So, long story short, if you liked those two movies, or you like Craig Robinson in any of his 20 or so memorable roles this year from Miss March to Pineapple Express and Zack and Miri Make A Porno, then you’ll like this movie.  Also, John Cusack fans will probably enjoy it, too.  Apparently there are a lot of those.

Author’s note:  Crispin Glover has now been in two movies where he’s played the same character 20 years apart.  First George McFly in Back to the Future and now again as Phil the bellhop, 1986 and 2010 versions.  He now joins Tim “Ted the Bellhop” Roth and Jerry Lewis in the pantheon of great movie bellhops.  Just some trivia for you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

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.

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.