Top 10 Secret Celebrity Scientologists
A couple I already knew about, but a bunch that I didn’t. Who knew Cracked was making a comeback?
Archive for May, 2007
Star Wars Weekends Airport Posters
Here are some great posters that’ll be hung up in Orlando International Airport advertising the Star Wars Weekends at The Disney-MGM Studios.
Apocalypto
Apocalypto was so good that it almost made me forget Mel Gibson was a douchebag. I hope the man keeps making movies. The man knows action.
I think my enjoyment of the movie was helped in great deal by the Filmspotting review that let me know exactly what to expect. It didn’t disappoint.
I looked the movie up on IMDB and in the trivia section, there’s this:
- During the scene where Jaguar Paw lands on a field full of dead bodies, while escaping from the headhunters, we can see a frame that was added completely out of context. This frame shows a man dressed like the comic character Waldo, laying amongst the dead.
I thought someone had just slipped something past the IMDB people, but I went back and checked the scene frame by frame. Not only is it there, it’s center frame at the end of the scene.
Hit the jump to see ApocaWaldo.
100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers
Here’s a Youtube clip with 100 different quotes from 100 different movies featuring the numbers 1-100. How many can you get?
I generally don’t watch a movie more than once, but it’s the movies I’ve seen at least twice that jumped out instantly. Plus the ones I saw recently. I don’t think either of things is very insightful, but oh well.
Hit the jump for my guesses. There’s no answer key yet but I’m fairly confident.
Mmm…Designer Beef…
Chicago restauranteur David Burke bought a Black Angus Bull for $250,000 whose offspring are now served as steaks at his restaurant Primehouse. Time to make a trip out to Chicago.
John Stamos has a Weird Belly Button
It’s simultaneously innie and outie. He shows it around 2:10.
Car Chase Marathon #2: Duel
Movie: 3/5
Chase: N/A
Even though Duel was excluded from the Hollywood Saloon car chase list that inspired this marathon because it was a feature length car chase, I wanted to see it because it was Spielberg’s first movie. The movie itself is entertaining but is packed with enough cheese (ah, voiceover, you’re a fickle mistress) that I found myself bored enough that I couldn’t rate it higher. This version of the movie runs 90 minutes, 16 minutes longer than the original 74 minute cut that was shown on TV. Spielberg expanded upon the original in order for it to be released overseas (apparently 90 minutes is/was the minimum). I wonder if I would’ve enjoyed the shorter cut better.
Visually, the film is stunning, especially when you consider the time he had to shoot it (10 days) and the budget (it was for TV after all). The shot of Dennis Weaver standing exasperated in the middle of the road, trying to make sense of the madness, is so iconic that it’s a wonder that it was probably cut away from to a dog food commercial. Spielberg talks at length in the extras about the cheats he used to accomplish the sense of speed on the truck which was, in reality, not all that fast. He did it so well that it never occured to me (except in the very few shots where it’s obviously sped up, something that Spielberg claims that was an unintentional result of a malfunctioning camera) that I was being misled. I just thought they souped up the vehicle for the film.
The aforementioned extras make this film required viewing. There’s no director’s commentary but instead there is a lengthy interview with the Spielberg of today discussing what Duel meant at that point in his career, what it took to make it and how it has informed nearly everything he’s done since. Particularly interesting is how the choice of never showing the driver of the truck and thus taking advantage of the fear of the unknown, an idea originating with screenwriter Richard Matheson, informed a lot of Spielberg’s later work, most notably Jaws. In fact, there’s a shot in the final moments of the film when the truck is destroyed (did you think it was going to end differently?) that directly inspired the death of Jaws, from the use of sound to the exact shots. Even Spielberg movies that would seem entirely unrelated to the unstoppable-killing-machine genre, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark owe a lot to Duel.
There are a few other extras including another interview with Spielberg focusing on his reluctant early work in television that resulted from his being shunned as the youngest director ever contracted at a studio (by Sidney Sheinberg, the guy who wanted Brazil to have a happy ending and Back to the Future to be called Space Zombies from Pluto, a disaster that was narrowly avoided with the help of…Steven Spielberg) and an interview with the screenwriter Roberth Matheson that I didn’t make it all the way through since it’s revealed that not only is Dennis Weaver’s character cheesily named Mann, but in the original short story the movie was based on, the truck driver’s name was Keller. Ugh.
If you’re at all interested in how Spielberg became what he is today, pick up this DVD and watch the extras back to back with the movie. It’s well worth it.
Rifftrax
Rifftrax is the second-coming of MST3K. Produced by Mike Nelson and often featuring Kevin Murphy (Tom Servo, Professor Bobo, etc.) and Bill Corbett (Crow, Brain Guy, etc.), it’s DVD commentaries for awful contemporary movies such as Star Wars Episode 1 and not-awful (but certainly deserving of mocking) movies like Lord of the Rings.
I thought I had mentioned it before, but the reason I bring it up now is that they threw a curve ball: the Rifftrax for the new Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory features Mike Nelson and…Neil Patrick Harris?! Now that’s intriguing. I need a second Netflix queue just so I can rent these movies without shame.
Walter B Strikes Back
Bruce Willis, in a stunning PR move, is posting on Ain’t It Cool News’ talkback. All of Most of the black posts are him (the ones posted by Walter B), and yes, it is him. Even more impressive is that he hurt Michael Bay’s feelings.
Edit: Black posts indicate admins and there are other black posts in the thread. Walter B is Bruce Willis.
Time is going by really, really, really slow…
A Narc rats on himself after eating some pot brownies and the 911 call has been released. 911 Operators seem to have a lot of fun when people aren’t dying.
