RIP Paul Walker, 1973 - 2013

Confirmed just over an hour ago, actor Paul Walker - likely best known as Brian O'Connor in the FAST & FURIOUS movies - died in a car crash in Los Angeles on Saturday, 11/30. He was a passenger, the car was a Porche belonging to a friend, they were apparently leaving a charity event. He was only 40 years old.


I doubt anyone would try and argue, even now, that Walker was one of the great actors or noteworthy movie-stars of his day. He was always one of those performers who seemed to have come up in the wrong era, and would've worked continuously in the 50s or early-70s when essentially looking like a walking Ken Doll and affecting unironic sincerity garaunteed you steady leading-man work (see: Alan Ladd.) By all accounts he was one of the good guys, and the FAST movies were among those that (eventually) knew exactly how to put him to good use - it's very possible that Vin Diesel's "exotic" pan-racial ubermensch character wouldn't have "popped" so notably in that franchise without Walker onhand as the "regular guy."

But he had an active career beyond that series, one that yielded as couple of bona-fide (if little-seen) classics that suggest he would've had a strong career heading into middle age as a character actor "handsome mature badass" type;" the unquestioned masterpiece of which was 2006's mind-bending pitch-black crime thriller RUNNING SCARED:



I'm also very partial to "EIGHT BELOW," where he played the main human component in what's effectively a wilderness-survival movie primarily starrting a group of dogs trapped alone at the South Pole.



He also had HOURS due out for mid-December, which if nothing else features a particularly novel twist on the "ticking clock" in the form of a baby hooked up to a life-support device that needs to be manually re-charged once every three minutes:



He was also active advocate for the preservation of endangered shark species, and operated the humanitarian aid group Reach Out World Wide.

Escape to The Movies: FROZEN

This is the year when something genuinely subversive got made in the form of a Disney Princess(TM) movie.

Spoiler-free review HERE (and embedded below.)

And here's where we start spilling ink on all those BIG SPOILERS:

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Frozen

All Three AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Villains (Possibly) Revealed...

...and do I even need to say it?

I'm putting the actual image (which if fake is a pretty good fake scooped from Twitter by ComicBookMovie) after the jump, because one of the three is still not "officially" announced even if it's the least surprising thing possible. Suffice it to say, sanding The Rhino and Electro - two of the most interestingly-designed iconic Spider-Man villains, easily - down to "Man In Hoodie" and "Boring Robot" is kind of an accomplishment in and of itself. "Different" is one thing - this is just boring.

Hit the jump for the "spoiler"...

Part of why I'm disinclined to think of this as a fake is the work that'd have to go into it: Make the fake image, print it out onto parchment-style poster and hang it in a plausible location.

In this case, the wallpaper screams "hotel conference room," which would suggest this was probably snapped at a merchandising meetup - i.e. "here's what you'll be putting onto lunchboxes and party-plates." Therefore, it's possible for this to be a "real" poster but not a final poster. I imagine it's pretty close, though.

The less said about Electro the better, at this point. I know that Rhino is here being drawn from Ultimate Marvel's R.H.I.N.O. concept... and I don't like it here, either. It really is amazing that the entire "Ultimate" experiment didn't yield a single not-shit new idea outside of the Samuel L. Jackson gag. Speaking of which, it looks like you can see a closer shot of Green Goblin's face on the billboard/screen in the upper right-hand corner - the gossip on this one is that A.) it's actually Harry Osborn who becomes the Goblin this time, and B.) this will be "Ultimate" Green Goblin - who's basically a less-interesting version of The Abomination.

BIG PICTURE: "Dog, Gone"

So here's a thing that happened:

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Dog, Gone

SON OF GOD Trailer Will Make Your Morning

Remember that cheeseball Bible miniseries from Roma Downey and company that the press felt obliged to pretend was a really big deal earlier in the year? Well, they've re-cut and added scenes to the New Testament parts and are releasing the result as a theatrical feature called "SON OF GOD."

The trailer is pretty (unintentionally amusing) on it's own, just for the spectacle of seeing the first Jesus Movie where Christ is being played using all the same "off" verbal tics and affect that people have been using to play "Christ-like" figures (think Neo) for a couple of decades... but... that last line. Oh my... that last line...

That Was Unexpected

In case you were wondering what the #BRINGBACKBRIAN thing exploding social-media overnight was all about, FoxTV has released this official (unlisted) video (SPOILERS)



So... yeah. Prevailing theory seems to be that this is a long-ball gag to pay off next new episode or maybe some sort of lead-in to the rumored Family Guy feature film.

Escape to The Movies: THE HUNGER GAMES - CATCHING FIRE

Here's my one-finger salute.

Intermission: "Franchise Dos & Don'ts"

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

MUPPETS: MOST WANTED Trailer

A spiritual-successor to THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER? You have my attention.

UK ROBOCOP Trailer Is Slightly Better...

...in as much as it makes the film merely look like a pointless, bland "modernizing" of the original; as opposed to the "eye-gougingly horrible shit" approach taken by the two U.S. trailers. Still, I could've gone on living quite contentedly having never seen Robocop do the three point landing bit.

Catching Up

Wow, who had a busy few days? Bob did. Here's some of what might've been missed while I wasn't posting:

SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD - REVIEWED for The Escapist (yeah, I'm doing this now)

AGENTS OF SHIELD: "THE WELL" - RECAPPED.

MARVEL'S NETFLIX SHOWS - Um... Talked About For Pageviews!!!

"CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS" - On The Game OverThinker!

FXX To Essentially Become THE SIMPSONS NETWORK (Plus Other Stuff) In 2014

So... remember how FX - Fox's barely-watched teen/college-age basic cable channel - spun off a sibling network called FXX earlier this year? If so, remember wondering what sense that made, given how FX doesn't really even have enough content for one channel as it is? Well, now we have our answer: THE SIMPSONS needed a cable home.

And just like that, the basic cable landscape just got shook the fuck up.



Okay, briefly: A few months back, the magic-number of years and money passed for 20th Century Fox to put THE SIMPSONS up for cable syndication deals. This previously wasn't possible, because the syndication deals for the series were struck long enough ago that it was still not uncommon for network syndication contracts to include agreements that kept the series off of cable competitors. Hence why you haven't seen, say, TBS, TNT or USA using this show to fill rerun-blocs like they do with LAW & ORDER, HOUSE, FAMILY GUY, NCIS, etc.

But now that's over, and FXX has won the very competitive bidding war and can now run all 530 episodes from THE SIMPSON's first 24 season (subsequent seasons will become available as they conclude on Fox) whenever and however they wish on the channel. Even if you're in the "it hasn't been good since Season 10!" camp, even just that would a crop of well over 200 episodes to work with. And they have precisely zero incentive to not run this massive backlog of content from one of the most recognized and popular multimedia properties of all time as often as they possibly can.

The "dirty" secret of minor cable nets like FX/FXX (or USA, TNT, TBS, etc) is that they pull serious ad revenue by booking blocs of familiar "comfort food" TV reruns (either one show or similar shows, see: USA's daily LAW & ORDER: SVU marathons) largely on the calculation that people who keep their sets on all the time just for background chatter will just leave that channel running as they go about their home-stuff. THE SIMPSONS - whatever you may think of it now or previously - could not be more perfect for this: It's colorful, it's immediately recognizable, it's family-friendly and thus can be on at any time of day, etc. Hell, add in the obvious 90s Nostalgia factor and it's also the most ideal possible fit for the college/stoner/work-from-home "overnight programming" time-slots... which is why if you've got money tied up in Comedy Central or Adult_Swim, you are not about to have a happy morning.

The "special" programming possibilities are staggering, from ratings/ad-rev perspective. Consider: On Halloween, FXX could run all 23 "Treehouse Of Horrors" specials as a day-long marathon - I could see people building Halloween parties around that. Every Sideshow Bob story? Do-able. Smithers-centric marathon on Secretaries Day? A Moe Marathon? Holiday episodes? Hell, you don't think legions of devoted SIMPSONS fans wouldn't make lucrative "live tweet this" events out of, say, Bumblebee Man Night? Any half-decent programmer should be salivating at how easy this would make their jobs.

The deal also gives FX's On-Demand arm, FXNow, exclusive streaming rights to every episode - which, yes, likely means you'll be able to watch any of the 530 whenever you want on TV, mobile, PC, whatever.

My only immediate question is what (if anything) they plan to do about the significantly large number of episodes that were produced pre-HD. That handily includes all of the "Classic Seasons" and a good deal of the Silver Age, and its apparently why some network syndicators have dialed back on re-airing those because they worry people will be turned-off by non-HD visuals. Will they do an optimizing-pass on the classic seasons to make them HD-ready?

Heaving Is For ReEEaauggGgGGhhLlll...!!!

In 2003, 3 year-old Coulton Burpo nearly died during an emergency appendectomy. When he came to, he started telling people that he'd had a near-death experience and had gone to Heaven, where he'd ridden a rainbow colored horse with Jesus, met magically de-aged versions of people's dead loved ones and brought back a message from his own miscarried would've-been sister.

Oh, and not that you should read ANYTHING into this minor detail, but Coulton's dad Todd is a pastor (shocker!) who transcribed the kid's "account" into a bestselling book, which (amazingly!) the Burpo Family has been able to expand into a hugely successful ministry movement; because apparently American "pop-Christianity" wasn't embarrassing enough without stadiums full of clueless twits literally swaying in thrall to a not-even-Biblically-Correct spew of pablum from an oxygen-deprived 3 year-old.

And now it's a movie, starring Greg Kinnear (why?) as Todd. Interestingly, the trailer (maybe also the movie?) seems to leave out the detail of this guy already having been on Heaven's marketing team - which is kind of a weird detail to leave out of something like this...



I like how the trailer, while downplaying the proselytizing aspect (presumably the film will take a "true or not, isn't it INSPIRING!!!???" track since it's aiming to be a mainstream sort of thing) none the less manages to cram us much Christian Movie stock-iconography into the frame as well: Heartland sunsets? Firefighters? Soldier funerals? All that's missing is Kirk Cameron and a 1-800 number.

Yesterday on Twitter I got into a bit of a "thing" with the Reddit Atheism crowd, suggesting that they might want to ease up on their typical behavior (and maybe while they're at it those obnoxious "nyah nyah!" holiday-themed billboards) when it comes to Aronofsky's NOAH movie. Well, regardless of how I feel about Internet Atheists... even the douchey-ist of douches can have a purpose, and stuff like this is theirs. Have at it, fellas.

Escape to The Movies: MAN OF TAI CHI

"Finish him!"

ALSO: "Intermission," in which I probably make some movie critics grumpy.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Man of Tai Chi

MALIFICENT Teaser

It's kind of weird that Disney - named for a man who more-or-less invented the modern American concept of consumer-nostalgia - seems to have only figured out within the last decade that there are ways to mine it's back catalog other than the perpetual re-release cycle. MALIFICENT, for example, is a two-fer: Part live-action remake of SLEEPING BEAUTY, part spinoff/prequel giving as "tragic origin story" [eyeroll.gif] to its iconic villainess:



Someone is going to have to explain to me how an infodump of background-detail actually helps this particular character beyond getting her Disney Store merch to move a bit faster. The idea of giving Disney bad guys franchises of their own to go be entertainingly evil in - PG-rated versions of slasher/monster "villain as main character" series, basically - is a good one... but Malificent's whole appeal in this pantheon is that she's really the only straight-out Satanic "evil for evil's sake" major heavy Disney ever bothered to generate.

Seriously. Even Scar, Ursula and Jaffar at least have political "seize the throne" power as goals. Cruella DeVille had vanity. The Wicked Queen had both. Captain Hook wants revenge. Malificent is their "pure evil" baddie - there's no motivation for what she does in the story beyond what's played as feigned-outrage over a minor sleight, and she never seems to have a bigger goal beyond "feels good to be bad." That black-pit lack of depth and nuance is entirely where the interest lies.

Honest Trailers does MAN OF STEEL

With it's Blu-ray release now upon us and a surprisingly early amount of data about the sequel starting to hit, did we really need one more "fuck you!" to MAN OF STEEL?

Apparently, yes we did:

Big Picture: WHO WAS THAT IN THOR 2?

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Who Was That in Thor 2?

Is This GRIMLOCK?

The assumption for awhile has been that The Dinobots would be the new showpiece toys characters in the fourth Transformers movie, and I mean before they were officially calling it "TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION." Now, JoBlo.com (yes, I'm aware that they finally took the "Chud meets Maxim" routine revoltingly far a few months back - but a source is a source) says they've snapped some merchandising art that appears to show our first look at Dinobot leader Grimlock in his T-Rex alt-mode... and that's apparently the newly-redesigned Optimus Prime riding on his back.

I'll say this much: You have to be pretty bad at... well, everything if you can fuck up as simple a concept as Robot Dinosaur (car-robots are actually quite easy to fuck-up: just look at the Go-Bots) ...and it doesn't look like they fucked this up. I mean, I'm sure his robot mode looks just as bad as all the other live-action Transformers, but this looks about like it should look.


Assuming that this isn't just crappy merch-art that couldn't be assed to keep to scale, by far the most interesting thing about this is that Grimlock appears to be about 2 1/2 to 3 times larger than a real T-Rex, which Prime (going by the previous films) would be either at eye-level with or a bit taller when it's hunched-over like that. All the Autobots are supposed to be getting major design-overhauls for this one, which is supposed to be a break from the story and human characters from the first three (no one has seen a good image yet, but the chatter has been more solid-looking bots with fewer moving-bits and exposed parts and they've said Prime is blue now) but Prime was confirmed to still be a truck and even if not it's hard to believe they'd be shrinking him down to near human size. The simpler answer is likely that Michael Bay is exactly the filmmaker who would look at dinosaurs and say "No, no - we need to make them BIGGER!"

Against my better judgement, I'm holding out a certain amount of hope for this one. I really do regret the immature cheap shots I took at Bay (absolutely as a person and, to a lesser extent, as a filmmaker) back when Escape to The Movies was still finding it's voice; and "PAIN & GAIN" was a potent reminder that whatever you think of his aesthetic predilections he really is something when he wants to be. The previous three Transformers movies all failed at least in part because of the tug of war between the Amblin-wannabe Sam story he was stuck with and the stuff that actually seemed to interest him - maybe (maybe!) now that that's over with (Mark Whalberg is the new human lead) this will finally "work," even if it still won't likely be the Transformers movie some are still hoping for.

Escape to The Movies: THOR - THE DARK WORLD

Good, maybe moves a little too fast.

ALSO: So long to Blockbuster.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Thor: The Dark World

Here's The American MISS UNIVERSE Contestant Dressed As OPTIMUS PRIME

The Miss Universe Pageant held it's preliminary National Costume Show a few days back, a pre-pageant publicity event where the contestants show off early builds of their outfits for the "National Costume" portion of the event - aka "dress up as the Sexy Halloween Costume interpretation of your country's national identity." You can imagine how this is supposed to go: Miss Sweden as a Viking, Miss Denmark as The Little Mermaid, etc.

Well, pictured at your right: Miss USA Erin Brady in her national costume interpretation of... Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots faction of The Transformers. Which were, of course, were Japanese toys - but that's really the least silly thing about this, isn't it?

The pageant itself will be held on Saturday, so there's presumably some time for them to possibly get her into something else... but I kind of hope they don't. This is us, America. Might as well just wear it.

Here's Another ROBOCOP Trailer

Well, this still looks like shit. Nice to know some things are constant.



At least we've now got some kind of new-ish story to work with: In this version, OCP makes it's money selling drones to every country but the United States; which apparently has either a law or at least a big cultural apprehension toward the use of robotic security within its borders ("Robophobia" waka waka waka fuck you.) and Robocop is a way around that: Ostensibly an augmented-human with bonus "second lease on life for a cripple" sob-story that's actually little more than a corpse being remote-controlled by OCP and tricked into thinking it's making its own decisions. But then he remembers to be human in time to get in elaborate (and PG-13 friendly!) CGI battles with other robots - i.e. exactly the sort of stuff the original movie devoted two entire sequences to making fun of.

Amusingly, the idea that near-future America is still considered a really important consumer market to "crack" immediately makes this a more optimistic movie than Verhoeven's film. This will be out next year, so everybody remember to get just as psyched as you did for "The Thing" and "Total Recall," both of which I'm sure we all have on fondly-displayed Blu-Ray and watch at minimum once or twice a week.

MARVEL'S DEFENDERS To Netflix

Where are all the black people, differently-abled and (other) women in the Marvel Universe? Netflix, as it turns out. Today's big news: The ubiquitous streaming service will follow-up it's year of turning the TV drama game upside-down with the breakout mega-success of "House of Cards" and "Orange is The New Black" by getting into the superhero game with Marvel/Disney.

The plan is produce four seperate series (each with a 13-episode initial run) based on Luke Cage (black guy, really strong) Iron Fist (white guy, does kung-fu) Jessica Jones (former superhero, now a private detective) and Daredevil (blind, also a defense attorney); and a team-up "miniseries event" that will bring the four together as THE DEFENDERS (the name is borrowed from a hodgepodge 70s/80s Marvel group that randomly tossed together Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer for no particularly sensible reason.) The rational for all this is almost certainly to be that these are all regular/"street-level" heroes who

So, basically it's "The B-List Avengers" as a streaming content-dump. But it's also a canny move that makes the Marvel brand immediately part of the huge story that is the rise of the Netflix model as a viable platform for serial television - they're now the streaming action-show brand. The characters are all well chosen, since none of them generally have the kind of adventures (on their own) that would befit a singular big blockbuster but might work better handling 13 smaller-scale scenarios an hour at a time.

Presumably they'll rope one or two of The Avengers into a walk-on for the publicity at some point (Devin at BAD thinks it's plausible that Jones might debut as her superhero self "Jewel" on "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D" first, which makes a lot of sense) but I wonder if this might start to work like a franchise farm-system; where if (for example) Luke Cage is the breakout hit we'll see him called up to the majors for "Avengers 2" (or 3)?

Sounds interesting, at least. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to light a candle for whatever unfortunate mid-level guy at Warner Bros/DC is currently dodging office equipment thrown by a boss bellowing "WHY DIDN'T YOU THINK OF THIS???"

The Big Picture: BAGGAGE

Let's talk about criticism.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Baggage

Tyler Perry Has Made a Christmas Movie With Larry The Cable Guy

"And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon upon him, his name was Death, and Hell followed with him." -- Revelations 6:8

Post by Tyler Perry.

In all seriousness, though - this is sort of interesting in the way that some of Perry's projects are once you stop regarding them as films and start regarding them as "found art;" or some kind of anthropological discovery. Drafting Larry The Cable Guy into this (the story: Madea tags along with a friend to surprise-visit her daughter at Christmas, where they're surprised to find said daughter has a white boyfriend with wacky redneck relatives) sound ridiculous for approximately 30 seconds, then it makes perfect sense.

Also, this (teaming with Dan Whitney aka Larry) seems to be the first time I've seen Perry acknowledge or actively court the unexpected crossover-appeal his movies have had with some more conservative white/rural audiences that typically wouldn't have "black films" on their radar. And his presence will be (literal) Christmas Present to white hipster movie-geeks who're "ironic fans" of Tyler Perry movies but might sometimes worry that they might unwittingly slip from "clever urbanite snarking at bad movies" to "clueless white person who doesn't get some idiom of black culture OMG I'M TURNING INTO MY PARENTS AND I MOVED ALL THE WAY TO WILLIAMSBURG TO PREVENT THAT NOOOOOO!"

This will be out December 13th, with another round of "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!!??" reports on it's "unexpectedly" large boxoffice take from industry news sites who still haven't grasped that there are indeed large economically-significant audiences outside their immediate readership to follow on Monday the 16th.

Escape to The Movies: ENDER'S GAME

Not so good.

Also, Let's Watch The WINTER SOLDIER Trailer.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Ender's Game