Batman – Gotham Knap

Batman Gotham Knight sounded like a much better idea than it turned out to be.

5 different anime directors give us their imaginings of the Dark Knight just in time to serve as an appetizer for the biggest movie of the summer.

But as it turns out, there is not an original idea among them.   All moody and morbidly serious without a second of fun throughout.

For all the power of Batman’s gallery of bad guys, we get 12 seconds of Killer Croc for no apparent reason, a smidgen of scarecrow to remind us he was the villain in Batman Begins and a story with Deadshot that is so by the numbers that I actually dozed off.

There is NOTHING original here. Even Kevin Conroy, the official animated voice of the Dark Knight for about 20 years now sounds as if he is phoning it in.

The first story in the anthology is called “Have I got a Story to Tell You”  – it is a piece told from the POV of a group of street kids who have seen the Bat in action in person. It is supposed to show how different people perceive him differently based on experience and situation. The biggest problem is that this story has been told in animation already as part of the wildly more entertaining Batman – The Animated Series and also as an issue of Detective Comics in the early eighties.

Sadly, this whole thing feels hacky and  I really WANTED to like it.

Swing and a big miss by the “masters” of anime.

Check it outta the Redbox if you think I’m being too hard on it – but let me know if you disagree.

National Treasure 2 – Book of Sedatives . . .

Nick Cage is one smarmy box of ego.

That’s one thing I learned from this movie.

Also – John Voight is slowly turning into a little old lady.

Also – Helen Mirren, surprisingly will do any movie that passes her desk as long as there are enough zeros in the contract (by the way – so will I so keep them scripts coming . . . )

Also – There is a city of gold under Mount Rushmore.

Also – French police will translate riddles for you.

Also – Apparently there are no more movies to make about NASA, because Ed Harris is in this as well.

I learned nothing else because I fell asleep in the middle of the movie and woke up as a City of Gold was discovered under Mount Rushmore.

I don’t think it mattered.

This movie doesn’t have any “bad guys”.

Just a bunch of concerned relatives trying to clear their family names. Which is fine, but man – Nick Cage is smarmy.

Wortha Red Box rental.

PS- this movie is lame.

Hillary Swank has a dead husband in PS- I love you.

Before he died he wrote her a bunch of letters to help her cope with his death.

She gets one each month and she heals a little bit more with each one . . .

BAH.

Hillary Swank will always be that skinny boy in Boys Don’t cry or the dead boxer in Million Dollar baby to me. Hillary Swank in this role is not something I am a fan of.

Now if I were to write letters to my wife from the grave they would go like this . . .

 
January 
Dear WIfe,

This may come as a shock to you, but I always hated Meatloaf.

Love,
Calmixx

February
Dear Wife,

I am not really dead.

Love,
Calmixx

March
Dear Wife,

I also don’t care for Spanish rice. This is not about the rice itself, but more of an ilogical  racist statement.

Love,
Calmixx

April
Dear Wife,

Remember back in February when I said I wasn’t dead? I really am. Pysche !

Love,
Calmixx

You get the idea.  That’s how I would do it.

Yep.
Sigh.

Probably worth a buck at the Redbox.

Steaming pile of Aliens vs. Predator 2…

You see, I’m not the kind of guy who lets others make his decisions for him.

So when my buddy Brother Jobu  told me what a piece of crap this was, I filed the opinion aside but didn’t let it poison the A Vs P well. Well I won’t be making that mistake again.  No sir. From now on, when Brother Jobu says it sucks, IT SUCKS.

How do you screw this up. Take some aliens, take some predators, piss em off and get out the way. This is an easy formula, not a cure for polio. WTF?

Half the time this movie is so darkly lit you can’t even see who is fighting who. In the rare instance you CAN see what the hell is going on, you don’t care.

This was directed by the Brothers Strausse  so I  was like  – “Now it makes perfect sense, they let Zack and Cody make a SCI-FI Horror flick of course it’s gonna suck . . . ” but then my seven year old daughter corrected me and advised that Zack and Cody are the SPROUSE Brothers, so really there is just no excuse.

Hardly worth the buck I spent in the Redbox.

Margot at the Wedd…what the hell happened to Nicole Kidman’s face?

My wife and I saw the trailer “Margot at the Wedding” on some DVD a couple of weeks ago and agreed that it looked like a very funny movie. Jack Black was hilarious in the trailer and Jennifer Jason Leigh was in it so how could you go wrong right?

First of all, be warned. The fine Nicole Kidman usually served here has been replaced with a woman who looks like Nicole Kidman if Nicole Kidman had WAY TOO MUCH botox. She appears to be a ferret.

Second of all, Jack Black is NOT funny in it. He is VERY SAD. The trailer for this film is cut to be a laugh riot but the very same scenes in the context of the actual film are not funny at all – some are actually disturbing.

The trailer editor in Hollywood is the most powerful dude around.

Wortha Redbox rental if only to see the difference between the trailer and the actual movie.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Empori – um when is this thing gonna end?

I do not like Walden Media Films as a rule.

I can’t really put my finger on why. They seem rather self important.

I have no tangeble evidence to make this case, but on a whole I personally feel that they . . . well. . . they suck.

Sure they LOOK good, all shiny effects and whimsical creatures filling the screen to a sweeping score . . . but I like my kids movies with less “suck” then they provide and after sitting through this with my 7 year old daughter (who shares my taste for cinema much to the dismay of her mother) we have decided that we would like our 2 hours back so that we can use it to watch a PIXAR movie or something with Zombies.

Dustin Hoffman is in this. I cannot imagine why.
Kermit the frog is also in it. He is brilliant.
There is a sock monkey in this film who is more interesting than any of the human characters.

Wortha Redbox rental if you have NOTHING else to do.

Was White Noise 1 so successful it warranted a sequel?

This movie has NOTHING to do with the Michael Keaton movie White Noise so far as I can tell except that it has some static filled Tv screens.

In fairness, the first White Noise put me to sleep. Turns out, all that ambient static is very relaxing.

This one kept me awake and as a thriller its not bad. Plus, it’s got Katee Sackoff in it and everything is better with Katee Sackoff. It’s also got the guy from Serenity or Firefly or whatever the hell the name of that thing was.

WorthaRedbox rental.

Revamped . . . the movie?

Umm. Well. uh. I saw this movie today.

Now, at first I was about to go crazy listing all the reasons it’s terrible and pointing out all the ways it fails but you know what?

I watched the entire thing.

I sat on my couch with my jaw dropped open watching this thing unfold on my 54 inch HD television and I could have stopped it a anytime. At any point I could have pressed stop on my remote and moved on to something else. Something more worthy of my entertainment time.

But I did not. I sat through this thing, even though it was just not very good. You know what?

It was absolutely terrible.

This is a bad movie the way black is a dark color.

If you and me made a movie with 35 dollars and Star Wars action figures and all the dialogue was in a foreign language that we made up as we went along, I am confident we would make a better movie than this.

With that said – You and I are not going to make a movie. We may talk about it, we may laugh about it, hell here I am writing on my stupid blog about it. A gentleman named Jeff Rector DID IT.

Revamped Sucks and it is soley the fault of Jeff Rector. He wrote it, produced it, directed it and he also stars in it. If I did a little more digging I’m certain I could find out that he PAID for it to be made as well.

So intrigued was I with this HORRENDOUS film that I googled it and went to it’s official website half expecting a message about how it was all an elaborate Hollywood prank – it was not.

But I did find that if I had any questions or was interested in distributing it I could contact JEFF RECTOR directly. So he wrote it, produced it, directed it and starred in it and now he is PROMOTING it on his own.

Hey I didn’t even get dressed today so who am I to judge HIM?

God bless him. He is obviously doing what he loves to do. I wish him all the luck in the world. Hey Ed Wood was very successful (albeit posthumously . . . )

If you or anyone you know wants to distribute this film that may actually be a modern day Plan 9 from Outer Space, the info is below.

As always feel free to disagree with me in the comments. (But really, unless you are Jeff Rector I don’t see how that’s gonna happen.)

Worldwide Distribution
Contact: Jeff Rector at Millenium Concepts
(Office)1.818.752.4315 (Fax)1.818.752.4300 makecontact@MilleniumConcepts.net

Believe it or not a lot of money seems to have been spent here . . .

I was raised with the adage, that if you don’t have anything NICE to say about someone, say nothing at all.

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Why not just use a picture of Amanda?

Sydney White is not a film that’s hurting anybody. It’s a cute retelling of Snow White and the seven dwarfs in modern times on a College campus where instead of being “dwarfs” – the 7 in question are “dorks”. Get it? Sydney White and the 7 Dorks?

Ahh, good times.

Bottom line – Amanda Bynes has been a star since she was 7 and I’ll be honest I’d watch her in anything. She is a natural talent and the camera loves her. So yeah – this is cute although I’m not sure who the real target for it is. It’s too raunchy for the disney set and I don’t see teenagers running out to rent modern day fairy tales, but I digress. If the target was 38 years old males – they hit it. Good for ‘em.

One giant irritation though. As I stated above, Amanda Bynes has been acting since she was a small child. There must be a thousand pictures of her from every age. There are two scenes in this movie where she looks at a picture of her deceased mother and herself and misses her. The director chooses to use a picture of a kid who is not Amanda Bynes. Clearly NOT Amanda Bynes.

The effect is that the viewer spends a minute saying, “Who is that a picture of and why is she staring at it?” No big deal if the actress was almost anybody else. But we all know exactly what she looked like at 7 . . . we were watching her on TV.

Why not just use a picture of Amanda and preserve the “illusion” of the film?

I demand that the director of this film, explain his decision right here in this forum. I will be waiting.