Soylent Red

Made of some sort of super-alloy of gold, titanium, and win.

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Sometimes people try to tell me that Superman would win in a fight with Batman. I do not understand these people, and I'm not sure that I want to understand them. That debate has been had. We all know who comes out on top, and who ends up with a kryptonite batarang up his jacksy.

But more importantly Batman is actually an interesting and compelling character. He's riddled with flaws and weaknesses, burdened with a terrible past, motivated by fear and anger but tempered with true conscience. Superman, on the other hand, will always suck:

[S]ince Superman knows nothing bad can happen to him no matter what, he acts with no […] subtlety. He flies headlong into every conflict, fists thrust forward, because he knows he's in no immediate danger. Thus, we know he's in no immediate danger, and we get bored out of our fucking skulls.

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A generous person would regard it as a positive trait of mine—forgiveness, the ability to grant the benefit of the doubt—that I can tell everyone who will listen that a movie looks like it'll suck harder than a $10 whore but then I'll go tosee it anyway. As it turns out, 21 sucked a lot less than I expected. It's based on the book, Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, which I read and really quite enjoyed some years ago.

The movie diverges significantly from the book, which itself is a true(ish) story, but this turns out to its advantage in my view. The movie introduces an antagonist in the form of Laurence Fishbourne's Vegas security consultant, and wedges in the mandatory love interest too, neither of which I remember from the book. These changes ultimately make the story a better fit for the movie medium, though they're a little more on the formulaic side than any of us would have wanted.

In fact the whole movies looks like it came off the end of a production line, with fewer surprises than a transparent Kinder egg, but if it doesn't stand out as fantastic it also doesn't stand out as terrible. The gambling and maths angle appealed to me, and made it that much more enjoyable. In the end I wouldn't be confident in recommending it to someone who didn't share those interests.

Maybe sit it out and go play the slots instead.

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I've been thinking (always a bad idea). There's loads of scope for different stories that all use the same premise as the movie Groundhog Day—reliving the same day repeatedly until you do something right or find a way to fix whatever is happening. There's the movie itself; the Stargate SG-1 episode where Jack and Teal'c continuously relive the same day; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with Kelsey Grammer and the temporal causality loop; and any number of other stories that have and haven't been written.

It's a setup that works with any character in any setting. There are tons of possibilities for ways that different people would deal with the situation, adapt to it, and ultimately try to solve it. It could be an entire genre unto itself.

Imagine if you had to keep reliving the same day until you wrote the best story in that genre.

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Has Roland Emmerich ever made a film whose title isn't a date? Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC, and soon (or at least sooner than it sounds) 2012.

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I'm by no means a fan of horror. But in recent years I've become quite fond of Sam Raimi, or at least of Bruce Campbell who is the fire whom Raimi's smoke is never without. Then there's the whole Ellen Page thing. And by 'thing' I mean me being completely infatuated by her and anyone who isn't is out of their mind.

So I guess all summed up what I'm trying to say is that Drag Me to Hell, appalling as that title sounds, may be the rare horror movie to draw my attention. I'd also like to point out that Empire's continued use of that same promotional shot of Page is doing nothing to help diminish my… enthusiasm for her.

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This article has been sitting in a cold and lonely Firefox tab for a few days without comment so I figured it's a good idea to finally post a link to it at least. It's entitled Why 2008 Will Be An Awesome Year For Movies. My interpretation of that title is this: The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, and two Rambos. Give or take a little Pixar and what we're promised will be an improvement to the Hulk franchise and it looks to be shaping up to being a good year.

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Following on the robot theme from yesterday, here's the first full length trailer for Pixar's Wall-E. I think there just might be room for a friendship there between Wall-E and Luxo.

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I'm not Derren Brown, but it doesn't take a mind-reader to predict that I'm not the only person excited by the news that Peter Jackson will produce two movies based on The Hobbit (error corrections are mine, because Ain't It Cool News's illiteracy dismays me):

One will be an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The second project is believed to be a bridge between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy - culled from the titanic amount of periphery/ancillary/notated material found in Tolkien's works. Such material can already be seen in the existing films.

I'm not shocked by this news. I don't think I ever really lost the feeling that this was ultimately inevitable. I'm happy to hear it's finally going to happen though. Most importantly, before some of the significant players become too old.

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Was that Rémy the rat from Ratatouille that you saw in the background of Toy Story 2? Well… probably not. But there are plenty of callbacks and cameos in the collective works of Pixar, from the overt to the barely visible. Jim Hill has quite a comprehensive (or at least very long) investigation of the studio's self-reference.

Hill goes into impressive detail, even citing the appearance of the birds from For the Birds in Cars. Said appearance lasts only a tenth of a second.

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