Do we need really another go-round explaining all the problems with Prometheus?
Why, yes. Yes we do.
Which is why I’m linking to this Prometheus Captain’s Log, not least for this line: “Weyland Corporation must not give a crap about this mission since they hired Insane Clown Posse to be our science team.”
If the review Howard and I did of Prometheus wasn’t enough to warn you away, here’s a spoiler-filled and NSFW list of all the questions regarding various plot idiocies in the movie, some we covered, some we haven’t. Enjoy!
Over at Locus Online. It wasn’t as good as we hoped it would be.
And it looks every bit as much fun as it sounded:
Here’s Jon Hopkins haunting theme from the excellent science fiction film Monsters, featuring perhaps the climactic moment of the film. (Howard Waldrop and I reviewed it, and I highly recommend making an effort to see it.)
I defend this as Shoegazer mainly on feel; others may categorize it as electronica or ambient, but I think it falls between those two. Available on iTunes.
I’ve gone from being deeply annoyed at 3D to being ambivalent about it. The 3D in Alice in Wonderland was actively annoying, and that in Thor disappointing. However, the 3D was just fine in Hugo and The Avengers, which suggests that the secret to having a successful 3D film is: A.) Film it in 3D from the start, and B.) Use it for films that don’t suck.
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is coming out next week, and Scott isn’t ambivalent about 3D at all. He loves it:
Also: Interesting tidbits about the movie, and why it’s always better to film live rather than using CGI.
I almost missed the news that Jonathan Frid, who starred as vampire Baranabas Collins in the original Dark Shadows, died April 13 (Friday the 13th). It’s tempting to say that he died after seeing the trailer for the Tim Burton version.
I have extremely vague memories of watching the original when I was very young (including one scene where characters were trapped in a web and menaced by a giant spider that, even to my 5-year old self, looked incredibly fake), but I was never a devoted fan of the original series. Even so, it was obviously a very interesting pop culture artifact, a failing soap opera that desperately threw in a stage actor playing a vampire that turned it into a sudden cult hit.
Even so, I have to wonder why Tim Burton decided to camp it up like the movie version of The Brady Bunch. They few elements it shares with the original are so attenuated that he could have made the same “18th century vampire out of water” movie and changed a few names without calling it Dark Shadows, and since it stars the always-watchable Depp it would still have made money.
I can only imagine how real fans of the series must feel.
It’s sort of ironic that in the late 1960s, Batman was camp and Dark Shadows was melodrama, and now in 2012, Dark Shadows is camp, and The Dark Knight Rises is drama. And we all get ready for the next turn of the wheel…
In a new land speed record, Mark Kelly had our review up at Locus Online about thirty minutes after I mailed it to him.
And anything that pushes The Hasslehoff Recursion further down the page is a blessing for the sanity of others…
Oh. My. God.
I’m finishing Howard and I’s review of The Avengers, and I stumbled across this: a TV movie starring The Hoff as Nick Fury.
How bad is? IMDB gives it a 3.5. And the footage looks even worse:
How bad is it? Hasslehoff may be the least sucky part of the film.
Yeah. That bad.
And speaking of things involving Hasslehoff that are painful to view—
No! You wouldn’t!
Yes. I would.
I would say that Marvel has a good idea exactly what audience it’s trying to draw to The Avengers:
(Actually, I always thought her Ghost World co-star Thora Birch was hotter.)
Since Howard and I will be reviewing The Avengers this weekend, I will forbear pointing out how underpowered Black Widow and Arrow Guy are compared to the rest of the team…