Subtle Bluntness

After having sat on the review for an entire week, today is the release date for my Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls review.  It’s about time March 3 got here, because I’ve been going nuts talking the book up in private but without any recourse to spew my review upon the reading public.  Now it’s out there, and I feel much better.

I got the book pretty quickly after I was approved for the blog program, which was impressive in and of itself.  More impressive was the fact that I basically picked up the book one day, randomly, and had my review finished by that same time the next day.  I tore through the book like a zombie at a meat processing plant.  It really is a great, funny read if you know anything about Victorian England.

Perhaps more importantly, you can win a free copy of the book and a bunch of other stuff.  Just head over to Quirk’s forum, sign up and register (I know it’s a bitch, but there’s like $100 worth of freebies up for grabs for 50 people) and let them know where you saw it. Either here, PopFi, or DoG works, since Quirk knows they’re all me.  Make me look good, readership.  If you somehow don’t manage to win, you can just buy the book for $8.73 at Amazon (or 80 cents if you use a Kindle).  It’s definitely worth the purchase.

So I saw Cop Out, and I’m in the minority since I actually enjoyed the movie.  For me, it works as a direct homage to those 80’s buddy cop movies, before they got all worn out by overuse.  Most people apparently didn’t dig it, but I liked it and apparently the audience did too, since it was second in the top 10 this weekend.

I also managed to get out and see The Crazies, the 2010 Breck Eisner remake of the 1973 George Romero virus panic horror flick, except this time The Crazies are basically zombies, and the Romero framework is used to support a greatest-hits of postmodern zombie movies.  I also enjoyed it, and it seems more people enjoyed it than did Cop Out, at least in terms of critical indices and whatnot.  Not like I care what critics say, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only person out there in the wilderness, screeching at the top of my lungs that a movie is adequately entertaining.

I reviewed Legion over at Den of Geek.  Look on these works, ye Paul Bettany fans, and despair.  Also, there’s Charles S. Dutton and Dennis Quaid, so despair a little extra for those two.

Yes, I know I just mixed Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Shelley’s Ozymandias.  I did that in much the same way Legion mixes The Bible, action movies, zombies, and ham-fisted CGI:  deliberately and with malice aforethought.  It’s not that Legion is bad, it’s just that Legion is incredibly dumb.  I have no doubt that it’ll make a great Rifftrax one day.

When I was at the coffee shop the other day, I was talking about movies.  (What, me?  Talk about movies?  Never!)  I forget how I got on this subject, but eventually it all came around to The Book of Eli.  I mentioned that I reviewed it for Den of Geek and mentioned how, five years ago, it’d be a Wesley Snipes movie.  And it’s true.  I mentioned that in my review, as well.  (I also called the movie Mad Blax, as in the blaxploitation Mad Max, even if the movie and character of Eli are colorblind.)

Either way, I think pretty much any B-quality movie (which Eli is just because of its setting) can be improved with the presence of quality actors who are willing to slum it a little.  Hence Denzel as Eli.  Gary Oldman, while a fine actor, is always willing to slum it in a B-style movie (see his long history of working with Luc Besson), so he doesn’t count for this discussion.  His style of villain is always appreciated.

This topic smells like an article idea, so if you have any good suggestions for A-list actors in B-movie roles, please suggest them below.  I could use some help on this one from the collective Internet Braintrust.

So, I got to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon on Sunday, after having waited for it a good chunk of Saturday.  As you can see by its $140 million dollar opening weekend, it was very popular.  Frightening popular, given the unsubtle message the movie has for teenage girls of all ages.  Here’s my full review, for those who wish to revel in the carnage.

Unfortunately for me, by doing this review I opened myself up to criticism.  After all, I pumped money into the New Moon machine.  And really, could I conscionably do that if I hated Twilight as much as I claim?  Well, I say yes, but others say no.  Here’s the thing.  Do I enjoy Twilight as a series of movies?  No, of course not.  They’re terrible.  Robert Pattinson can’t act, and he’s the least-bad one of the bunch.

However, I do enjoy the Twilight movies in the same way that I love those terribad Syfy original movies.  They’re great fun for MST3King in the theater, or fun for groaning and rolling your eyes during.  And if the Rifftrax for New Moon is half as good as the Rifftrax for Twilight, then we’re in for some serious fun once that turd plops into the DVD bowl.

If there’s one thing I learned from the response to my review of The Fourth Kind, it’s that people love the phrase “The Fourth Kind is cat poop and onions.”  I thought I had included something about chocolate and peanut butter and two great tastes, but I guess I didn’t.  Or I did and my laptop decided to cut it out.  Either way, I think the description is completely appropriate.

I also reviewed The Box, the new film from Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly.  It was much better than The Fourth Kind, and is the sort of movie that you need to watch a couple of times to pick up everything in it.  Needless to say, I’m waiting for the DVD release anxiously, because it raises a whole lot of questions.

So did you guys catch the first episode of the new V series last night?  I did, and it was EPIC.  When I say it’s the most exciting show premier I’ve seen since Deadwood, I am NOT kidding.

They managed to cover the base of the original series, but strip away a lot of the alien obsession and campiness while adding more of an emphasis on the humans and how they respond to the aliens.  It’s like a network TV version of Battlestar Galactica, and I can only hope it keeps up the strong start and that ABC doesn’t somehow screw things up.

Hey, did you know that sometimes I watch movies?  Like, for example, Astro Boy.  Sometimes I even write about movies I’ve already talked about, like that time I talked about how the Saw franchise is on its way out the door and how the torture porn genre is soooo 2006.

But mostly it’s videos, because writing takes up too much energy and by the time I do my billion daily posts for PopFi and a post for Shaktronics and whatever else I have to do for Den of Geek, I’m too tired to blog over here.  So you get half-assed paragraph-sized posts like this one.

With random spaces to make it seem like there’s more content.

Did you see Saw?  I saw Saw.  I also saw Saws II and III.  Then I realized that the series would never be more than mediocre and dropped out for Saws IV and V.

Then, the other night, I saw Saw VI and realized the series had been taken over by the two guys that won Project Greenlight III and wrote Feast, so the writing has gotten much more plausible.  The movie still kind of sucks, but at least it sucks and makes sense.  That’s a lot better than, say, sucking and being completely nonsensical.

I have more to say about the Saw series, and where I think the torture porn genre is going, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for that.

I’ll link you to my review of Where the Wild Things Are, but I won’t make you read any more of my rambling.  Nope, to sum this particular flick up, I’ll just paste what Deadspin’s Dashiell Bennett said about this particular picture:

How was your weekend? Did you see “Where The Wild Things Are,” the first kids’ movie designed to make you hate childhood? No wonder there are so many nine-year-olds on Prozac these days. Sheesh. Lighten up, Francis.

That pretty much sums it up.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to go cheer myself up with some Elliott Smith and Nembutal.