Oh Japan, don’t ever change.
But there’s no reason this idea can’t succeed in the U.S. Why not have Freddy Kruger, Leatherface, Jason or Pinhead throw out the first pitch? Granted, this still wouldn’t be enough to get me to watch baseball…
In related news: Hello Kitty Ringu products.
Today is the birthday for Dwight Brown of Whipped Cream Difficulties, whom I’ve known since God was a corporal. Happy birthday, Dwight!
On the birthday theme, here’s a viral teaser trailer for Prometheus promoting Weyland Industries’ androids, that’s so straight it’s almost not creepy. Which makes it that much creepier:
Plus an imaginary TED talk from Mr. Weyland himself.
Last Saturday I was over at A.T. and Carol’s house watching a Japanese science fiction action film called Returner (imagine every big budget American science fiction film between 1980 and 2000 being jammed into a blender and set to frappe and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the plot elements). It was fine if you didn’t mind the complete lack of originality, but we watched it because I thought it might be the one I saw a clip from a year or two ago. The problem is, while my memory of the clip is fairly clear, I can’t remember sufficient details to find it via a Google search.
In the clip I saw, people were fighting some freaky looking monsters that were obviously some sort of CGI (about the same level of the CGI in Returner, i.e. better than the Skiffy Channel’s cheap monster movies, but not as good as a major U.S. release). I think the monsters were sort of pale and slightly taller than human sized (but not multistory kaiju sized monsters). It was live action, not anime. And they were fighting in some sort of open, brightly lit interior area, like an atrium, or foyer, or perhaps somewhere in a museum. And the monsters weren’t guys in suits and didn’t look anything like the monsters on Ultraman, etc.
This should be enough to find the clip again, but it doesn’t seem to be. Maybe it wasn’t a movie, but part of a TV show. And maybe it wasn’t from Japan, but Hong Kong or South Korea. Or maybe Taiwan. (But not the Philippines. Probably.) And maybe they weren’t monsters, but aliens. Or maybe demons. Beings from another dimension? And I thought I saw it on Fark, but couldn’t find it when I searched there. Maybe it was linked from comments in the thread?
Movies I know it’s not:
Any ideas? It’s driving me to distraction…
Here’s a film I’ve never heard of, that never got a U.S. theatrical release, that cost some €25 million to make, that sounds not just like a train wreck, but like horrifying, misconceived, epic train wreck.
The premise, from IMDB:
Cheyenne, a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his retirement embarks on a quest to find his father’s persecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now hiding out in the U.S.
Well, they doesn’t sound very promising right off the bat. But then you see who’s playing the lead role:
That’s right: Sean Penn, 50-something EMO rocker. That moves it from merely bad to legendarily bad. You look at the IMDB listing and think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.” And then you watch the trailer:
And think: “Well, it has David Byrne playing himself. That might be the only thing about this film that doesn’t suck.”
This may be the most ill-conceived film involving Auschwitz since Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried.
But unlike The Day the Clown Cried, This Must be The Place was actually released. And I’d be willing to watch either of them once.
Once.
Edited to add: Though it’s played in Europe and Sundance, it doesn’t seem to have had a general U.S. release, so it might still pop up at art houses across the country this year.
It does seem to have gotten mostly good reviews from the kind of people who give films like this good reviews…
Two names that are not otherwise paired together.
Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis (and, with Mike Rutherford, the only member through all the band’s lineups) is 62 today. In celebration, here’s a live version of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”:
Director Tarantino turns 49 today, which gives me a chance to talk about his film Django Unchained, an antebellum slave revenge fantasy that looks like looks like a cross between Mandingo and, well, Kill Bill. No trailer yet, but since it’s Tarantino, we know won’t be screwed up by any of that annoying political correctness. Also, damn, look at that cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, James Remar (Dexter’s dad), Don Johnson (in the “Designated John Travolta Career Resurrection Role”), Sacha Baron Cohen, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the bad guy.
I fully expect it to rock.
John Belushi’s 30th on March 5.
H. P. Lovecraft’s 75th on March 15.
I think it’s safe to say that the names of those two have seldom been linked together…
The second trailer for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is out:
When this was first announced, it was disclosed that it was set in the Alien universe, but it wasn’t clear whether the xenomorphs themselves would make an appearance. After this trailer, I feel pretty safe in saying that they will.
Howard Waldrop and I will review this when it comes out.
Over at Locus Online. I liked it more than Howard did…