid point if you ask me, although I love The Shining, and Nicholson is great in it. (Moral: Stanley Kubrick knows what he's doing, don't fuck with his vision.)

See, that picture above is just plain-old-normal-everyday Jack Nicholson. And so it is these days with Nicholas Cage. He starts out being a normal single father and is supposed to end up crazed and frantic...except he seems about to snap the entire way through the movie so there's no transition. Cage discovers this secret code in a page full of "random" numbers, and he does it so quickly that it's like he's been waiting for this opportunity for his whole life. (Plus he does it while drunk, so that scene belies the theme of the film and supports the argument posed by one supporting character against numerology: You see what you want to see.)

Aside from that, when Cage gets to the parts where he is supposed to be teetering on the edge of reason, he is great. It goes without saying that Nicholson's best scene in The Shining is a tie between his reveal to Wendy that he is crazy (all work and no play makes jack a dull boy) and his axing of the bathroom door. Likewise with Cage, his best scenes are towards the end when his natural weirdness parallels his characters', and he becomes a method actor. (PS: this picture below is something Cage does a lot of in Knowing.)

It's hard to critique a movie [that is about how everything is tied in to everything else showing a thread of congruity throughout our seemingly random lives] without ruining some of the surprises, so I won't. I'll tell you that the film is scary, tense, action-packed, weird, scary again, sad and of course, eclectic. But I want to reiterate that it's not a bad movie, and I enjoyed it basically, and it's not a waste of your time. The plane crash alone brings this movie from a C+ to a B-. The subway car crash is even more amazing. It's not bloody, but my GF had to turn her head all the same. You just have to see it to believe it.

The end is...odd. Like I said before, you'll sit in the theater and wonder how in the hell the movie you started with ended up with you watching this. That's the only way to describe it. My final thought on this movie is that it's better than 80% of the other movies out right now. You won't feel gypped at the very least. Here's the trailer.

Those People

I really admire people who are on one track. Sports nuts, insane hobbyists, single-track folk who just want to be immersed in their one thing all the time. I cannot do that. The desire to absorb different kinds of media and attempt to be physically active is a job in an of itself. There just aren't enough hours in a day to watch a complete season of some show I missed out on, catch up on a couple of horror films, watch at least one brand new movie I've never heard of before, read a book, play some video games, go to the gym, beat this dead-horse of a blog and earn a living each day. How nice it would be to just not care about anything but one thing.

I sit down and think about what's important and what I really want to do and what can be discarded, and I come up with a big chunk of something that isn't important to me: TV. I do not care about TV anymore. I have no energy for it. I'm one of those people who said out loud to everyone who would listen when I was in single digits, "I will never get tired of TV. I love commercials."

I hate fucking commercials. I hate TV. Every time there's supposed to be a swear word or a bare breast or a sucking chest wound there's just a void unable to be filled. You watch a horror movie on TV, the axe is coming down towards the actor's stomach and then, it just cuts to the rest of the cast running away from whatever monster is doing the axing. It's like missing a shift in your car and you get that lag that prevents your body from accelerating along with the automobile at the rate physics wants it to and you feel strange and stunted. TV edits are the uncanny valley of hard-R horror films. It's still the movie you know,but there's something about it that just doesn't feel genuine or authentic.

So I don't watch much TV. I do watch it, because you can't really live in a household in this country and not get some exposure, but mostly I stay away. I enjoy the TV that I happen upon, but I am not drawn to it. So I push the need for TV away from myself and I'm fine with that.

Then I have to read posts like this fucking bullshit from Patton Oswalt's Myspace.com blog telling me all the amazing stuff that is on TV and how I really am not giving TV a chance. Patton Oswalt is probably the funniest and most well-read and well-watched person I have the pleasure to know about these days, but he's a total cocksucker for stuff like this.

Patton Oswalt can write a blog post about KFC, 10 of the best movies the world has ever created and the best television shows around today all while quoting and referencing classic works of literature, canon Sci-Fi book series' and noir from the 1950's. He's a well-rounded guy who writes really well. He is to be admired, respected and emulated. Fucking Patton-goddamned-Oswalt.

Lake Ends in Road

I saw the Last House on the Left remake over the weekend, and I was pretty impressed. Remakes are coming hard and fast and in worse and worse condition, but I thought this was just a solid movie. Sure, it was a little more "shiny" than the original (due to the use of nice/working cameras and equipment), but the content was just as earthy and gritty.

Garrett Dillahunt is amazing as Krug, the main baddie of the film. He was great in Deadwood, (both times) and I liked what he added to the casts of The Believer and No Country for Old Men). I hope he gets more high profile work in the future. Sara Paxton, who some of you might know as Marnie from Return to Halloweentown, did a good job in her role as the raped and beaten child of the couple whose titular house is used as the main set piece of the film. Her adjustment from Disney TV star to grown up dramatic actress surprised me. I didn't expect her to illustrate such range. (I can hardly be blamed for having low expectations from her. Two of her last movies were Aquamarine and Superhero Movie!)

Some things about the movie were a bit unnecessary, but that's no different from the original. The basic plot is that two young girls are out on the town and run into a group of criminals. They are raped and beaten and one is left for dead, the other is killed. Coincidentally, the criminals seek shelter for the night at the house of the nearly dead girl's parents. The parents discover who the killers are and vice versa. Ultra-violence ensues. **SPOILERS** I liked the decision to remove the blowjob castration scene...but replacing it with the head exploding in the microwave at the end seemed a bit overdone. That scene comes at the very end, almost as bonus, and just didn't fit. I'm sure someone thought it would make for fine closure, but it wasn't necessary.

Last House on the Left was originally made in 1972 by Wes Craven. It was his first film and he has maintained that the movie reflects social feeling and reactions against the atrocities of the Vietnam War from that time period. Since Craven's film is such a cult classic among horror enthusiasts, the new version has been under fire for lacking that Vietnam context. You could always argue that this version could reflect feelings about the war in Iraq, but since it's not an original vision, that wouldn't really make any sense.

However, slighting this new version for not having Vietnam context is ridiculous. There aren't any characters in the original that were in Vietnam or who talk about the war at all. The only reason anyone knows that the extreme violence is a blow back from social unrest is from interviews and articles with Craven and (producer) Sean Cunningham. Taken on its own merits, the 2009 remake is a good film with a well-shot graphic and brutal rape scene, the crux of the original production as well, and great, evil characters to root for and despise respectively.

Apart from the lack of obvious Vietnam context, which is an argument used to create a deeper sense of worth in something that is really just a horror movie, albeit a good one (and has been used before for such movies as Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Last House on the Left (1972) is based on a film by Ingmar Bergman from 1960 called The Virgin Spring. The plot is the same, except it's just one girl instead of two and at the end of the film the father repents and promises to build a church on the spot where his child was murdered, even though in the same breath he questions why God would allow such a series of events to take place at all.

The Virgin Spring is itself based on a 13th century Swedish ballad from whence it derives its plot. Since the actual original source material is from 13th century Sweden, it doesn't make much sense to discard the 2009 effort because it has no Vietnam context. It doesn't need any context. The Shining doesn't have any world-view context and it's fantastic. Alien doesn't have current affairs context but it's great too. The same goes for Audition and Jaws. These movies are just good. And instead of bitching that the movie doesn't have any possible way of relating back to the world events that caused its predecessor to be made, why not focus on the fact that it's the best horror film of this year, remake or not.

Criterion

As the proud few who read this blog know, I am kind of into movies. I say that in the most understated way imaginable. The reality of the situation is that while I find it easy to refrain from using crack and heroin, if there was a way to place Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Seventh Seal, Akira, Blazing Saddles, Ichi the Killer, Yojimbo, and The Sword of Doom onto a heated spoon I would be a five-syringe-a-day junkie. I'd be broke and my 29-year old face would look like the hallowed out wax visage of a melting Norwegian troll candle.

DVDs are almost as prolific and scattered in their releases as VHS tapes were in their 80's heyday. We're getting shows that aren't even off the air yet, as well as classic movies and TV programs from years gone by. And yet, as much as the studios try, I am still dissappointed to find that such shows as Thriller and Parker Lewis Can't Lose are still not available on DVD. (Although I did find out recently that Parker Lewis will be out sometime this summer.)

The buoy on the sea of movie history is The Criterion Collection. If you have ever watched a DVD commentary, or know what one is, then you are familiar with the major contribution that Criterion has made outside the bounds of their own catalogue. Criterion invented the DVD commentary. Criterion created the idea of "special features", and to this day, Criterion makes the best commentaries and includes the best special features of any DVD company around. (There are standouts in other companies, for example, the Fight Club DVD commentary has David Fincher, Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.) But the best comenatary I've ever heard is from the Criterion edition of The Rock: Michael Bay, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, actors Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris, and technical [Navy Seal] advisor Harry Humphries. It is an amazing way to watch a movie.

The Criterion Collection puts out classic movies and conemporary films - anything they feel is important and needs preservation. Why is there no Criterion Citizen Kane? Because Citizen Kane doesn't need saving and there's nothing left for Criterion producers to find that hasn't already been found about the film. Sanjuro needs to be preserved. Branded to Kill needs a documentary. No one in the world will go the lengths to make a great release of Le Samaurai or Jigoku. Criterion to the rescue!

If you think you're a film critic, fan, buff or casual viewer, check out the Criterion collection. Then go create a Netflix account and immediately fill it with The Milky Way, Wild Strawberries, Tales of Hoffmann, The Blob and The Ruling Class.

Graduating: addendum

I just read the David Foster Wallace commencement address that Patton Oswalt felt he had to live up to.

Here it is.

It's great.

Graduating

There are all sorts of different experiences that 18-year olds have when they graduate high school. Some of them fuck their girlfriends as a pledge to stay true while they're off at separate colleges. Some get cars or SUVs. Still others might get taken to dinner or receive really nice pens. Some might get good advice.

I got a speeding ticket, a copy of Oh, The Places You'll Go! and a label maker - the better to identify my things while away at college.

Apparently some people received a version of this commencement address from alumnus Patton Oswalt: from Patton's blog, May 25, 2008. I feel like my life would be 1000% different today if I had heard these words at my graduation.

Watching Watchmen

You find small moments of genius in the strangest places. In Men in Black, a good movie but not a work of genius, we get the genius line, courtesy of Tommy Lee Jones, "A person is smart, but people are stupid." No sentiment sums up the adaptation of Watchmen better than that.

Take it how you will: either that the adaptation sucked and was made by stupid people or that the adaptation was formed because of the nature of the audience dynamic of the movie-going experience. I think the adaptation was a success. The movie was good. It was exciting, violent, gritty, well-realized, engrossing and dense without being too overbearing. Of course I'm coming from having read the story, so that gave me a good sense of what was transpiring onscreen. I know a lot of people who hadn't read Watchmen before, and they were a little lost at the winding storyline.

A single person watching or reading something can handle a wider range of weirdness than an audience in a theater. For some reason there is a place where an audience will become a complete organism and reject what is happening onscreen. I think the filmmakers were nervous about the original ending in the book, so they re-wrote it so it would play better in front of the collective American audience. They did a great job, because the ending is still the same, it's just different. (I know I'm being vague, but I'm not giving away either ending in detail.)

Watchmen has always been touted as the unfilmable book. That is partly because the script had been tossed around all over the place between companies for about twenty years prior to this release. At the end it seemed that two studios had rights to the story, so one of them got international rights and the other got domestic rights. It's a messed up tangle of lawsuits and copyright BS. Long story short, we have a Watchmen film and it's good. The other reason that Watchmen was considered by some to be unfilmable is because it is a dense tale with lots of characters and side-stories that come together to form a wonderful whole, but would make a 6 hour movie necessary.

There are a couple of big changes, one big blue change, and a few smaller alterations that are curious. The most obvious is that there is a lot more Dr. Manhattan...a lot more shown onscreen in fact. He wears more clothes in the comic than in the movie. I'm not sure why they chose to do it that way, but if you want to see a large blue penis, run out and buy a ticket for Watchmen. Another change is the added violence in the prison, where a thug's arms are cut off with a circular saw instead of just his throat being slit. Not sure why the added change with that one. I like gore as much as the next horror fan, but a scene like that will make some people stay away from the theater. It just wasn't necessary.

** Spoilerishness ahead **Casting was strange. When you cast a film based on a novel, it makes sense that there would be some disparities, but when you cast a comic book movie, don't you know what the characters are going to look like? Some people were way off, and it changed the tone a bit. Take Dan Dreiberg for instance, (Nite Owl 2). In the book he has fallen out of shape. In the movie he doesn't look out of shape at all. That detracts from the humanity that the book has to offer. The original story is all about how human these people are underneath their costumes. The movie makes them all amazing physical specimens, and that is counter intuitive to the book. Also Ozymandias is not how I thought he'd be. He seems like an evil genius bent on world domination, not a good guy who feels hemmed in by the only apparent solution to world peace. In the book, Ozymanidas is defeated by his own intelligence. He does what he feels he has to, but he doesn't want to do it. The ends justify the means though, so he goes through with his plan.

Everyone's favorite character, (even if he's your second favorite, he's still who the movie is about in my opinion), Rorschach, is awesome. There's not much to say about him. The filmmakers spent the most time on Rorschach and every part of his performance, look and voice is perfect. He brings the characters and the film together.

Apart from that, the movie works. You can't have everything from the book in the movie anyway, so there were always going to be some elisions. I think the movie works very well in conjunction with the book. They are both required reading and viewing. If you have seen the film, read the book and still want more, you can buy/rent Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated movie that is direct-to-DVD which is a movie version of the story-within-a-story from the Watchmen graphic novel. You can also buy/rent Watchmen: The Motion Comic. The Motion Comic is about 5 hours long and it is the entire graphic novel, panel by panel, slightly animated, but exactly the same as the graphic novel. It's an interesting experience from what I've heard.

Sign #115 of the coming Apocalypse

There will be a new wine on the market in April. CLD Imports will be bringing the Aussie wine, Return of the Living Red, to American shores next month. The wine is getting pretty solid reviews. it is non-vintage, uses 2 different kinds of grapes, and will probably turn you into the un-dead. Sounds like a blast. The states where CLD Imports distribute to are, CA, IL, NJ, TX, DE, MD and DC.

I would buy a bottle just to have it forever for the fun of it if I could.

See the wine here.

And here.

And just so you're made aware, The Grapes of Death is a real movie about a wine-making town in France wherein the chemicals put on the grape plants turn everyone into zombies when they start drinking the wine.

The long-awaited obscene post

My girlfriend, chaste virgin that she is(n't) commented recently about how unfair it is that I get to see copious amounts of bare boobies all over the place but she doesn't get to see the equivalent. Where are all the dicks? I assure you that they're there, hiding behind underpants and jeans wherever you go. The issue is more why are there boobs in every movie, but a big ixnay on ocksay? The answer is the same now as it was when I first posted about this topic here, the MPAA has problems with penises.

It's misogynistic I know, and also it's completely unfair. It's a strange weird relationship that guys have with the dicks of other guys. In locker rooms it is no big deal to change and weigh yourself and sit on your towel in the sauna naked. No one cares really. Girls in the locker room hate the fact that other girls are in there naked. But at the same time, girls are drunkenly drawn to breasts and think they're funny and no big deal in public or when they are watching a movie; a guy will never touch another guys' dick, even as a joke, and they'll boo whenever they see a 5 foot long cock on the movie screen. (I mean, it's 5 ft. long because it's on such a large screen. The same way that a girl in a movie has quintillion-D breasts on the same screen...perhaps in the same [money] shot.)

Anyhow, my GF gives me a hard time last night about how there are so many movies with tits and none with dicks. So I go through my DVD collection and point out all the movies I have where there are cocks. I think the total, in a collection of about 500, was 15. There's a dick in Life of Brian, I Am Curious: Yellow, W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the list goes briefly on. And what did the GF have to say about all those dicks? "I don't want to see black and white foreign dicks."

She's kind of right...American cinema hates a dick. You can't even show a whole scene of marionettes fucking in an American movie, it has to be edited down. (I appreciate that there is a "yellow shower" and a "hot carl" in said marionettes-fucking movie, but c'mon...it's puppets!) Thora Birch wants to get naked in American Beauty and she's underage? No problem, her folks can sign a permission slip. Kevin Bacon accidentally flashes his member in Wild Things? He has to get woken up at 3am by the director who has to find out if it's okay with him that his johnson has screen time and then they have to discuss it for a two hours and finally settle on it being cool. Ricockulous? Definitely.

Team America Uncut Sex Scene | Viral | SPIKE.com

What can we do about this? I propose that for the next month, you just grab the dick of every man you pass by on the street, look him in the eye and say, "I, as a woman, appreciate and respect the penis. Feel free to be comfortable showing and seeing this little guy all the time." Don't want to do that? You can watch this movie instead of desensitize yourself to the dick in the privacy of your own living room.

However, another issue, albeit a much more subjective one, gets brought up at the same time. My significant other says I get to see boobs and she doesn't get to see the equivalent What exactly qualifies as the equivalent? Technically a bare chested man is the same as a bare chested woman. Un-technically, a bare chested woman is much less acceptable in public than a bare chested man. If you're a man then you can walk around town without a shirt and no one will say anything to you. (Unless you're Quato, in which case you should just keep that shirt on, man...) And since boobs are so round and pleasing to the eye and hands and etc., are they really in the same erotic category as flaccid cocks? My heterosexual opinion is, "no". There are very few things in this world less attractive and more hilarious than what looks like a turkey throat hanging between your legs. Sorry, but that's how I see it. Now an erect cock on the other hand...there's something nice there. Maybe it's because so many great things look like erect penises: rocket ships, submarines, geoducks, trains, balloon animals, George Washington's head on a folded dollar bill, Joe Camel's nose, et al.

I think that the tide of male domination of imagery in this country has saved many people from a sight that is intentionally hilarious: the exposed, limp cock. And instead, we have decided, culturally, to embrace the naughty but acceptable naked breast. I'm cool with this trend. How do you feel about it, readers?

England has a lot of great things going for it: Boddington's, Guinness, Keira Knightely, Samantha Fox, "Are You being Served?", the MG. A major strike against England are its new anti-terorist laws.

Remember when the Patriot Act came out in this country and everyone was in an uproar because the government could tap your phones and look at your e-mail bu no one you ever knew had anything bad happen to them? England's version of that is much, much worse. England doesn't just have these laws in place to stop terroism either. They are doing it for the protection of all English people. CCTV cameras are up in all the major cities, and I'm sure, if it was possible, they'd put them on every sheep and cow they could get their hands on.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

The picture at the top of this page is a photograph of graffiti by Banksy. If you don't know who Banksy is, then you should check him out. At the link, whichi s his homepage, you'll see many examples of his work including his Guantanamo blow-up doll at Disney World and his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. He is a fascinating person.