Monday Movie Whatnot: Twilight, Why Fanboys are Lame-tacular, and IMDB Quotes…

Welcome back to Monday Movie Whatnot here at The New Cool.  I’m your host, J.C., and I’ll be taking you through a brief tour of some movie stuff that I personally deem important enough to write about.  Starting with…

Twilight takes a massive “bite” out of the box-office…

Wow, I even put the quotes around my terrible pun – it’s like I’m a professional entertainment beat writer! 

But back to the lecture at hand, Twilight, the movie about the weird, allegedly handsome looking vampire dude and his enthralled teenage love interest, based on the mega-selling novel(s) by Stephanie Meyer, pulled in $70 mill over the weekend. 

To quote Krusty the Clown, “Holy shamola!  What’re you gonna do with all that kablingy?”

Why, green-light the sequel, of course. 

Which could lead to some interesting developments down the road.  I’ve never read the books in the series because I’m not a teenage girl and I prefer fictional vampires that are less broody / pure-souled and more murderous / psychopathic, but from my diligent, impeccable research I’ve gleaned that by book four there’s copious blood-vomiting, violent, furniture-breaking vampire sex (I’m sure the book calls it “lovemaking” or “intertwining of kindred souls” or some other crap, but dammit, if furniture’s being destroyed and bodies are being bruised then that’s fucking), and literal back-breaking labor.  That certainly seems to have all the necessary ingredients for an awesome vampire movie.  Hell, I didn’t even know some of these were ingredients – much less necessary ones – until just now finding out about them.

How was I ever before entertained by a vampire film that didn’t have fountain-of-blood vomiting and borderline bodice-ripper style sex? 

Makes you wonder how they’re going to make that work on-screen while still keeping the flicks PG-13 though.

Anyway, enough about Twilight.  No really, movie-fanboys everywhere…

Enough About Twilight…

…and Sex and the City, and High School Musical 3, and other movies that you have not seen and have no intention of seeing and are obviously not aimed at you.  This might come as a surprise to you, but there’s an entire world full of people who don’t fit your specific demographic.  I know that many of you have so little interaction with women that you may believe they are a myth (oh snap!) and therefore have zero chance of fathering children (daaaaaaaaaaaannnnnggg! *starts doing the wop*) so you think they too do not exist, but I assure you, you are mistaken.

It’s one thing to casually throw jabs at movies outside of your viewing preference, or to be upset about a shitty film series sullying the reputation of a genre you actually give a damn about, but you can go to post-forums and see cats ranting about High School Musical taking the top spot at the box office like Disney killed their father and should prepare to die.  Motherfucker, it’s not intended for you.  You might as well be in Toys R Us standing in the Barbie section talking about “These are the lamest action figures I’ve ever seen!  They don’t even come with guns, or tanks, or a scale model dancefloor that I can use to reenact prom night as it should have… er… I mean… um… a scale model… planet… monster… bot…”

These are the same types of dweebs who might get lucky enough to get a girl to come home with them only to be befuddled as to why she’s so apprehensive about seeing a poster of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hanging above the sofa with mysterious stains all over the seat.  At least flip the cushions, gotdammit!

If you look up these kinds of movies (or 90% of the movies with a majority black cast… yeah, I said it) on IMDB you’ll see the rating grossly deflated because internet dweebs who shouldn’t care went out of their way to vote it down because they can’t stand the idea that there might be people out there who liked Twilight enough to rate the movie above a 6 out of 10. 

I wish there was some way to build a program that caused an android hand to reach out of your monitor and smack you for being stupid on the internet.  (Of course, somebody would find other, nefarious uses for such a program I’m sure… Rule 34 and all.  But I digress…)

Speaking of IMDB…

Something Has to Be Done About the Quotes…

…and several other things on the site as well, but baby steps, right?

Here’s an actual quote from the movie Closer as it appears on the Memorable Quotes section on IMDB…

Dan: You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry: Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself! You writer! You liar!

Nothing wrong there.  That’s the actual exchange.  But then, right underneath that you have this…

Larry: A heart is a fist covered in blood!

Whoever typed this, wherever you are out there in internet-land: Fuck.  Your.  Life. 

This is just one example, but IMDB is full of this.  There might be two or three versions of the same quote on the same page.  They might as well make a game out of it: “Which Quote Isn’t Complete Bullshit Misremembered By Some Stupid Fan?” 

On top of this you get “From the trailer” quotes for shit that hasn’t even come out yet (does the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still really have “memorable” quotes already?  Really? ) and quotes that aren’t all that memorable after all (I love the movie Swingers, and it’s absolutely loaded with quotables: “Eat, eat, you fucking jackals!” though?  Not one of ‘em.  Not something anybody needs to be walking around quoting.  Even if you’re a zookeeper and it’s your job to feed the jackals daily, you still shouldn’t be saying that line.  If you ever did say that line to a bunch of jackals, I would hope that they’d surround you and do you in like Scar in The Lion King.  No, that’s not harsh, it’s what you deserve.)

Finally…

Just something I noticed the other day… the Hancock Unrated DVD cover (and matching poster plastered all over rental stores across America)…

I mean… the movie has one twist, you know?  It seems like you’d want to guard that plot point from people who haven’t seen the film yet, not smack them in the face with it like some awesome robot-monitor-arm that I’m about to invent…

Al Qaida No. 2 Man Calls Obama Racial Epithet… oh, and he’s also known to murder people…

See, stuff like this is why I sometimes have a problem with the media .  Is the racial epithet really the headline material here?  Shouldn’t it be more like Terrorist Psycho Unmoved By Election Results: Says, “I Thought I Told You That We Won’t Stop.” 

It’d be different if al-Zawahiri called him something harsher and followed it up with, “You know, I’ve never liked black people.  I just might put out a hit on the entire race.”  That’s some shit I need to see in the headline (in no small part because certain elements in America might hear that news and say, “Well gol-damn, dem ol’ terrorist boys may not be so bad after all.”)  Highlighting al-Zawahiri’s use of the term “house negro” is like running a headline saying Satan Calls Jewish People Greedy in an article where he also reveals himself as the cause of all human misery.  Sure the terminology’s offensive, but it’s Satan.  Is this a surprise?  Isn’t the continuing hostility of a known madman the real news here?

The headline makes it sound like al-Zawahiri is a corporate exec who let an n-bomb slip around the wrong people.  Like he’s going to hold a press conference later talking about, “I deeply regret my choice of words.  It was obviously inappropriate.  Clearly I was mistaken in thinking that prefacing the word with ’What’s up my’ would make it acceptable, and I apologize to anyone who I offended.  I’m not a racist.  I’ve slept with many, many black women.  I would marry Beyonce in an instant.  Rhianna too.  And Terrence Howard.  Oh wait…”

The basic gist of the article is, “al-Zawahiri calls Obama a house negro.  And it looks like he still wants to kill everybody, too.”  Maybe I’m nuts, but the latter seems more critical than the former.  I just can’t imagine that Obama heard al-Zawahiri’s recording and responded like, “What did that motherfucker just say?”

“He insinuated an escalation in violence if we increase the number of troops in Afghani–”

“No, no, no, before that.  The shit about me being a house negro.  Do my ears deceive or is he basically calling me a sell out?  Is he calling me an Uncle Tom?  Is Barack Obama gonna have to choke a bitch?”

“Uh… no sir, I doubt you’re gonna have to.  You can certainly choose to, though.  You are going to be President after all…”

“Right, right.  Thanks for the clarification, that’s why I keep you around Steve.  So, I guess this all boils down to America’s relationship with Al-Qaida remaining unchanged?”

“That’s pretty much it, sir.”

“Thought so.”

Movie Whatnot: Star Trek trailer, Bad Remake Ideas, and… you know… whatnot…

That’s an absolutely terrible title, first of all.  “Movie Whatnot?”  That’s the best I’ve got?  Jeez…

Anyhow, I’m going to seize Mondays as my opportunity to go over random, movie-related thoughts bouncing around in my skull.  None of this is exactly “hot off the presses,” but it’s on my brain like Wu-Tang, so here’s the run down…

Star Trek Trailer: Holy Shit!  (Or… Maybe Not…)

If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is.  The big bad Star Trek trailer that was attached to Quantum of Solace.  This is not a sequel, this is an official re-boot with all new actors, all new adventures, and all new nerdiness. 

My first thought seeing this was “Wow, that actually looks kind of cool.”  I’ve never really liked Star Trek.  It always seemed like a series for dweebs.  I mean, liking Star Wars is pretty nerdy, granted, but it has swordfights and telekinesis and space ninjas and shit.  That made it cool to like when you were a kid, and then as you grew up, if you still liked, it was more about you hanging on to a shred of your youthful innocence as opposed to being a dork. 

Conversely, I don’t remember a single cool kid from elementary school liking Star Trek.  Everybody loved Star Wars, but if you liked Star Trek you weren’t getting asked out for the Sadie Hawkins dance.  Don’t even bother showing up.  Girls didn’t dance with Trekkies. 

But this trailer, on first sight, looks sort of fresh.  People are engaging in hand-to-hand combat, girls are taking their shirts off, there a space-battles and explosions… wait… actually, that’s not all that fresh.  Damn it… after re-watching it just once more I realized that I was already off-board.  Just like that.  Not even Zoe Saldana looking scrum-diddly-umptious as Uhura can pull me in.  I can’t even really put my finger on it, but something about Star Trek, no matter the incarnation, just strikes me as somewhat bland.  The Enterprise is shaped awkward, the set looks too white, the uniforms look like onesies… Star Trek is like cheesy bread at the buffet line of a pizza place.  If that’s ALL you’ve got then I suppose I’ll go for it, but if there’s a pepperoni or sausage joint anywhere in sight then why would I bother with this?

Plus, James Kirk has to have the most dweeb-tacular middle name any iconic hero has ever had.  Tiberius?  I know, it’s the name of a Roman emperor, it’s supposed to convey an air of some sort of authority.  It doesn’t work.  Ironically, it sounds like the name a Trekkie would give a an alien scientist supervillain in some lousy fanfic if not for the fact that it was already taken by their hero.

Tiberius.  It sounds nerdier than Spock.  Think about that…   

Will Smith and Spielberg Considering Remake of Oldboy…

…all while my heart gently weeps.

Look, I like Will and Steven.  They’re both great at what they do.  But nothing in their exhibited repertoire gives any indication that they are the right fit for this material.  In case you missed the picture in the above linked article, this is what the main character in Oldboy looks like…

And this is what Will Smith looks like…

Please note that any picture of Will Smith not smiling is photoshopped.  Any scene from any film where he wasn’t happy and charming and looking like someone you’d love to invite to your Super Bowl party was done with extensive CGI.

Will is talented and cool, but he aint’ edgy.  Oldboy, on the other hand, is beyond edgy.  It’s kicking you in the face with knife-boots and then skating off into the night, laughing maniacally.  Will has range, but can he do quiet, simmering madman?  Can he convincingly beat down a freaking platoon of thugs with a Home Depot claw-hammer? 

Likewise, Señor Spielbergo has never directed anything close to this before.  There’s nothing cuddly or heartfelt or relatable about this movie.  If there’s a one-word description for Oldboy it’s not “dark,” ”cruel,” “violent” or “nihilistic.”  Any of that can be manufactured.  Oldboy is simply relentless.  It spares you nothing because it doesn’t know how.  It doesn’t “cross the line”–it doesn’t even know what the hell a line is. 

It exists in a world where lines don’t exist, Stephen!  Where lines don’t exist!  Can’t you see that?  Don’t do it Stephen, you too Will.  We all like you.  You two stepping out of your element to do this movie is like the people in The Mist stepping out of the supermarket with rope tethered to their waists.  It’s not impossible for you to make it, but there seems to be a good chance you could get eaten the fuck up…

Ridley Scott to Direct a Monopoly movie…

Yes, that Monopoly.

A lot of people are already skewering this as one of the worst film adaptation ideas ever.  I’m inclined to agree, though I’m kind of hopeful for it.  The board game already has elements of deceit, sabotage and ruthlessness–hell, you pretty much can’t win without exhibiting those three traits.  A movie about warring land tycoons seems like it would just apply the logical story of warring land tycoons to the undefined framework that drives the game.

I’m hoping it’s a surprisingly brutal, dark-comedic thriller that sort of satirizes the idea of making a game out of driving competitors into bankruptcy and essentially ruining their lives.  Then they could release a new board game based on the movie–Monopoly: Cutthroat Edition–with Chance cards like “Advance token to St. James Place.  If owned, pay local police $200 to raid premises, plant incriminating evidence of a meth lab, seize property and then sell it back to you for cheap at a local auction.  Pay addtional $100 to police to have current property owner shanked in jail.”

That’s the Monopoly game we’ve always wanted to play, isn’t it?