Yeah, I don’t know what that means, but I felt piratish now that I’ve plundered six thousand hits on my blog. And I reckon I’ll pillage six thousand more, with me ships on the yonder high seas!
The seas of the internets shall be run red with the blood of the non-believers! Pieces of eight! Y’arrrrrrr! Planks! Nautical things ahoy!
I’m done now.
Speaking of Batman, I found a petition online for casting a certain actor in the role of the Joker, should he appear in an upcoming Batman film. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it suddenly became clear that this man was absolutely perfect for the role. That man is…
You may recognize him from “Back to the Future,” “Willard,” “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter,” or my personal favorite: “Bartleby.” Actually, most people today would know him from the “Charlie’s Angels” movie, or the “Willard” remake they made a couple years back, and probably wouldn’t remember when he almost kicked David Letterman in the face on Late Night. He’s the ‘weird’ and ‘creepy’ actor of choice, a multimedia artist and performer that’s always picked when the director wants people to feel uncomfortable watching the movie.
That’s why he’d make an absolutely perfect Joker. I know a lot of people really liked Jack Nicholson in the role, but I was never a fan. He never seemed, you know, crazy. He just seemed like he was a big asshole who was trying to act like he was crazy, and I never found him threatening like a good villain would be. Crispin Glover, on the other hand, was threatening even when he played Marty McFly’s dad, because he seemed like he was seconds away from becoming totally unhinged and killing the McFly family in revenge for never achieving a career in writing. You know that somewhere deep down in his dark, twisted heart, he really wanted to kill Biff. And I always got the feeling that if he killed Biff, he’d really enjoy it. Besides, he’s got the right face — his extended nose and chin look like the playing card was modeled after him.
Chris Nolan, if by some slim chance you’re reading this, I’m telling you: Crispin Glover is the right man for the part. I’ve heard rumors of Steve Buscemi, but he’s all wrong.
Get the Glover.
Two movie trailers appeared online last night, for two movies that I’ve been anticipating for years. So, without further ado, I present:
George A. Romero’s “Land of the Dead”
I love zombie movies, all zombie movies, pretty much regardless of quality. I don’t care how awful the reviews are, if a movie comes out and it features flesh-eating dead people, I will watch it. For instance, I’ve seen Uwe Boll’s “House of the Dead” about eight times. If you’ve seen “House of the Dead,” you know that watching it once is hard enough, but watching it eight times is a sure sign of either low self-esteem or having a zombie fetish. (For further illustration of how bad that movie is, I refer you to UweBoll.com and Quint’s Bottom Ten of 2003.) There’s a kind of Pavlovian reaction that I have with cinema; if I hear slow shuffling feet, low moaning, screaming, and drooling-munching sounds, my head tilts to one side like a confused dog and I am forced to immediately alter my queue at Netflix.com.
Finally, the master of the zombie movie is back with his fourth entry into his genre-creating living dead series. Romero started the flesh-eating zombie chain, and his work always reflected the times and had a strong socio-political subtext, which is hard to pull off when the text is about zombies, shopping malls, and learning to use a Walkman. In his latest movie, which is about twenty years in the making, the living dead have basically taken over the world, and the survivors have banded together to form relatively large gated communities, where they do their best to forget and ignore the larger problem lurking just outside the fences.
I’ve read the script for this one, and I’ve got to say that I was a little disappointed in it. A lot of it is about whole the community that forms immediately creates a tyrannical class system, while the zombies themselves start to get … smarter. There were a lot of great things in the version that I read, and some truly intriguing ideas, but overall I felt that the actual message of the film was alternately overplayed, underplayed, and on occasion breached absurdity. On the other hand, a script is a script and is likely to evolve and sharpen during shooting; the performances, visuals, and other inherently unscriptable bits change everything in the end. I guess my main beef with the script is that the characters frequently do things that are unimaginably stupid and careless in terms of living in a world filled with flesh-eating zombies, but since that’s a staple of the genre, I won’t complain until I see how it all turns out onscreen. Mr. Romero and the studio already have my ten bucks in their pocket.
The trailers for the latest Batman movie have been online and on TV for a while now, but the new one is (I think) the longest and most fleshed-out. I think this one gives a much clearer picture of how the movie is likely to turn out, and finally brings in Katie Holmes’, Ken Watanabe’s, and Cillian Murphy’s characters. You can’t beat the cast (also including Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Rutger Hauer, and Gary Oldman), and I hear that the script is somewhere on the level of “fantastic,” but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re going too realistic with this one. I just have a hard time imagining a ‘real’ world where a person like Batman could actually exist, and because of that I never really cared so much about where he got the Batmobile, or how he made his costume. He’s not a realistic character, and so placing him in a world where he’s constantly surrounded by ‘normal’ details feels odd. I’m an unabashed fan of the Burton films — especially the second one — because somehow, in that stylized Gotham, it just seemed okay that a man dressed up as a bat.
Anyway, I’ll wait and see, and maybe it’ll redefine “Batman” again, just like it happened in 1989, when everyone was saying that a Batman movie should be funny and campy like the ’60s TV show. (Check out Batman: Unmasked if you don’t believe me.) I’m all for entertaining paradigm shifts, and like Romero and Co., they already have my money.
Sidenote: This is something that’s been bugging me. So Bruce Wayne — in the new movie — gets his costume, weapons, and Batmobile from Wayne Enterprises prototype items that Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman) shows him. It makes sense at first, because it explains how a guy like Bruce Wayne could get/make his toys. Upon further reflection, doesn’t it immediately point to Bruce Wayne or someone at Wayne Enterprises when they’re trying to figure out who Batman is? Say what you will about the new Batmobile, but it’s a pretty unique looking vehicle, so it’s not likely to be confused with some other company’s giant military prototype tank. If I were Lucious Fox, the first day a blurry photograph of the car pops up in the Gotham Observer, I’d be firing a whole lot of people.
Second sidenote: If the music in the trailer is the new Batman theme, I’m not pleased. I understand that it’s hard to top one of the most popular and distinctive baroque action scores of all time, but the music in the trailer sounded awfully bland in a should-be-in-a-Michael-Bay-action-B-movie kind of way. I’m guessing that it is the new score (by Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, and Ramin Djawadi) on account of the fact that using the distinctive Danny Elfman score as temp music in a trailer would be far, far better marketing. At the moment, it reminds me of Elfman’s “Spider-Man” theme, because I cannot for the life of me make out an actual memorable theme. (Can anyone hum the Spider-Man theme? Anyone?) Bryan Singer is reportedly keeping the John Williams Superman theme for the new Superman flick, but that’s because it’s actually tied to the original two movies; since “Batman Begins” is a restart, a new theme is good, but I’m not a fan of this one.
Did you know that there’s a communications company in the US that appears to be solely dedicated to destroying the gay lifestyle? Well, you do now. It’s called United American Technologies, and it’s coming for your phones.
Luckily, we have comedian Eugene Mirman to stand up for the sanctity of homosexual relationships everywhere, as you can hear in this mp3 clip that I found this morning via the ever-entertaining Jesus’ General. Actually, he doesn’t so much defend homosexuality as completely agree with the telephone solicitor’s assertions that “the gays must be destroyed” and that MCI, AT&T, and Verizon peddle child pornography. Very funny, but probably not safe for work unless you’ve got some headphones on.
Once again, though, we have people setting up fallacious arguments against homosexuals, such as linking them implicitly (and explicitly) with things that are actually bad, like child pornography and abuse. I’m surprised that bestiality wasn’t mentioned.
I’ve done some searching on this company, and other than the child porn blurbs on the front page, the rest of their site seems pretty free of any ‘vision statement.’ I checked Google, but again, it came up dry in regards to the content of the phone call, so I can’t quite tell if this is a hoax or not, although I’d be surprised that a joke by a semi-known comic would include a specifically named company distinctly associated with anti-gay sentiments. That’s the stuff lawsuits are made of.
Thanks again to the manly and heterosexual Jesus’ General.
Sometimes it’s fun to see what the referring web pages are, thanks to that little list I have at the bottom of this page. Other times, it’s downright weird. For instance, someone came to Tales to Astonish! via a websearch for the terms:
“diabolical and satanic messages ‘Pope Benedict XVI’ rock”
What the hell that person was looking for, I do not know, but I doubt they’ll find it here. I wonder if they tried http://www.diabolicalsatanicmessagespoperock.com first?