Spring Gamers

Is this brilliant? Yes, this is brilliant.

Escape to The Movies: "After Earth"

Pretty damn horrible.

"Intermission" looks at how we got here.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : After Earth

First Image From The Live-Action "Kiki's Delivery Service"

Courtesy excite (note: site is in Japanese), here's your first publicity-still from the live-action version of "Kiki's Delivery Service;" which evidently is a thing that is happening.

"Machete Kills"

The key to the original "Machete" - for me, at least - was that it was the first instance in a long while of a Robert Rodriguez movie actually being about something beyond the surface-level faux-grindhouse jokefest. I have no idea what Rodriguez politics are and thus no idea how strongly he "really" feels about the U.S. immigration debate; but whether authentic or just part of the winking 70s-exploitation pastiche it was the ferocity with which "Machete" engaged the subject that made it stand out: The wildly-applauding, predominantly Latino audiences at my screening(s) certainly didn't think it was a joke.

So I wonder if "Machete Kills," which Rodriguez may or may not have put together partially by having the castmembers of "Sin City 2" put on different costumes for pickups during their greenscreen shoots, is going to keep that going or let Part 1 be "the political one" and just focus on the spectacle of improbable action-lead Danny Trejo hacking up a succession of stunt-cast cameos and Latin-cinema mainstays.

The first full trailer for the film (it's a Yahoo, sorry) doesn't let much out in the way of story beyond what we already know: Machete is called in for a mission by the U.S. President (Charlie Sheen, here using his real name "Carlos Estevez" for the first time in a film) involving a supervillain played by Mel Gibson; whose scheme may or may not involve a "Moonraker"-style outer space component. Rodriguez has "joked" in the past that the third film "Machete Kills Again" will be a Space Opera, possibly incorporating leftovers from his scuttled John Carter project.

Introducing The BOFCA YouTube Channel

The Boston Online Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, now has their very own YouTube Channel. Bookmark it now, because fun stuff will be incoming.

"Planes"

Here's all you need to know about Disney's "Cars" spinoff, "Planes." Pixar - which had no problem signing it's name to both of the wholly-disposable "Cars" movies, is letting Disney take sole credit for this one.Dane Cook stars as a cropduster who dreams of competing in an airplane race against an elite gathering of broad ethnic stereotypes.

Ma vie en rose

Huh. Well, this will be interesting.

The Hub, which is still looking for an original kids' series that people will watch other than "Friendship is Magic," thinks it's found a winner in an Australian animated series called "Shezow." I hadn't heard of it until the (week old) trailer for it's U.S. premier started making the rounds, but the premise is interesting: The (magical) mantle of a female superhero with decidedly female-gendered accoutremants (sparkly miniskirted costume, Barbie-esque pink car, etc) is accidentally passed to a teenaged boy.

Okay, so it's kind of a single-joke premise parody wise re: male superhero uniforms are considered "unisex" but heroines' are not, but I've seen a lot more made from a lot less. I don't recall ever hearing if anybody freaked out about this in it's native Australia, but as you'll expect the usual gang of idiots is already apoplectic about what they see as another assault on children by The Gay Agenda. 

Even without their "help," of course, if the series catches at all that it'll be roped into the debate(s) surrounding LGBTQ children is inevitable; though it's hard for me to get a read on what those communities will/do actually think of this: The premise appears mostly played for laughs, i.e. Shezow is alternately thrilled with his powers but annoyed/embarassed at the form(s) they take (I haven't tracked down an episode, but I'm assuming that, by the law of teen heroes' powers usually being learning-opportunities, the hero has some sort of overcoming-his-own-assumptions-about-girls'-abilities character-arc going on?), and I'm not 100% clear as to whether the transformation (his "By the power of GraySkull!" is "You go girl!") makes him biologically female or just puts the costume/hair/makeup on; but my sense is that any kid-targeted series that - even humorously - says "dressing outside gender-roles is cool/acceptable" has to be a step in the right direction, yes?

Well, we'll see. "Shezow" makes it's U.S. debut Saturday, June 1st.

Big Picture: "Dumping Irony"

"Too much!"

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Dumping Irony

Controversial "Blue" Scores Big At Cannes

And we now have our customary first big Awards Season Frontrunner (for awhile anyway) as the voting concludes at the Cannes Film Festival. The jury - this year headed by none other than Steven Spielberg - awarded the Palm d'Or (top prize) to "Blue Is The Warmest Color" (aka "La vie de Adele Parts 1 &2"); a French romantic drama that was already one of the most buzzed-about and controversial entries in this year's festival.

Based on a French graphic novel (apparently unavailable in the U.S.), the story follows a young woman's (Adele Exarchopoulos) awakening to an intense attraction to another woman in her teens and into early adulthood over the course of a lengthy relationship with said woman (Lea Seydoux,) whose blue-dyed hair is the source of the title. The film runs an impressive 3 hours, the majority of which is simply conversational scenes between the two women and a small supporting cast.


However, the element that had the festival talking early were sex scenes described as "frank" - which is arthouse-movie speak for "actual fucking" - one of which allegedly goes for a full ten unbroken minutes (Cannes audiences are being reported to have applauded the - literal - climax of said scene as though a monument had just exploded in a Roland Emmerich movie.) There are already questions as to whether or not the film will require major editing to be viewable in certain countries, and a skeptical backlash painting the film as being over-praised by lesbian-fetishizing male critics and jurors (the director is a man, Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche.) Meanwhile, it's victory will almost certainly become a talking point in it's native France; which just legalized gay marriage in the face of major opposition from conservative and religious organizations: The nutcase who shot himself in Notre Dame Cathedral last week did so in protest of legalization.

In any case, the film is now slated for an October release in France followed by a year-end rollout in the United States in anticipation of Oscar nominations.

The Hard Stuff

Below, the trailer for this year's movie the "endurance cinephile" in your life (the guy who prides himself on having "made it through" notoriously heavy/violent/controversial works) will be going on about this year: "The Act of Killing." The good news? It indeed looks/sounds kind of amazing.

The premise? In Indonesia, the government that operated the country's notorious Death Squad killings of communists and suspected communists that are said to have numbered at least 1,000,000 is still effectively running the show, and while the vestiges of a modernizing nation are all present the perpetrators of this genocide have gone largely unpunished - rather, many live as lionized national celebrities. In "Act," filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer documents the life of a (mostly) unrepentant death squad leader named Anwar Congo, now a grandfather, who claims to have personally killed 1,000 men himself.

The hook? Oppenheimer asks (and provides the resources) for Congo and his surviving co-killers to make a movie about their death-squad exploits. Not a documentary or a historical-recreation, mind you, but a narrative version of the events from their point of view. As it turns out, Congo's particular outfit were gangsters specializing in movie-piracy before they were conscripted to help with the slaughter... and they're big movie buffs. So not only does their version feature death squad killings (with them directing the amateur actors playing the victims and killers) recreated by the guys who did them with low-budget special-effects makeup and gore, it also ends up featuring "arty" setpieces, elaborate costumes, fantasy-sequences and (apparently) a musical number.

Yes. A documentary about mass-murderers directing, staging and acting-in a lavish, "visionary" movie about their own mass-murders. Holy. Shit.

Does The "Carrie" Remake Now Have The Stupidest Marketing Campaign Ever?

Pop Quiz, hotshot.

You've got a horror movie to sell. It's a remake of one of the genre's modern-day classics, a film that damn near everyone has either seen or at least is familiar with the plot and iconic moments thereof. One of the small handful of genuine horror (as opposed to "suspense" or "thriller") entries alongside "Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby" to be recognized as great, important films even outside their often-disregarded genre. Based on a book by easily the most famous living author of horror or anything else on the planet.

What's more, said book (and original film) are absolutely loaded with button-pushing themes and imagery about evergreen Important Subjects like female sexuality, bullying, child-abuse and religious extremism.Your cast? Headlined by Julianne Moore, one of the most lauded actresses in the business, and superstar child actress Chloe Grace Moritz on the cusp of her "I intend to still be doing this as an adult!" step into the teen stardom maelstrom. Your director? Kimberly Pierce, best known for the critical and awards darling "Boys Don't Cry."

So! Given all that, how would you choose to market this film, which, by all accounts and evidence, is primed to be a serious, perhaps even noteworthy work?

Well, if you answered "Unfunny reference to a tired, ancient Internet Meme," you might have a future working for MGM/ScreenGems, which has unveiled the below-pictured, head-slappingly stupid "motion poster" for the remake of "Carrie."



"Keep Calm And CARRIE On." Because the prom, and because there's a crown on that old British WWII poster that was hanging up next to "The Kiss" on every other college dorm wall a decade ago.

I'd love to know what the logic was in deciding that making your own movie into a joke was the best way to sell this; though I suspect it's something like the resident overpaid Social Media Strategist opining that it would be good for them if Tumblr got on a "Carrie on" viral kick and deciding to start it themselves. Self-meme-ing famously failed to make "Snakes On A Plane" happen at the boxoffice, but at least that was always going to be a throwaway movie. I can't really see deciding that this was the way to go for something that was previously being pitched as a serious film.

Shazbot!

We cannot stop Robin Williams, we can only contain Robin Williams.

Below, the extended trailer for CBS's fall sitcom offering "The Crazy Ones," which appears to compress the entirety of it's pilot episode into five minutes. The premise? Somebody though "Y'know, people seem to love 'Mad Men,' but maybe they'd love it more as a wacky-father/serious-daughter workplace comedy with Robin Williams and Sarah Michelle Gellar:"

Escape to The Movies: "Furious 6"

Stay for the credits.

Intermission talks XBox because reasons.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Furious 6

The Fast & The Europiest

Something Interesting Is About To Happen In The "Avengers" Biz

So. A week after Joss Whedon surprisingly confirms that X-Men/Avengers shared-custody kids Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are being planned for "Avengers 2," apparently enabled by a contract loophole that lets them use these specific characters from the X-Men family (the movie rights to which are owned by Fox) so long as nobody says the words "Mutant" or "Magneto" (he's their dad); Fox and director Bryan Singer have now out-of-nowhere revealed that Evan Peters will be playing Quicksilver in the currently-shooting "X-Men: Days of Future Past."

This is interesting. Maybe.


First things first: Marvel/Disney would have absolutely zero problem with casting a different actor for the part in their movie, so the idea that this automatically means this guy will be showing up in "Avengers 2" is a non-starter to begin with. Besides, "DoFP" is a time-travel movie (supposedly involving lots of time-skipping and alternate-history in the service of cleaning up series continuity and presumably further deleting "Last Stand" and "Origins: Wolverine" from happening) so... yeah, likelihood that we'll see two different actors play a fast-running guy named Pietro in two different movies? Pretty damn high.

For the record: It also wouldn't surprise me at all for Quicksilver to have a really, really small walk-on role in "DoFP" - so small, in fact, that you'd think they perhaps very quickly wrote him into the movie once it was announced that he was to be an Avenger so they could benefit from the free-marketing of fan speculation. (Also, I expect they'll be casting young for the Avengers version of Wanda and Pietro; positioning them as the "unpredictable kid members" of a mostly adult-to-middle-age team.)

That having been said, the logistics of all this are kind of fascinating. My own pet theory (not supported, I stress, by any kind of special "insider info") is that "The Conversation" between Marvel/Disney and Fox about allowing The Avengers and X-Men to be seen holding hands in public is already taking place on some level (likely in the form of a childish staring-contest, but still). If nothing else, QS & SW are a strange choice for the first-announced new addition to The Avengers lineup, re: they aren't particularly popular, non-fans have never heard of them, their powersets aren't all that special and while it's true it gives the team one more woman it's still just two more white people on a team everyone seems to agree could use some diversity.

BUT! If they were allowed to be Mutants, with everything that entails? Suddenly it makes some kind of sense. Part 2 of a genre series is typically "the dark one," where things get complicated and awkward as the post-victory party winds down ("Yay! We blow'd up the Death Star!" "Crap, The Empire is resilient and this universe is actually pretty fractious and complex.") The sole non-upbeat undercurrent of "Avengers" was the idea that S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing and ready to play dirty as a response to a world "filling up" with superhumans, and it's important that the big "coming together" of the good guys happens in-tandem with them rejecting working "for" Nick Fury - even though he kinda sorta manipulated them into it, anyway.

If "Avengers 2" was to (or was able to, rather) explicitly say that the "filling up" of problematic individuals includes the "The Mutant Problem?" (They've already been floating the idea that Thanos won't be the "main" antagonist until Part 3, so there's also that.) Well, that's a really easy road to a darker scenario - the separation of The Avengers as the "good," accepted super-beings versus The Mutants as the "bad" ones people are worried about - and suddenly makes Wanda and Pietro interesting for the team.

The thing of it is, this is all on Marvel/Disney. Fox (and everyone else who owns Marvel movie-rights) would likely kill for their franchises to be declared even tangentially part of the Marvel movie-verse. "Avengers" was bigger than a hit, it was (and remains) a world-wide cultural phenomenon. Basically everyone saw it, the reception was overwhelmingly positive and it's absorption in the common language of pop-culture has been so immediate and all-encompassing that it's third-tier non-costumed supporting characters can now headline television series. If you're running a studio making superhero movies and there's some chance you could connect your movies to this juggernaut in the public eye, it'd be worth almost any price. Fox in particular should be salivating at the idea of being able to knock out a cheapjack X-Men tie-in and score a profitable weekend because it might be part of the "Avengers" story.

The trick of it is, while Fox (or Sony, if we're talking about Spider-Man) would probably meet any reasonable price to "share" the X-Men, it's Marvel/Disney that's in the position to A.) make the offer and B.) say yes or no; and there's really no (financial) reason for them to not just wait out the clock on the other studios running low on cash and just buying the franchises back wholesale so they don't have to share anything. The Avengers are, after all, already worth billions with "just" the six guys they already have - it's not like they stand to lose money if Spider-Man and Wolverine (lets be clear: Wolverine is the only reason the X-Men franchise is worth any money to any studio) aren't in the lineup.

In any case, it's a long way to "Avengers 2's" 2016 projected release date, and Marvel is (in)famous for making a lot of their movies up on the fly while shooting; so there's plenty of time for the situation to change on this. Right now it's a game of chicken, Fox saying "We're using Quicksilver first, so maybe start dealing with us or put up with fansites complaining about an 'actor switch' for your movie" and Marvel likely thinking "Yeah, because everyone was soooo mad that Edward Norton wasn't in Avengers;" but the math probably gets different if "The Wolverine" rescues it's franchise in a few months: Marvel is all about the money, and they know exactly how much of it a hairy forearm rising into the foreground in front of the assembled Avengers* and popping out claws to a familiar "snikt!" before a hard cut to black would be worth as the last shot of an "Avengers 2" trailer.

*Of course, like everyone else I'd LOVE to see the "Wolverine vs. all the Avengers" fight scene - with the caveat that Captain America ultimately knocks him on his ass, then gives him a hard time about how he remembers him being a lot tougher.

"Don Jon"

Below, the trailer for Joseph Gordon Levitt's self-written/directed "Don Jon;" which casts him as a pornography addict who falls for Scarlett Johansson as a woman similarly-addicted... to shitty romantic comedies. Because Mars & Venus and reasons.

In all seriousness, though, it looks REALLY good - I am so psyched for the idea of Tony Danza entering an "aging sought-after character actor" career-phase you have NO idea. I'm just going to assume that casting of two of the best looking people in Hollywood as having "addictions" more generally associated with people who look (regardless of gender) more like me is some kind of meta-joke...

"Man of Steel" Trailers, Once Again

I finally know what date I'll be seeing "Man of Steel," which is a relief because the anticipation on this one has been killing me: Every new thing seen/heard from it has been alternately thrilling/terrifying: So much that looks like they "got it," so much that sounds like they might not have and nothing to change my concerns that while Zack Snyder is the perfect person to direct a Superman movie... the Nolan Bros. don't belong anywhere near the character.

That sense continues with the new trailer, which is more-or-less the "introducing your villains" one. The look and feel of everything is awesome, and Michael Shannon's Zod seems to be as magnificient as I'd hoped... but I'm also getting a bad feeling:


"Clark becomes Superman to fight off an alien invasion by his own people" is a serviceable enough new spin on the mythos, fine," but how many Kryptonians is Zod dragging around with him, exactly? The "one of my citizens" line and the "background details" of the other trailers make it seem an awful lot like they've switched Krypton from "destroyed" to "conquered" in this version - a pointless, asinine revision that J.J. Abrams' abominable "Flyby" script also pulled - though he could also be "ruling" a roaming crew of super-nomads, which has interesting potential (it also occurs to me that we don't even know HOW Kryptonians having super-powers "works" in this version.)

But it's worrisome that they either seem to be junking (or have simply "missed") the quintessential "immigrant story" that's always been underlying this character. Kal-El being one of very few survivors of an advanced, proud culture that's been destroyed and (literally) scattered to the stars is what made Superman not just The American Immigrant generally but The Jewish-American Immigrant specifically. Not necessarily saying new ideas are bad, but this is big stuff to be doing away with and I remain thoroughly unconvinced that the people behind the writing of this have the understanding/respect for the things their tinkering with to be trusted with a full-scale overhaul.

We'll see.

Big Picture: "Secrets of S.H.I.E.L.D."

It's speculatin' time.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Secrets of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Not Entirely Unlikely

Just kinda popped in there...

Click for larger version, obviously.

Help Me Out Here...

The second half of my "Star Trek Into Darkness" review got into spoiler-territory in order to address what I see as some pretty serious flaws, but there's one in particular that I didn't fully discuss - partially because it would've taken too much time and the show ran long as it was, but mainly because I'm not 100% sure that I didn't "miss" some bit of dialogue that would've made this not the ginormous, baffling plot hole that it seems to be.

Obviously, EVERYTHING after the jump is spoiler-territory, including the comments. So read/click through only if you've seen the film and/or really, really want to...


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Okay. The issue I'm having concerns the film's big finale action sequence - which, befitting a Star Trek movie, takes the form of a CGI-assisted parkour foot chase in San Fransisco.

Background: Revealed at midpoint of the film, Benedict Cumberbatch's "John Harrison" owes his superhuman strength, intelligence and healing-factor to the fact that he's actually Khan Noonian Singh, the villain from "Space Seed" and later "The Wrath of Khan;" the leader of a crew of genetically engineered superhumans who got cryogenically frozen and lost in space after starting a big mess called "The Eugenics Wars" 300 years pre-Starfleet. (In the film, though, it's only ever mentioned that he and his crew were superhumans - at one point, Spock pulls "Oh, and they were totally genocidal, too!" out of thin air once Admiral Red Herring has been dispatched and it's time for Khan to be primary antagonist again.) It has also been revealed that Khan's super-blood has the power to cure death, which the crew becomes aware of when Bones injects some into a dead tribble he happens to have around. Anyway...

The setup: Having driven Khan into a rage and causing him to scuttle his warship on Earth by pretending to kill the 72 remaining still-frozen superhumans (they're actually safe aboard the Enterprise,) Spock is informed that the ship was only able to re-start because Kirk elected to climb into the warp-core to repair it manually and is now about to die from radiation poisoning. From there, the climax from "Wrath of Khan" is replayed but in-reverse, with Kirk now dying behind the glass and Spock getting to do the angry "KHAAAAAAN!" yell. Discovering that Khan has survived by beaming into the city, the enraged Spock beams himself down to pursue and kill him. BUT! Bones serendipitously catches sight of his test-tribble coming back to life and realizes that Khan's magical death-curing blood could save the day, meaning that Uhura now has to beam down into the big fight and convince Spock to spare Khan's life. She does, he does, Kirk is fine, Khan is back in his freeze-pod so he can come back in a sequel, the end.

Here's my issue: There are 72 other superhumans, frozen, right there on the ship. Why don't they just use one of them? Why does it need to be Khan? Did they ever specify that having magic death-curing blood is a special thing only for Khan? Because if they did, I missed it. I've heard it suggested that it's possible Khan's crew are not all supermen in this timeline, but A.) That doesn't make sense because this timeline is supposed to have been identical to the original up to the moment Nero came through the wormhole and altered history and B.) Khan specifically says that he and his crew are built for deep-space survival during his big "I'm going to win!" bad guy monologue. Seriously, I cannot figure out how this isn't a massive hole in the story. Anybody?

UPDATE: Someone has pointed out that a throwaway line earlier in the film about not being able to get the bodies out of cryo-sleep without proper codes or somesuch without killing them being an explanation. Good catch, but clearly Bones doesn't have any big issue with their death/injury from improper-thawing (and you CAN get blood from a recently-dead corpse) since he orders the crew to eject a body from a pod so he can use it to keep Kirk's body stable.

And while we're at it... this basically means Starfleet has a cure for death now, right? I mean, they're going to have to either explain-away or readjust and deal with the fact that nobody should be dying of anything in this universe from here on out, since there are now 72 bodies worth of self-replenishing Cure-It-All safely tucked away wherever, yes? Because otherwise aren't we going to be wondering why, if people get killed or mortally wounded in the next movie, they don't just uncork a vial or two of the serum Bones said he made from the blood and get on with life?

And Your Next Two AVENGERS Are...

Long rumored but now seemingly confirmed by Joss Whedon to IGN, joining the team (or at least in the film to some capacity) will be Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, better known as The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. He's basically The Flash if he was a Eurotrashy douchebag, she can manipulate probability - i.e. she can make pretty-much anything happen through "magic" handwaved with psuedo-science. They're fraternal twins, originally villains who reformed and joined The Avengers alongside fellow ex-baddie Hawkeye during the team's first major overhaul (everyone quit but Captain America, leaving him to train a new team of ex-villains.)

And now things get interesting...

Here's why this is kind of a big deal: Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, in the comcis, are Mutants. Supposedly, "all" of Marvel's Mutants are owned as part of the "X-Men Family" by Fox; so they can't show up in any non-Fox Marvel films. Normally, that shouldn't be a problem: "Mutant" in the Marvel Universe essentially means anyone who is a human born with an extra-human sense or ability, so it would not be tremendously difficult to augment them into some other variation on "born like this" (or just give them new origins) for "Avengers 2."

But these aren't just any two Mutants: Despite being overall more-associated with the Avengers franchise (which is why they can be in this at all, Mutant or not) Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch started out as members of The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants... and they're Magneto's children.

Now, sure - that can be written out just as easily as having them be capital-M Mutants, but it also negates most of what would make them novel as members of an ostensible good-guy team. And they're not exactly popular or novel enough for me to imagine Marvel insisting on their presence - nobody really cares about Quicksilver and there are many more-popular Marvel heroines than Scarlet Witch - so Joss Whedon or someone else on the creative side wanted them specifically for this. That's interesting.

Here's the thing: Fox would probably do anything (short of relinquishing the X-rights themselves) to have "their" X-Men franchise be "officially" connected to "Avengers," even tangentially. Suddenly, any random Mutant movie they crap out becomes much close to must-see because "hey, we might need to have seen this for the next 'Avengers' movie!" So the question isn't whether or not Fox would "go for" some kind of shared-custody of the Mutant characters (they probably would,) nor if Fox and Disney/Marvel have already talked about this (you'd best believe they have - everyone who owns a Marvel franchise has been talking about how to get in on the action, FX scheduling is supposedly the only reason you didn't see "Amazing Spider-Man's" OsCorp building in "Avengers.") The only question is whether Marvel is willing to "work something out" or would rather hold back until Fox has a bad year and needs to sell the X-characters back altogether.

I have a suspicion that there's another shoe or three yet to drop on this, especially since there's a LONG time between now and "Avengers 2." But for now, Fox has two "X-Men" movies set for this year alone, and if they're both hits that gives them a slightly stronger bargaining position assuming any bargaining is actively going on (I suspect there is, but you never know.)

Escape to The Movies: "Star Trek Into Darkness"

Second time is not the charm.
(Note: later-half of review has clearly-marked spoilers)

"Intermission" has some Blood Dragon for you.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Star Trek: Into Darkness

Final(?) "PACIFIC RIM" Trailer Hits

I really, really hope that this marks the start of a much bigger push for this movie. Fairly or not, I feel like so much is riding on "Pacific Rim." An original (read: not a sequel, remake, reboot, adaptation, etc) big-budget genre movie? Guillermo Del Toro finally on the cusp of the blockbuster clout he should've had a decade ago? Giant monsters and robots up onscreen with no "apology" for their own existence or attempt to make them palatable to audiences that might turn their noses up otherwise?

If something like this doesn't "succeed," it validates all the worst chickenshit instincts of the current studio-system. "Joe Popcorn" (or whatever the current euphemism is) probably doesn't deserve this movie... but I hope "he" shows up anyway. There's more riding on this than just this.

"Riddick" Trailer

In case you weren't aware, the reason Vin Diesel keeps agreeing to "Fast" sequels is because it's the only way to force Universal to make more movies featuring his "Riddick" character. The new film, simply titled "Riddick," now has a trailer:

FULL Three Minute "S.H.I.E.L.D." Promo Hits!

An extended version of the trailer for Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." series has now hit the web HERE.

This follows the previous 30 second teaser, the 7 second teaser for THAT teaser, and the 2/12 hour teaser released to theaters last year as "The Avengers."

Big Picture: "Mystery Bonks"

This is sort-of about "Star Trek." It's that kinda week.

Also: NEW GAME OVERTHINKER today!

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Mystery Bonks

Fox's "SLEEPY HOLLOW" TV series. Holy. Cow.

I'm an on-record eye-roller when it comes to the Orci/Kurtzman team, not because they so often make bad movies and TV shows but because the bad stuff they make is often so close to being awesome. So much of their output plays like a "sanitized" version of someone else's batshit-nuts brilliant idea; and as I continue to say: A crazy, unwieldy, unworkably ridiculous idea unleashed full-force - even and often especially if the result is spectacularly embarassing - is preferable to competently-executed mediocrity: Please me, horrify me, just don't BORE me.

With that in mind, the trailer for O/K's latest TV effort for Fox, "Sleepy Hollow;" in which Icabod Crane and the Headless Horseman are ressurrected in present-day New England to continue their battle anew. With Dan Brown-style historical conspiracy theories. And machine guns. And it looks AWESOMEly terrible.

Looks like these guys are finally heeding the sage advice of every assistant director on every porno ever: If you're gonna suck, at least suck well:

Sooooo many things I love about this - mostly ironically (because really, this looks soooo fucking stupid) but some genuinely:

Icabod Crane is now some kind of super-agent contracted by George Washington to kill the Hessian brute who becomes the Headless Horseman. LOVE IT... because it's so point-missingly dumb, like something out of an old "Spawn" comic.

"He described the man I saw in PERFECT DETAIL!" In that she saw a man without a head on a horse, and Crane apparently used the standard two-word description for that.

Orlando Jones is in it. Orlando Jones rules.

So is John Cho!

The decade-old "too many Starbucks" joke getting dragged out, again. Um... LA writers? Do your research. If they're in New England, 2/3rds of those are Dunkin Donuts.

Jones calling Icabod "Captain America."

"Turn around and put your hands on your... OH GOD!!!"

Treasure maps? Ancient good vs. evil Witch War conspiracy? "The secret is in Washington's Bible?" So dumb. So beautiful.

Icabod's mission: Thwart armageddon - apparently The Headless Horseman is also one of the Four Horseman of The Apocalypse. Because... that's two supernatural things that everyone knows has the word "Horseman" in them. That's the sort of thing you'd put into a parody of bad Alan Moore-wannabe literary-mashup stuff, and here it is as the hook of a real TV show. Perfection.

The Headless Horseman, wearing an ammo-belt over his Hessian war coat, firing a submachine gun at cops gangsta-style.

Icabod assumes his black female cop partner is a freed slave.

"HEADS! WILL! ROLL!" Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I would love this if it were just a "Funny Or Die" parody of someone's insane pitch for a "Once Upon A Time" bandwagon-jumper, but I think I'll love it even more as a somehow-meant-to-be-taken-seriously actual show. Bring it on.

Close The Blast Doors

There's been fan-scripts and fans-becoming-writers, but this might be the first time in history that a TV series has opted to create a spin-off series and a theatrical movie... effectively based on it's own fan-art.

"Equestria Girls" is a spin-off movie (and apparently also a series pilot) from the rebooted surprise crossover-hit "My Little Pony" cartoon; built on the conceit of the main character dimension-jumping into the human world; where she and the other recurring characters appear as human versions of themselves. If we're going to start building movies around Deviant Art trends, I'll just assume that some other franchise will take "____ If They Were Mega Man Sprites" and "_____ But Everyone Is A Dog."

Not really my thing either way, but I'm familiar enough with both the harmless and decidedly-less-pleasant fringes of "Brony" culture to comfortably predict that this will probably do surprising boxoffice... and that if any of the main character winds up with a boyfriend he's going to be the most frighteningly-hated cartoon love-interest since that guy from the later seasons of "Daria" in certain unfortunate circles of the web.

Full "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Teaser

And now, here it is: The first teaser for "Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.," which effectively frames the show as "'The X-Files' But More Funny And With Those Guys From 'The Avengers.'" The mysterious-man sequence is now unblurred, and we can now clearly see that the unnamed superhuman in question is indeed a black man wearing a hoodie. I still say it's probably Luke Cage.

Gotta chuckle at how they manage to work in ultra-short "cameos" for The Avengers without having to show (and thus pay) the actors associated with them - Thor's hammer, Cap's shield, Iron Man flying, Banner in Hulk-form, etc.

I'm excited about this. There's a lot of fun stuff to mess around with in the Marvel universe that may not need or warrant a full movie or full act in a movie - you could probably get a solid syndication-worthy run of shows JUST out of having them chase B and C-list supervillains around every week.

Screencaps: Who Is This Hero(?) In The "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Teaser?

A moment ago I posted the "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." pre-tease, which opens with a motion-blurred action shot of an unidentified person(?) rescuing a woman from a burning building by jumping out the window and landing safely with enough force to crater the pavement on impact.

Below the jump, some screencaps of the very brief action-shot for a clearer look and possible guesses as to who this might be:

1. Basic window-jump shot, nothing too unusual looking under the circumstances.

2. Little more clear, can see "jumper" separate from "cargo." Tan/gold color blur at play. Iron Man cameo, maybe?

3. Much more defined now. "Cargo" is wearing gray suit and skirt, jumper has gold/tan pants or leggings. Arm of jumper, visibly distinct from white legs (stockings?) of cargo suggest either dark skin-tone or clothing.

4. There's a motion-blur effect on the footage, so this is about as clear as it's going to get: Unidentified red-haired woman in a gray suit being carried by a larger person (likely but not definitely male) wearing what appear to be tan or mustard-colored pants - could be bellbottoms, but probably the wind.

5. Whoever the rescuer is, he's strong/heavy enough to both land safely and do major damage to solid concrete when he lands. Still motion-blurred, but this last one looks about as good as it's going to get for now.

While allowing that the aforementioned motion blur could be further obscuring things, what this looks like is an unknown woman being rescued by a larger and unusually-powerful unknown man of apparently darker complexion. Is this The Hulk? I don't think so - he's not quite "Hulk Big" and I don't think the current Movieverse Hulk runs on the Silver Age comics mechanics of Hulk changing size depending on his mood like the Ang Lee Hulk did. Also, this guy appears to be wearing shoes, and his hair is either blown-upwards or styled in a manner that doesn't scream "Hulk" to me. My (and I'm betting a lot of other people's) best guess? Assuming for a moment that this is a Marvel character and not someone made up for the series, this could be our first glimpse of a live-action Luke Cage. 

A mainstay of Marvel's aggressive (if occasionally awkward) diversity push in the 70s, Cage was a wrongfully-imprisoned black youth who was subjected to experiments in prison (yet another half-formed attempt to recreate the Super Soldier Serum that created Captain America) that wound up making him super-strong and virtually indestructible. You'd think they'd test something designed to that on anyone other than convicts, but there you go. He was mainly popular in the 70s before getting sidelined for a good long while, only to be brought back to the forefront in "Alias" and soon promoted by positive fan response to being a major fixture of the post-Mansion Avengers lineups.

If this is him, it makes a lot of sense: Cage is a street-level guy, doesn't go in for elaborate costumes or gear and his abilities are fairly simple to visualize. He also has (or had) a fun, story-ready gimmick: Cage was New York's resident "Hero For Hire" - instead of going out looking for wrongs to right, he let clients come to him and procure his day-saving services. He'd been previously set to be a recurring character in the "Alias: Jessica Jones" TV series, which never went to air and may or may not have had some of it's assets folded into this project.

Secondary possibility: That the rescuer looks to be of notably darker complexion than the woman could be an illusion of the blur/shooting, in which case that could be anybody. There've been various "official" explanations, for example, as to how Coulson is back; but a popular fan theory going all the way back to "Avengers" has been that the original Coulson is indeed dead and this one is an LMD ("Life Model Decoy," aka "a robot") that will wind up being coverted into The Vision for a future "Avengers" sequel. Some additional tangential "evidence" to that end: Of all the onscreen superheroes, Coulson is most closely associated with Captain America; whose movie featured a hard-to-miss cameo by a certain artificial-man who, in the comics, was used to build Vision's body. It doesn't look like a suped-up Robo-Coulson is making the save here, but it's a possibility sure.

First (Brief!) Tease of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

A "teaser" for Joss Whedon's Marvel TV franchise "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." is set to air during tonight's season finale of "Once Upon A Time." For now, here's the - um... teaser for the teaser?

Egh. Y'know what? There's still enough residual goodwill from "The Avengers" that I can't even be mad about this kind of marketing. Yes, Marvel (and Whedon) are allowed a pass on this - they did the impossible, they earned it.

Previously, everybody's top question was: "How is Coulson alive again?" But now, I'm guessing it's either about to be equaled or passed by a new one: "Who is that (apparent) super-human pulling a rescue at the beginning?" It all goes by pretty fast, and I'm about to do some screencapping to see if it can't be made clearer, but check it out yourself for now:

UPDATED: Screencaps and guesses HERE.

"The Venture Bros" in 8 Minutes

The curse of being a "Venture Bros." fan is that a big part of the show's charm (at this point) is the way it's gradually turned making fun of the self-referential moebius-strip nature of comic books and "cult" genre series (OMG! This suddenly super-prominent character was in the background on that random flashback three seasons ago!) into a functioning continuity that's rewarding in it's own right... which becomes REALLY hard to keep track of since there are such lengthy breaks between seasons.

Fortunately, since the break between seasons 4 and 5 (debuting June 2nd!) was longer than usual, Adult Swim has posted this compressed recap of the important-ish stuff - though what I'm most excited about is the apparent Season 5 returns of Captain Sunshine and Ghost Robot (a ghost living inside a robot, which we are told is completely different than a machine with a soul.)

Escape to The Movies: "The Great Gatsby"

I liked it.

RIP Ray Harryhausen.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : The Great Gatsby

Better Living Through Chemistry

I don't generally get professionally jealous of other people in my industry, but seeing James "AVGN" Rolfe getting to work with Troma founder and "Toxic Avenger" creator Lloyd Kaufman recently got me close - damn, that must have been awesome. But then, James has worked his ass off building his brand and more-or-less inventing a big slice of web video business - if anyone deserves to have things finally start paying off big-time, he does.

In any case, Kaufman is still doing his thing as a vanguard of authentic, no-bullshit independent moviemaking. He and Troma's latest offering, a reboot(?) of "Class of Nukem High" (one of their better 80s offerings, about a High School whose student body is mutated by a leak at the nearby nuclear power plant) officially titled "Return to The Class of Nukem High" has had a teaser up for a bit now promoting the film's scheduled premiere at Cannes 2013 - ULTRA NSFW, but check it out if you haven't already:

Presented With Sincerity

UPDATED: First Images of Megan Fox as April O'Neil in "TMNT"

Hey, Internet? You want borderline-obsessive, Zapruder-esque coverage of a likely-middling movie based on a bunch of toys from the mid-1980s!? Of course you do. Here's the first BTS video of the Michael Bay produced "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie, featuring our first glimpse of Megan Fox as April. Does this meaningless, masturbatory entertainment "journalism" puff-piece tell us anything useful about the movie?

(with apologies for the wonky formatting caused by aol's shitty video embed)


UPDATE: CBM has some higher-quality set pics: Hair has some red highlights (seriously, though - this is the weakest detail to flip out over) and she does indeed have a yellow coat. So... yeah.

1.) She's not a redhead. Everybody lose your shit now.

 2.) No yellow jumpsuit. Not terribly surprising, but interestingly enough the outfit she is wearing in this clip is just a skirt away from the (in)famous "Ravishing Reporter" action figure. Coincidence or fanservice? You decide.

 3.) She's a reporter, which means they really did change that script. The "leaked" screenplay that infuriated fans last year was also allegedly so hated by the producers that it helped scuttle the first incarnation of the project entirely; and reports were that it was either extensively rewritten or even thrown out entirely. In that version, April was primarily onhand as Casey Jones girlfriend, a small-town girl who claims to be on her way to journalism stardom in New York but is revealed to actually have only managed to finagle a job as an intern/gopher. In this video she's clearly playing a TV news reporter (note the microphone) doing some sort of human-interest piece that involves a trampoline. CONJECTURE: New April's arc will be "reporter sick of doing cheezy daytime-news filler, stumbles on Turtles etc. while chasing out-there scoops for legitimacy."

 4.) She may or may not work for Channel 6. The resolution on the video is iffy, but if a few shots the logo on her microphone looks a bit like a "6." That doesn't actually mean anything, other than to indicate that the production may have doubled-down on fanservice for whatever reason.

"I'm The Captain Now"

The next year or so will find Tom Hanks back in American Hero mode in a big way: He's slated to form an Americana moebius-strip by playing Walt Disney in the making-of-"Mary-Poppins" drama "Saving Mr. Banks" soon enough, but first up he'll be "Captain Philips," the real-life captain of a freighter attacked by Somali pirates a few years ago. Directing duties went to Paul Greengrass, so... "United 93. But On A Boat. And With A Happy Ending."

Gump Harder

The (perhaps unwitting) con-job Lee Daniels is running on the old guard movie press is kind of a joy to watch: His penchant for social-consciousness casts him as a helmer of Award Season middlebrow pablum, and the halo-effect of his Oprah connection seems to make many unable to discern that his films are actually sleazy, trashy, batshit-insane exploitation junk of the highest order. Seriously, go back and actually watch "Precious." The only question is whether Daniels himself is a subversive genius in on his own joke or if he thinks his Hallmark-meets-Grindhouse schlock is serious drama, too - the guy is like Tyler Perry's George Stark.

Anyway, Daniels' big movie this year is "The Butler," aka "Black Forrest Gump," aka "We SWEAR This Is a Real Movie, Not an SNL Sketch." Forrest Whitaker stars as a White House butler who has a front row seat to turbulent decades of American cultural change as he serves in the background of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. It already looks completely nuts, mostly due to a rosters of stars running the gamut from disastrously bad casting to ingeniously bad casting (JOHN FUCKING CUSACK AS NIXON!!!) - and this is only the early "hide all the ridiculous Lee Daniels stuff" trailer!

"Ender's Game" Trailer

And so, the countdown begins: Orson Scott Card now just under six months to find his way in front of a camera, microphone or keyboard and create a "sugar tits"-level public-relations nightmare for Summit Entertainment. Smart money says he'll find a way...



I'll admit, there's a certain incredible finality to finally seeing one of the more influential Young Adult scifi novels of the later 20th Century finally get its movie; but taken on it's own... wow this is kind of a bland, lifeless trailer, isn't it?

Apart from fans of the book/series, who is this trailer for? Almost no sense of plot, no context, no real clue as to who the characters are outside of their genre stock-types, not a single piece of action, line of dialogue or even sliver of design-aesthetic that might differentiate it from a thousand other generic scifi pastiches. It's way too dour and nonspecific for the Ender-aged kids who ought be the target demo, but it also dwells too much on the child characters to fool older audiences into thinking this is "Harrison Ford Barks At Middle-Schoolers: The Movie." I'd say it calls to mind the "Wing Commander" movie... but nobody remembers that well enough to call it to mind.

Also... I could be mishearing, but I'm reasonably certain nobody said "Buggers" once. Willing to bet they decided to just not bother trying to make that work. Probably a good decision, overall...

RIP Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen, one of the greatest (and by far the most influential) special-effects masters of all time, died today. So today sucks.

More to come, obviously. But until then, here's a montage of all his famous creatures:

Big Picture: "The Big Spoiler - Iron Man 3"

First things first: RIP Ray Harryhausen. Today sucks.

Alright, then. Let's talk about The Mandarin. Title's not joking, this is all spoilers.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : The Big Spoiler: Iron Man 3

Uwe Boll's "Assault On Wall Street"

Holy. Shit.

German filmmaker Uwe Boll made himself (in)famous via adaptations of video-games so bad they seemed deliberately provocative, then he took that fame and that provocateur attitude and used to it to transform himself into true dyed-in-the-wool modern exploitation filmmaker - i.e. he makes fast, cheap, nasty movies exploiting incendiary newsworthy subject matter to get the audience's attention (this actually seems to be his "real" passion - his actual debut feature was about a school-shooting.)

The kick in the pants, though, is that his non-game exploitation movies are actually pretty damn solid work... for the most part. I know plenty of people who find them in horrifically bad taste, and some of them are... but I just can't deny that they work. "Rampage," in particular, which is a moment-by-moment account of a mass-murderer's commando-style shooting spree in a small town, is seriously chilling stuff made even moreso by really, really good direction.

His newest, "Assault on Wall Street," appears to be a kind of successor - "Falling Down" for the Investment Age: Dominic Purcell stars as an ordinary man who snaps after his life savings vanish during the recent economic meltdown and opts to wage a one-man war on the Wall Street investment bankers he holds responsible. Knowing Boll, the final film will likely strike a perfunctory "right-bad-guys/wrong-actions" tone... but the trailer is essentially selling straight-up "fuck those fat cats!!!" revenge-fantasy. There's an argument to be made that that's pretty reprehensible, maybe even straight-up irresponsible. But this is the kind of aggressively-nasty stuff that true "exploitation filmmaking" was always made of, and I'm perversely fascinated to see how it plays today.

Below: The film's official trailer, and a new Red Band clip dropped by Latino Review depicting a sniper sequence (and demonstrating that, yes, Boll's action-chops for gunplay are the real-deal for those who didn't see "Rampage.") I get the sense this will NOT be the last we hear of this one...



Exclusive Red Band Clip | Assault On Wall Street by latinoreview

Letter From a Man in Boston to The NRA

Gun industry lobbyist Wayne LaPierre had some things to say about my city at his recent fundraiser. I have some things I'd like to say in response. Yes, this will be political - don't want to read it, don't read it.

To Wayne LaPierre and The NRA,

First off, I don't hate you. I don't even really hate what you represent, because what you represent is actually a neutral concept. You do not, contrary to the bombastic language with which you pepper you speeches, represent The Second Amendment. Or The Constitution. Or even simply the nebulous concepts of "Freedom" and "Liberty." What you represent is money; or more specifically the ability to continue making money of a particular collection of companies in a particular industry. You and your organization, cloaked though they may be in the veneer of offering "protection" to those who already own guns, are in fact in the business of making sure that gun manufacturers are able to sell more guns.

I understand that and, what's more, I don't really have a "problem" with it. I myself openly support the actions of various lobbying groups representing the film and video-game industries in the full and complete acknowledgement that a good deal of their flowery prose has more to do with keeping movies and games sell-able than it does with the various Amendments and high-minded ideals they namecheck to make their argument; and I do so because whether or not they "believe" in my rights is not especially important to me so long as their actions benefit me vis-a-vi said rights. (that movies and games are not designed to kill anyone nor have they ever killed anyone whereas that is the sole purpose of the majority of your product is not inconsequential to this discussion, but also not the most important distinction.) I don't take much of a "moral" exception to what you do, at least in theory. I'm a pragmatist and realist: Things are good when they are used for good, evil when they are used for evil.

Or, to put it in the terminology of the make-believe macho movie dialogue which apparently passes as good speechwriting within your organization: "This ain't personal."

I'll come back to your organization's corporate functionality later, since it's not the most substantive thing I wish to raise with you. Don't worry, though, it ties together.

You wondered aloud, in your speech, about how Boston - which you seem to laughably characterize as some kind of firearm-free utopian commune - might be feeling differently about your products place in the world in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombing. Now, I understand your position about such things: You believe, or say that you believe, that tragedies like this can be prevented by the presence of a more heavily-armed citizenry. You imagine that if there had been a greater presence of individuals carrying guns in the area that day, the odds are increased that someone might have drawn on the Tszarnaev brothers and ended the carnage right there. In fact, I understand this viewpoint better than you yourself do; because while you appear to be intellectually-arrested in the fantasy of such logic actually being logical in the 21st Century, I recognize it as your fantasy of a Wild West America that never really existed in the way you believe it did (based on movies and pulp novels) and definitely doesn't exist today.

What, exactly? Do you imagine the presence of guns and gunfighters would've done at the Boston Marathon? To be clear, I'll assume you're talking about armed civilians, since I know how your organization feels about "Federal Troops" and/or The ATF and because American police organizations support the assault-weapon bans and background-checks you now exist to oppose. The two men in question didn't attack with guns themselves (at least not at first - good thing such weapons are so plentiful in the U.S. so as to be easily-accessible by wanted fugitive terrorists, huh?) they used bombs. They didn't announce themselves in the grandiose manner of a suicide attack, they dropped them and ran like cowards. What would a crowd full of present-day Earps and Holidays have done - shoot the bombs?

Oh, wait - bad example. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday were in fact proponents and agents of Tombstone gun-control ordinances so strong they make Beacon Hill's legislature look like "Red Dawn's" Wolverines.

Maybe they could've taken down Tamerlan and Dzhokhar before they had a chance to leave the bombs. That's certainly possible - though since it's still not officially determined that the bombs were remote-detonated and not on simple timers that might only have changed the location of the blasts. Also, how exactly would you have found them in the first place? As we've established, they didn't announce themselves; and carrying a backpack in Boston (yes, even setting it down) isn't the height of suspicious behavior. How, then, would your hypothetical vigilante superheroes have spotted them?

The only answer I can think of is rather nauseating - to me, at least: A crowd dotted with NRA-endorsed wannabe-crimefighters, drawing guns on anyone who "looked like a terrorist." Now, let's not either of us pretend that such goings-on wouldn't be largely acceptable to a certain portion of your organizations' (I use the plural-form here, as I now refer both to The NRA and to The American Right-Wing in general) membership; but I'll afford you the benefit of the doubt that you are not a full-on bigot.Besides, even that kind of bigotry and "othering" wouldn't have helped. The Tszarnaev brothers were not the dark-skinned, bearded boogeyman that American paranoiacs conjure when they imagine The Great Constant Terrorist Threat - they were white guys (literal Caucasians, in fact) with names and (likely) accents that most Bostonians would've likely thought Russian-sounding. And they weren't exactly dressed in Al Qaeda "uniforms;" their midpriced-looking outfits and ballcaps didn't make them "look like terrorists" - it made them look like douchebags, indistinguishable from a hundred thousand other 'bros wandering Boston or any other East Coast metropolis.

But, alright. Assuming that we might both ultimately agree that a plethora of armed Bostonians would not have likely prevented the bombing, there is the other part of your conjecture; wherein you imagine the terror our citizens must have felt when asked to remain in their homes during the hunt for the (armed) terrorists by police - cowering, you seem to imagine, because we don't have guns.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: The idea that Boston (particularly in it's surrounding areas) is an "unarmed" city is laughable. Despite the image we may project and/or have projected onto us, Bostonians aren't "all peaceniks," "all progressives" or even "all liberals" - we're "all Democrats;" big difference. People here who want a gun and can have one (read: they are not themselves violent criminals) tend to have them. Given the neighborhoods Dzhokhar Tszarnaev was scuttling about in, I can safely assure you that the smartest thing he did was not try and kick down anyone's door; as he would've stood pretty good odds of being greeted by a pissed-off Union guy (or Government worker! ::shudder!::) with a photo of Jack Kennedy on the wall and big gun in is hand.

I am not myself currently a gun-owner, but I'm the friend and family of many people who are. I have no "fear" of guns, nor do I regard them as being some kind of powerful entity apart from their users; and I'm definitely not for "taking away" guns from the responsible users whom I count as friends and fellow Americans. In this respect, I am quite typical of Boston.

But then... you know that, don't you? Of course you do. You know that Boston isn't gun-free, it's just not gun-saturated. People who want guns here can and, for the most part, do have them... but said want isn't particularly broad or all-consuming. The fact is, there isn't much in the way of a "gun culture" here; not because some prevailing pacifism, just because of the practical realities of city-dwelling. There aren't a lot of places to shoot recreationally until you get further out from even the 'burbs, and in terms of home-defense more and more of the population lives either in closely-clustered residential neighborhoods or apartment buildings. Police, most of the time, are very close by to a given distress call. In other words, regardless of whether or not such assumptions are correct, the notion of being truly and completely "alone" against a home-invader isn't a persistent "realistic" fear among the majority of people here - and thus the "need" to keep a defensive home-arsenal is a similarly far-off concern. That's not a Boston "thing," by the way - that's a  Modern City Thing.

And there, as you are well aware, is the key to this whole thing.

As I said before, The NRA does not lobby on behalf of gun-owners. They lobby on behalf of gun-makers. They are only concerned with my right to keep and bear arms only to the degree that it means the industry can continue selling those arms to me for profit. And gun-makers have a big problem in that regard, right now - the same problem, by the way, that plagues the Republican Party (and "Conservative" movement in general) to which it has become affixed: America is changing, and they are being left behind.

Guns sell less well (and it's only projected to get worse) in metropolitan areas like Boston (or New York, or LA, etc) not simply because of "regulation" but because of culture and practicality: Correctly or not, more and more people (especially younger people) in such places are less likely to feel that they "need" them and because there's less of a hunting/sport-shooting culture are less likely to want them. The places guns do sell very well are places where the opposite is true: Rural and small-town communities where hunting and sport-shooting are part of the longstanding culture and where law-enforcement manpower is smaller and/or more spread out and thus keeping a rifle or two for home defense sounds perfectly sensible - which, just so we're clear, I agree with: I spend a lot of recreation time in rural New Hampshire; and were I to keep a home there I'd have a gun in it. It only makes sense.

Here, then, is the problem: Like it or not, the "rural America" where the gun industry makes most of it's money is either shrinking, transforming or disappearing altogether - not through some nefarious scheme, but through the simple (and inseperable) facts of economic-change, technological improvement and pop-cultural evolution. The manufacturing and agricultural industries that necessitated the creation of communities that comprised "rural America" have either moved overseas (because that's where new "booms" similar to our "boom" of the past are underway) or transformed into smaller boutique operations to survive. That automotive and agriculture sectors exist at all in The U.S. is largely owed to government aid - tax money paid mostly by urbanized "blue" states used to prop-up otherwise unsustainable industries so as to keep various "red" states from becoming essentially deserts. More and more, rural communities that are thriving are doing so because tech and science companies have moved operations there to take advantage of lowered property taxes - and the longer they are there, the less genuinely (culturally) "rural" the place becomes. I say this without any judgement to whether or not this is a "good" change, merely that it is a change.

Meanwhile, popular-culture has similarly transformed to reflect these economic realities: "The American Dream" for millions of up-and-coming young people - particularly young people seeking degrees and aquiring training in the science, tech and cultural fields that will actually matter in the economy of the near-future - is no longer to get a job that will last a lifetime, marry your High School sweetie, move somewhere quiet and have a bunch of kids. That's not bad dream, I stress... it's just not the dream anymore. For the rising generation of movers and shakers, their American Dream is to work for as many jobs as they need to for mobility and financial security, to be single/childless for longer than their parents generation went (both for money-saving and "we're-living-longer-so-let's-prolong-the-HELL-out-of-our-20s" rationales) and, perhaps most notably, to live as close to vibrant centers of cultural relevance (read: cities) as possible.

American Dream 2.0 is the skyline, not the white fence and the lawn; and the desire for it is so strong (and made stronger by economic reality making it more and more preferable) that whole swaths of what used to be thought of as "slummy" areas of New York, LA and even Boston are being Frankenstein'd to life through what's often derrided as "Hipster Gentrification" - an influx of young people who'll take the "crummy" section of a city over the alternative, just to be get a foothold in The Future. One of the things that means is that the places/populations that don't buy many guns are growing rapidly, whereas those that buy lots of guns are getting smaller. And if you make guns, or lobby for those who do... that's a big problem for your bottom line.

So you see, NRA, I understand you completely. You want to keep making money, your customer base is shrinking, so you need to get less people to buy more product. And so you scare them. You tell them they're lives and freedoms are in danger. You tell them that scaaaaaaary Muslim Terrorists remain a massive, SPECTER-esque global megathreat. You tell them that scaaaaaaary border-hopping Mexican drug-killers are coming for them. You tell them that scaaaaaaaary "urban" gangbangers are coming for them. You tell them that the world as they know it is on the brink of collapse, and that the only way that they can be safe from all this is to buy and stockpile more and more of the products made by the industry you lobby for. And then you tell them that the scaaaaaaaaaaaaaaary Black President is going to come and take those products away unless his political opponents - who also happen to be friendly to your industry - are supported and voted for.

That's what you do, and that's fine. It's your function. Besides, you've already lost the long-game: The country is changing, and the vast majority of those changes mean the eventual end of you and everything you tangentially represent. There will probably always be guns and a gun culture in America, and that's fine by me . But the version of it propped-up by you and your organizations is demographically, culturally and economically doomed. We both know this - that's why you're trying so damn hard to move so much damn product now while you still can - I'm simply more of an optimist because, well, the New & Improved America that's replacing yours happens to be my America.

But go on, tell your tall-tales and make your dishonest speeches... but when you want to use my city and our victims? When you talk us down or mischaracterize us to fuel your ignorant vigilante fantasies? I'm going to call you out on it.

Which I now have.

Go fuck yourself.

Sincerely,
A Man From Boston.

May The 4th Be With You

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The Escapist : The Escapist Presents : The Escapists Blow Up The Death Star!

Escape to The Movies: "Iron Man 3"

Relax, it's fine. Good see it.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Iron Man 3

Douchequake

I'm going to assume that you, dear reader, are among the majority of people who did not bother to watch (or even hear about) "The Impossible" earlier this year; a spectacularly awful disaster-melodrama about how a tsunami briefly interupts a middle-class white family's vacation - killing thousands, but these people got out okay and learned something about themselves so it all works out. Blegh.

Nicolas Lopez's "Aftershock," a survival-horror flick set amid the Chilean Earthquake and guest-starring producer Eli Roth, looks like the exploitation-movie response to that sort of thing. The premise: A bunch of vacationing douchebags get caught up in the quake and try to survive in the aftermath... survival being complicated not only by the destruction and total social breakdown, but by a collapsed prison having released a slew of bloodthirsty felons into the streets with them. 

Obvious vicarious thrill in watching archetypal asshole bros perish horribly, the buzz on this one is that it's some real-deal hard stuff - good old-fashioned "all humans are animals just waiting for the excuse to act like it" nastiness. Color me psyched.

HOLY CRAP! Something From "The Wolverine" That Doesn't Look Boring As Hell!

Snapped from the CinemaCon trailer, this is either Wolverine fighting Silver Samurai or Wolverine fighting some kind of robot presumably in the employ of Silver Samurai. Not sure which, but either way it's finally something cool-looking from this (still pretty dour-looking, overall) movie and almost by default the most visually interesting thing Wolverine has been involved in in the entirety of the "X-Men" movies so far (excepting, obviously, scenes where he might've been onscreen at the same time Mystique was.)

"Violet & Daisy"

Well this looks... different, but not so different that it's not immediately identifiable as yet another "Quirky Indie Crime Movie," though this time fused with the burgeoning "Otherwise-Typical-Teen-Girls-In-Criminal-Scenarios" genre: Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan are the titular hitwomen, James Gandolfini is the "Regular Mob Movie" street-cred, could be fun: