Technical Difficulties

I'm sitting at school in the cafe trying to download things to my computer so I can finished assignments due by the end of the week because my cable and internet at home are down. I'll resume posting as soon as they are back up.

Irreverance

Since it is Sunday, I don't like football, and the posts I've made today have been of a admittedly silly nature I thought, what's one more?

So, I just caught the cover of the latest issue of Glamour magazine, which is sitting on our living room table at this very moment. It features Victoria Beckham with a puppy around her neck, which got me thinking that this would make a great new PETA campaign. You can wear animals, just don't kill them first.

The Things You Miss When You Take A Weekend Off

So guess what? Remember that classic game Battleship that was so simple and yet so addictive? Well, Nikki Finke is saying over at Deadline Hollywood that it will be hitting the big screen come May 2012.

Whether or not the film will be any good or not (and I doubt it will based on the description, but we'll get to that) you don't even begin to understand how many things bug me about this project. Not only does it display full-on desperation on Hollywood's part, but it's going to be directed by Peter Berg who, once upon a time, made very good, often somewhat subversive genre pictures like The Rundown, Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom, before falling victim to the old too-many-hands-in-the-pot syndrome with Hancock. That is a description I use in regards to movies that feel like they have fallen far away from their original aim as big stars come on board, producers see dollar signs and the prospects of a big blockbuster come into view to the point where little of the original concept is left and the end product feels like a confused and half-hearted missed opportunity.

Then there`s the description. Here`s what Deadline Hollywood says about it: `` Which the studio says will unfold as a massive Naval adventure across the seas, in the skies, and over land as Planet Earth fights for survival against a superior force.`` Did I read that right; the movie is going to be about doing battle with aliens. I don`t really remember that part of the game. I guess now that Berg tasted big money with Hancock we`ve lost another great director.

In other news, the Jenga movie will be hitting theaters in the summer of 2013. It will be written by William Goldman and directed by Sidney Lumet.

Remember Andrew W.K.?

Andrew W.K. was that rocker dude in the early 2000s who wore all white, talked in insane tongues, wrote infectiously catchy rock songs like Party Hard and She is Beautiful, and was supposed to be the golden saviour of rock, only for his career to fizzle out after his third album was never released in North America.

Well apparently, there have been rumours going around that Andrew W.K. might not be real after some cryptic comments he made during a lecture about how he isn't the same person now as he was back then. Collages have been made comparing his early pictures to more recent ones and, although the similarities are there, there are also just enough differences to believe that he just maybe isn't the same guy. Thus, it has been speculated that Andrew W.K. is a fictional character that his record label created and has been played by different actors over the years.

Anyway, whether Andrew W.K. is real or just a character isn't the point. What matters is that this got me thinking about another big celebrity in the movie world who may just be a fictional character played by someone else. Check it out:

Could it be that Michael Bay is just Michael Bolton in disguise?

You decide.

Big News This Week and Snarky Comments to Go With It

I slacked off on the big Hollywood news this week. While everyone has writing about the Oscars since Tuesday I got my two cents in quick and spent the remainder of my time posting pictures of Tom Cruise. To each their own I guess. I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the weekend, but I was reading some of the big news stories over at Rotten Tomatoes and felt that some of them required some comment. So, in typical You Talking to Me? fashion:

• How's this for irony? After quitting as director of Spider-Man 4, leaving the studio with no other choice than the scrap the entire project and reboot the series, Sam Raimi is considering a reboot of his own for his next project. He's considering directing a reboot of The Shadow, which was made into a film in 1994 with Alec Baldwin that was basically a huge flop. Some will find this news disappointing because it interferes with the Warcraft movie (an adaptation of a popular video game series) that some hoped would be Raimi's next project. Personally, having never played the game I don't much care who directs Warcraft or if it ever gets made. This guy, on the other hand, might be a tad disappointed.
  
  
• Fast Five is apparently the title to the never ending Fast and Furious series. Vin Diesel and Paul Walker will be back once again. Okay, let me admit it: I loved the first two films (yes, you read correctly, the first TWO films), found the third forgettable and hated the fourth. The only way to possibly save this series would be to scrap Justin Lin as the director (who made the last two films and clearly isn't comfortable with story, character, logic, plausibility or great action sequences) and bring back Rob Cohen to the director's chair. Cohen is the one true director who understood that Fast and Furious is basically just a slick b-movie and had a lot of fun with the material while also delivering great car chases. All i can say for Justin Lin, who will be returning for the fifth film: Better Luck Tomorrow man. (Look it up).


• There's going to be an Enchanted sequel. No word yet on casting for the project. This is the kind of news that makes you want to phone up someone important at Disney and remind them of their direct-to-video sequel policy.


• Finally, Lee Ziotoff, the creator of MacGyver is planning a lawsuit against MacGruber, a feature length interpretation of the Saturday Night Live MacGyver parody sketch starring Will Forte. Reports are that Ziotoff is planning his own MacGyver movie and doesn't want the parody to interfere with his business. I'm not sure I buy that reasoning but regardless this is good news because, if the lawsuit goes through and MacGruber is shelved, we might owe Ziotoff a debt of gratitude considering there is about as many laughs in the trailer as there have been over the past few years of Saturday Night Live. See for yourself
  
  

Does Eli Roth Suck?

Okay, this one requires some background.

When I was writing for Suite101.com I wanted to do something interesting so I decided it would be cool if I started a regular piece dedicated to the most overrated movies of all time. The first entry was about Bertolucci's 1900. So I called the piece The Most Overrated Movies of All Time Part 1, with 1900 as the subtitle.

Of course, Suite101 being what they are, quickly put the kibosh on the whole enterprise, informing me that you couldn't number things in the title, essentially meaning I would have to rename the entire thing with each post. So I switched it up and put the film title as the article title and then The Most Overrated Movies of All Time in the subtitle and linked the articles together.

There were two problems with this. For one, for online search purposes, this technique made it nearly impossible for people to know that the entries were part of the series unless they actually clicked on the article and read the subtitle and, since Suite101 only allows up to three links in one article I wouldn't be able to link any more articles together. So I ultimately threw the whole idea out the window.

However, I did manage to write three and the second one with the subtitle of The Most Overrated Movies of All Time was an editorial on why I thought Eli Roth sucks. It was appropriately titled Why Horror Director Eli Roth Sucks and has continually been one of my most popular articles on that site.

So I thought, why not share it in this space as well. So, if you want to know why Eli Roth sucks, click here.

The Best Oscar Campaign Ever

Yesterday Dennis over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule blogged about how he respected Mo'Nique because she appears to not be playing the campaign game in which celebrities seem to whore themselves out completely in hopes of scoring a nomination and a win. Mo'Nique, on the other hand seems to want to let her performance in Precious do the talking, taking the attitude that, if she truly is the best, she will win.

So this got me to thinking about Oscar campaigns, which led me to post in the comments section that one of the few great Oscar campaigns was David Lynch and a cow in Beverly Hills campaigning for Laura Dern to get a nomination for her performance in Inland Empire. Say what you will about Lynch, he is, to say the least, creative.