Ya just can't make stuff like this up, folks! :-)
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Pale horse, pale rider
A commercial you won't see during the Super Bowl tonight
Here's the spot that CatholicVote.org came up with. I find it to be exceptionally powerful, and well within the bounds of good taste. And in my mind, there is no reason at all why NBC should have refused to run it...
Thanks to Geoff Gentry for the heads-up.
The Super Bowl spots for UP, STAR TREK, LAND OF THE LOST, G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, and TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN!
This first spot is for Disney and Pixar's Up. I know some folks who have seen advance footage of this one, and they cannot stop raving about how good it's already looking. Go to Disney's website to see the commercial in much higher resolution. This will definitely be on my "must see" list this summer...
The next one is for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, due out in May. Another one that I'm eagerly anticipating, for one reason because this looks totally unlike anything that has been done in the forty-some years of the Star Trek franchise. And because I trust Abrams to deliver the goods...
This next one is for Land of the Lost, starring Will Ferrell. A movie that so far I am remaining very cautiously optimistic for. I must admit though: visually at least, this spot is hitting on all the right chords. Love the shot of the "time/space junkyard", the multiple moons and the Sleestack of course. The music has a great vibe to it also. We'll see this spring how this one fares...
The Super Bowl commercial for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Color me "meh". I'm just not getting this one yet. It comes perilously close to making me understand the whole "raped my childhood" thing that a lot of Star Wars fans have cried out over the past decade. That's supposed to be Destro that Christopher Eccleston is playing (sans the mandatory beryllium steel mask Destro always wears). Looks as outrageous and loud as any Stephen Sommers flick. I doubt I'll be there opening day for it but if word is good, I'll probably check it out, if only out of curiosity. ComingSoon.net has the commercial in multiple high-res Quicktime versions...
And finally, here's the Super Bowl ad for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. A movie that I am extremely looking forward to but until now I have somehow remained blissfully unaware of what it's going to be about. And if this spot is any indication, the sequel to 2007's Transformers is going to completely pour on the crazy!
Oh yeah: Go Steelers! :-P
Friday, January 30, 2009
Yup, more WATCHMEN goodness!
Check out this new pic of some of the bad guys from the Minutemen era...
TotalFilm.com has even MORE new photos from Watchmen, including Dan's Arctic-conditions costume, the photo of Jon and Janey at the amusement park, and Billy Crudup in a very TRON-like motion capture suit during filming of the destroyed city scene.
And Movienewz.com has up some portraits of several of the characters, including Big Figure and his henchmen, Rorschach's psychiatrist and even one of Seymour! And yeah, Seymour is wearing just what you think he should be wearing.
So... does anyone know where a guy can find one of those cool Operation: Wrath of God patches?
A friend's intriguing LOST theory

Don't stop now Geoff: we want to read more!! :-P
"National car crushing" sought for inclusion in stimulus plan
So as if this country's economy wasn't in shambles enough, Feinstein and Waxman not only want to waste even more of our money, they want to destroy much of what little industrial infrastructure we have left to us.
It's almost enough to make one wonder if some elected officials are not actually the proverbial "Manchurian candidates", if ya know what I mean. They certainly seem hellbent enough on wrecking havoc to this country.
Thanks to John Seilback for the heads-up.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
RED DWARF is returning!
It will have been ten years since they were last seen, but Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat will be returning at last to television this spring. Red Dwarf: Back to Earth will be a two-part special broadcasting in Great Britain during the upcoming Easter weekend (and will no doubt soon afterward find its way to The Pirate Bay, Demonoid and many other torrent-trackin' sites). As the title indicates, the story involves Lister and his fellow crew members finally returning to Earth (and I smell a lot of fun to be had with Battlestar Galactica when they get there).
Slam this smeggin' link for more info on what many have raved is the best sci-fi comedy series ever.
Handcuffed crooks run right into pole
Standard Mode of Dress rearing its ugly head in Forsyth County

Now comes word that much the same is happening to some of our friends a few counties over in Forsyth. Janet Marsh, the mother of a student at Wiley Middle School, alerts us to this story at the Winston-Salem Journal website. The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Board of Education unanimously voted to implement Standard Mode of Dress at Wiley Middle during its January 13th meeting. But opponents of the policy contend that many parents felt too "intimidated" to rise in opposition because of how the information on those wishing to address the board was being recorded at the meeting and because of this, several parents feared retaliation against their children. There was also a sense of "restless urgency" regarding how fast the board pursued the policy, Marsh said. And in an e-mail to The Knight Shift she shared more of her concerns...
"I am a NOSMOD mom at Wiley Middle School and the administration is trying every trick in the book to push this measure through before anyone can really object. I was denied a request for an open forum for discussion and ended up having to stand outside the school for three days in the pouring rain trying to hand out my "Ten Good Reasons to Oppose SMOD" flier before the final ballot was issued. I won't bore you with all the gory details, but many of the parents at our school who would like to object won't come out as we had to put our names on the ballots and they feared repercussions."Janet Marsh has asked me to pass along the link at the Winston-Salem Journal to the readers of this blog, and even if she hadn't asked I would have gladly shared it with y'all anyway.
And on behalf of those who have fought this kind of thing before, we wish our brethren in Forsyth County all the best in their own struggle against school uniforms! :-)
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Standard post-LOST episode reaction: "Jughead"
That was the cheesiest-looking hydrogen bomb prop that I have ever seen.
It wasn't the device itself that bugged me. That actually looked the right size and shape of the first Teller-Ulam "gadgets". But to have it suspended from that tower, hanging off the ground nose-downward (and test bombs do not look like deliverable warheads, guys) by those cables, as if it were one bad drop away from blowing Lost Island to Kingdom Come...
Lost hasn't done hokey all that much. But that was the hokiest thing on this show to date.
But with that out of the way...
"Jughead" was definitely one of the best episodes of the series yet! Early word was that we would get answers to some hard questions about the show's mythology. So let's see: possibly the origin of the Others, Daniel's mom, a ton of background on Charles Widmore (who had a whiff of sympathy for once), Richard and how he knew to be in Tustin, California in 1956...
Did I miss anything?
One thing I can't help but think: that the young female Other who took Daniel out to the bomb... might her name turn out to be Eloise?
And I'm wondering if sometime later this season or next, after all the time-twisting settles down, if a certain long-buried nuke is gonna be found. Hey, Anton Chekov's rule of drama is: "If a gun is shown on the wall in Act 2 it must be fired in Act 3, if a gun is fired in Act 3 it must be shown on the wall in Act 2".
Jughead is certainly one honking big gun on the wall, yah? :-P
Final WATCHMEN poster hits the Intertubes (along with more goodies... like Rorschach's mugshot photo!)
And the Warner Bros. marketing department is being very clever indeed. Check out this mugshot photo of Walter Joseph Kovacs AKA Rorschach (played by Jackie Earle Haley) that's just been released. And if you head over to the Flickr account for that radical right-wing fringe magazine The New Frontiersman you can find some "vintage" news photos of Dr. Manhattan during Operation Wrath of God, which took place in Vietnam in 1970. In the world of Watchmen, anyway...
The movie comes out March 6th.
Tonight's episode of LOST, titled "Jughead"...
That's all I know at this point. Neither do I understand why this episode bears the name of an Archie Comics character for a title. Maybe there's a DHARMA station in Riverdale?
Why has Old Dutch Galaxy Food Center apparently pulled out as an advertiser on WGSR Star 39?
The answer to that question is, evidently, "yes".
Old Dutch Galaxy had been a major advertiser for WGSR. A chain of four grocery stores around the Danville and Chatham area in Virginia, Old Dutch Galaxy had been running updated commercials every week (on a station that was still running spots for the Reidsville Christmas parade last week, mind ya...).
But the word from our friends around south-central Virginia, is that Roark's constant harping about a sign calling Obama a "bastard" and his mother a "slut" was way over the top and into the realm of completely inappropriate behavior.
I doubt that this lesson will be anything but lost on Charles Roark, who has abandoned responsible broadcasting ethics for tabloid-style trash that caters to the least common denominator.
Except now, WGSR has lost one of its bigger clients because of Roark's reckless behavior.
But I'm pretty confident that Roark won't care, and he probably even told the Old Dutch Galaxy guys as much when they pulled out, since cult leader Johnny Robertson can always be relied upon to make up for the loss via all those thousands of dollars coming in from "the Mysterious Texans"(tm).
Seriously though: I've been arguing for awhile that the image conveyed by WGSR's management is a detriment to the commerce of this area. Does anyone now doubt the veracity of that contention?
Some random musings on things...
I would like to quote "Oceania is at war with Eurasia, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia" to the Powers That Be, but sad to say, they most likely wouldn't get it.
And now that he's President, doesn't Obama have better things to do than to get into the proverbial "pissing contest" with a radio commentator who is nothing more than a shameless shill for the "other side"?
Don't we have better things to do than to even care about such a non-story involving two men with apparently arrested development?
Pat Buchanan is right: we have become an unserious people in a serious time.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
ABC greenlights V remake pilot... and Hollywood threatens to make THE A-TEAM movie
If handled right, this could be a terrific show that might pick up the same fans who are currently hooked on Lost (which will see its final season next year). Unfortunately, V creator Kenneth Johnson is not aboard for this go-round... and I've long thought that if he had been given complete control over his original concept, that NBC could have had one of the greatest television series of the Eighties. Alas! Too many suits ruined that...
And speaking of NBC television shows from two decades ago, June 11, 2010 is the penciled-in date for the big-screen adaptation of The A-Team, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Unless this movie uses the original Vietnam War concept to springboard the plot with, and utilizes a convincing computer-rendered B.A. Baracus (with Mr. T's voice), this will bomb bigtime. Pity the fool who thinks he can tamper with The A-Team and get away with it.
Neal Hutcheson reports from courtroom: Prosecution was "petty and vindictive" against Popcorn Sutton, sought to put "sick and broken" man in prison

In the past 24 hours I have seen some positively unbridled fury from supporters of Popcorn Sutton, including on sites like Facebook (home to no less than three groups for people who believe the government should have left him alone to ply his trade in peace). The general consensus is that Popcorn wasn't harming anyone, and that the federal government has set out to "make an example" out of him, lest anyone else think that they should assert some liberty on their own. There are even some individuals who are publicly suggesting that perhaps a "storming the Bastille" is in order. I'm not gonna endorse or condemn such thoughts... but I am gonna pass along something that is no doubt going to make a lot of people even madder than they already are!
Neal Hutcheson is a well-known name not just across North Carolina, but throughout the southeastern United States and the rest of the country. He's a documentary filmmaker based out of the Raleigh area. Among his many credits are Mountain Talk and Voices of North Carolina, which have both featured appearances by Popcorn Sutton. More recently Hutcheson dedicated an entire film to Sutton and his art in The Last One. I've come to know him lately ever since he sent over a DVD of The Last One (and I just got it back last week, 'cuz everyone that I know practically has been wanting to borrow and see it for themselves!). Hutcheson has built up a solid reputation among the folks in this region and if he reports on something, I'm more than inclined to say that his word will be held as bond.
Well, Neal Hutcheson was in the courtroom yesterday when Popcorn Sutton had his sentence handed down. And earlier today Neal sent along the following report. I asked him if I could share it here for this blog's readers and Neal said "please do". So here it is, in his own words...
"You should know that the prosecution used a video clip made twenty years ago (of him capping a still) to make the case that Popcorn was strong enough to continue making liquor. The judge made it explicitly clear that the idea that he would resume operations if he was let out on probation was behind the rationale that he needed a prison term to stop him. The prosecution knew of course that the clip wasn't made last week, and that his health plus house-arrest & monitoring would be more than enough to prevent him from doing anything prohibited, as the past ten months of house arrest has proved. So, if you leave aside the debate about whether moonshining is a serious offense or not, and take the government's case at face value, the public would have been 'protected' & served without putting a sick man in prison. What the prosecution did was petty and vindictive: The sick and broken man they saw in that trial wasn't putting on an act; I had been with him for three days and that was the best he had looked in all that time.So... apparently the prosecutors used "evidence" that didn't pertain at all to this particular case in order to malign Sutton, and they convinced the judge to deliver a harsh sentence even knowing that Sutton is not currently in the best of health."I just think people should know what happened there. The litmus test here is for people to substitute moonshining for something else they don't sympathize with, you know just lay all that aside, and ask if it was necessary, as the prosecution insisted, to lay prison time on him. Obviously it wasn't. He's been under house arrest and monitoring for ten months and, along with his health, its kept him from doing anything prohibited.
"The judge did question the age of the video, so that thought came up. But the prosecution was directly implying that the video demonstrated he was capable and because of that could not be deterred from making moonshine without a prison term. And that was disingenuous. And they knew it. The fact is that Popcorn had embarrassed them for a long time."
Does anybody else think that there is something horribly out of kilter with the "justice" of this situation?
Report and photos from the orchestral scoring for WATCHMEN
