Has anyone seen The Spirit? We were actually looking that one up yesterday when we were waylaid by the badness of Seven Pounds. The Rotten Tomatoes pull-quotes are no doubt a thousand times more entertaining than the actual movie.
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This movie appears to be so ungodly awful that even the trailer is a confusing and befuddled mess:
OK, possible spoiler warning for Seven Pounds, click at your own risk:
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We went on a date recently and we actually went to the movies – we saw The Day the Earth Stood Still at the local IMAX theater. We watched the original first because, well, we’re geeks. Keanu Reeves acquitted himself nicely as the completely expressionless Klaatu, and the pacing was much better, and GORT the robot was seriously creepy, but it lacked all the nice DC scenery that gave the first one so much of it’s charm (for us).
The real geek-fest was the previews – warning – these websites all launch annoying sound effects when you click the links so you may want to turn your speakers off – The Watchmen (which author Alan Moore is, predictably, upset about), Star Trek, and Monsters Vs Aliens, which looks really cute. I also choose to take it as further evidence of the dinosaur-human hybrid super-soldier project in the basement of the Pentagon.
To be fair to Moore, Hollywood hasn’t done a particularly good job of translating his work to the screen (see also: League of Extraordinary Gentleman and V for Vendetta). Plus, the guy probably gets more press as the disgruntled and disenfranchised creator than he would if he was gung-ho about the adaptations.
Before I return to my regularly scheduled pre-election media blackout, already in progress…But first, a link to Roman Dirge’s spookyland, because I promised DelRaySteve I would post it.
Please please please let this just be an idle rumor. If Sandra Bullock is really going to play Wonder Woman in a big screen remake I simply don’t know what I’m going to do. This is a concept that upsets me no end. I don’t have anything against Sandra, but damnit she is not Wonder Woman.
If I ruled the world (and someone put a gun to my head and forced me to do a wonder woman remake) I’d cast Sigourney Weaver. She kicks ass. And don’t give me that “she’s too old” crap because Wonder Woman is 3,000 years old. She’s an amazon, remember? As long as you’re indulging me in this sick little fantasy let me add that I’d cast Janeane Garofalo as Wonder Girl.
No, actually, I want Gina Torres to be Wonder Woman and that’s all there is to it. Problem. Solved.
They’d have better chemistry than Weaver had with Winona Ryder in Alien Resurrection, that’s for sure.
This morning something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about before. I was watching Wonder Woman, as I do every morning before I go to work. The Chinese Communists had captured Diana Prince and were tying her up. Diana had to just let them tie her up because of course she couldn’t turn herself into Wonder Woman right there in front of them – it would give away her secret identity.
Or would it? Wonder Woman’s golden lasso compels people to tell the truth, but she also uses it to make people forget things. Why not turn into Wonder Woman, make them forget that they just saw her turn into Wonder Woman, and then kick their commie asses?
Is there an ethical issue? Is it against the rules back on Paradise Island? Is Diana Prince extremely modest? Or would doing that eliminate the requisite scenes where Diana escapes, runs behind a tree and turns into Wonder Woman in “privacy” and then kicks their commie asses. This sequence is formulaic and yet always awkward and never quite believeable – even in the TV Superhero Universe. Changing the forumla would have required the writers to come up with more – and different – scenes to fill out the episode and would have thrown everything out of whack, I guess
I missed the ass-kicking scene since I had to run and take a shower. When I came back Diana Prince was having dinner with the Chinese Communist leader and the couple who had captured her in the first place. They were having a fine time and the leader, General SomethingOrAnother had given his blessing for the couple to disappear into Chinatown and not be commies anymore.
I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on at the end of the episode and neither could Husband, who was stupified, sitting in the lazyboy sucking down coffee and looking totally perplexed. And he’d seen the whole thing. Some things are better left a mystery, I guess.
I think part of the problem was that our resistance was down. We tried watching back-to-back episodes of the Love Boat last night and I believe we may have actually injured ourselves in some way.