One of the things that I genuinely adore about writing for mightygodking.com instead of my own blog is that I get a lot of comments. People love to give feedback on what I’ve written (and ultimately, that’s what every writer really wants, to know that people are listening. Money is just a measurement of that, albeit one that can be used to pay your rent.)

But after a while writing for a high-traffic blog on the Internet, you do start to notice that no matter what you say, someone disagrees with it. I’m not complaining about it; you don’t get into writing, especially writing opinion pieces, if you don’t have enough confidence in your opinions to avoid taking disagreement personally. But I am curious. Is there really any opinion out there that everyone, absolutely everyone can agree on? Is there something we all like?

So, here’s the experiment. I’m going to name ten movies that I consider to be awesome. Not the ten best movies of all time, or the ten all-time classics; just ten movies that I love, and that I could sit down and watch at any time and enjoy them. And in the comments, you can either add movies to that list, or veto movies that someone has added. You don’t need to defend your choices, either to add or to subtract. In fact, I don’t want you to; I’d prefer that the comments not get bogged down in a big argument about whether or not “Buckaroo Banzai” sucks. I’ll try to go back and edit the list occasionally, so people can see at a glance what the current content is, and we’ll see if anything survives as something everyone on the Internet could sit down and watch together.

UPDATE: I went through the first sixty-two comments and updated the list based on everyone’s new picks and vetoes. A few points I want to clarify for future commenters: You do not, I repeat not need to take something off the list in order to put something on. The list can be as long as it needs to be. Comments that said “replace X with Y” were treated as “Veto X, Add Y”. Also, there is no need to re-nominate or re-veto a movie. I won’t take anything off unless it’s vetoed, and once it’s vetoed, it can’t go back on even if someone nominates it again. The whole point is finding films everyone wants to watch! (If you want to make my life easier, you can just make your comments: “Veto: A, B, C, D” and “Add: E, F, G, H” so that it’s easy to figure out what you want me to add and remove. Also, it’d help if you mentioned whether you meant the original or the remake. I assumed the original unless otherwise specified.) Oh, and sorry, but if you nominated a film specifically to watch the Rifftrax version of it, that doesn’t count.

The current list:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alien, Aliens, Animal House, Apocalypse Now, Army of Darkness, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Better Off Dead, The Big Lebowski, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Blues Brothers, Das Boot, Bringing Up Baby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, City Lights, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn of the Dead, Death to Smoochy, Doctor Strangelove, Donnie Darko, Empire Records, The Empire Strikes Back, Enter the Dragon, Fargo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, Forbidden Planet, The Full Monty, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, High Society, Highlander, The Hudsucker Proxy, Hunt for Red October, In Bruges, It’s a Wonderful Life, It’s My Party, Jaws, Juno, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Last Night, Last of the Mohicans, Latter Days, Little Miss Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Lone Star, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings, Memento, Metropolis, Miller’s Crossing, MirrorMask, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Moon, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, Murder by Death, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Night of the Living Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perseopolis, The Princess Bride, The Producers, The Professional, Pulp Fiction, The Quiet Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom, Rebecca, The Right Stuff, Ronin, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rushmore, Ruthless People, The Shining, Silver Streak, Snatch, Sneakers, The Specials, Spider-Man 2, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Sting, The Terminator, Thank You For Smoking, The Thing, The Third Man, Throne of Blood, Time Bandits, Unforgiven, The Untouchables, Watership Down, Willow, The Wizard of Oz, Used Cars, The Valet, X-Men 2, Yellowbeard, Young Frankenstein

The Vetoed List (remember, once it goes on this list, it can’t come off):

Airplane, Amelie, Avatar, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Brazil, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Bug’s Life, Caddyshack, Chasing Amy, Children of Men, Clue, Contact, Cowboy Bebop, Dangerous Liasons, The Dark Crystal, Dogma, Drunken Master 2, Evil Dead II, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, (500) Days of Summer, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, Happy Gilmore, Hot Fuzz, Hudson Hawk, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Jacob’s Ladder, The Jerk, Jurassic Park, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Love Actually, The Matrix, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Monsters, Inc., Pan’s Labyrinth, The Patriot, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Philadelphia Story, Police Story 3, Ratatouille, Repo Man, Schindler’s List, Serenity, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Silverado, Sin City, Star Wars, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The 13th Warrior, 30 Days of Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Tombstone, Tommy Boy, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Unbreakable, Up, The Usual Suspects, WALL-E, When Harry Met Sally, Zombieland, Zoolander

There we go; let the consensus-building continue!

ME: That was a surprisingly unsatisfying set of trailers we just saw.
FLAPJACKS: Says you. I was enthralled to see that we will get another chapter of Resident Evil, and this time in three-dee!
ME: Do you kind of get the feeling that that trailer was intended to be shown in 3D and then… wasn’t shown that way?
FLAPJACKS: You mean with all the shots of Milla whatsername –
ME: Jovovovovovitch.
FLAPJACKS – whatsername shooting RIGHT AT YOU and then her and the other girl who I assume is supposed to be a clone of Milla jumping backwards through the window and then falling while shooting RIGHT AT YOU through a haze of glass shards? I dunno, maybe they thought “whoa, if we don’t show this in three-dee, maybe the nerds will be all “damn, now I got to see that with the goggles on” and we will make lotsa money”? Like that?
ME: Yeah.
FLAPJACKS: I dunno. Maybe. I kinda think that the actual Resident Evil 3D will just be two hours of Milla bobbing her head back and forth in front of the camera, like in Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theatre.
ME: Which will still be more entertaining than Get Him To The Greek. “Hey, remember that one character who was funny for about the first ten minutes he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Here’s two hours of him!”
FLAPJACKS: “Also starring Jonah Hill, for some reason. We’re not really sure why, to be honest.”
ME: Jonah Hill is definitely one of those actors who does, like, one thing.
FLAPJACKS: What thing does he do?
ME: I’m not sure. But he does it. Man, does he do it.
FLAPJACKS: I wonder what’s gonna happen when Jonah Hill loses the weight that his doctor probably tells him regularly he should lose for health reasons? I mean, is it going to be like Wayne Knight? Did you see that? He lost all that weight and then he just wasn’t Newman any more.
ME: I hear Wayne Knight does critically acclaimed off-Broadway stuff now, so I doubt he’s worried. I mean, worst-case scenario, he just goes into a closet that’s labeled “Seinfeld Money” and takes out a laundry bag full of hundred dollar bills. The closet is five miles deep.
FLAPJACKS: Will Jonah Hill ever have that kind of closet?
ME: It’s entirely possible he already has one. I bet his has guardian Morlocks in it.
FLAPJACKS: Topic change! Jonah Hex. What do we think?
ME: Well, on the one hand you have a cowboy with a gatling-gun horse and rocket-dynamite crossbows who talks to dead people. That’s kind of awesome. But on the other hand, that’s not Jonah Hex. Jonah Hex doesn’t need a gatling-gun horse or rocket-dynamite crossbows or the powers of the Sixth Sense kid. Jonah Hex only needs a knife and a revolver and pure motherfucking anger to kill you. People who fight Jonah Hex should have gatling-gun horses just so they can find out how useless those things are when you fight Jonah Hex.
FLAPJACKS: So it’s kind of like they made a Batman movie with Adam Sandler as Batman.
ME: Shut up shut up shut up I don’t want Bruce Vilanch to hear that and get ideas for the next Oscar ceremony’s “comedy” bits.
FLAPJACKS: Speaking of which, Grown Ups. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what the fucking fuck? Wasn’t Adam Sandler’s career over already? I can’t even remember the last three movies he made.
ME: Funny People, Bedtime Stories and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.
FLAPJACKS: I forgot. You’re like the film-school version of Rain Man.
ME: Look, you have to understand: his movies always make back all the money they cost, and then some. And given that this is a guy whose comedy about an Israeli commando-turned-hairdresser cost ninety million dollars, that says something. Plus, Kevin James is in this one, and after Blart Blart Mall Blart he is apparently a giant cheque in human form, merely waiting to be signed.
FLAPJACKS: Wait, what the fuck is Maria Bello doing in that movie as his wife? Surely there must be some clause that says “there is a limit to how fat and stupid a man can be, even in a Hollywood movie, if Maria Bello is going to play his wife.”
ME: Girls think Kevin James is cuddly. The fact that Sandler gets to have Salma Hayek playing his wife disturbs me a lot more than that. I mean, Adam Sandler’s actual wife is honestly pretty hot. Why does he need Salma Hayek? It’s like he’s rubbing it in that he’s rich and famous.
FLAPJACKS: At least they kept David Spade single in this movie.
ME: I’m pretty sure they learned their lesson when the ending of Joe Dirt, where Spade gets the girl, resulted in a massive increase in cancer diagnoses coinciding with the movie’s release.
FLAPJACKS: There are like, no good trailers before this movie.
ME: Well, we are seeing Macgruber. Isn’t that mostly admitting that we have no standards? The studio people were probably all “oh, whatever, just throw ads for shit we wouldn’t make dogs watch in front of MacGruber. They’re already there anyway. Maybe they’ll decide to buy a ticket.”
FLAPJACKS: No, no, I think they were very deliberately marketing to idiots.
ME: And yet, we are here.
FLAPJACKS: No, you’re here. I’m just a figment of your imagination.
ME: No, you’re not.
FLAPJACKS: Look, run with it, will you? I don’t want people finding out I actually paid money to see MacGruber. If I’m just a figment of your imagination then maybe when somebody I actually know asks me if I went to see MacGruber they will believe my lies.
ME: I doubt it. You’re not trustworthy. You still haven’t returned my wok.

Not half as bad as many critics have complained, but the constant whitewashing of the setting borders on the ridiculous: British people (or Americans with bad British accents) are just not Persians, and it’s honestly kind of offensive to try and pretend otherwise, which serves to ruin an otherwise innocuous two-hour bit of entertaining pointlessness.

SCENE: A STUDIO BIGWIG and his three JUNIOR EXECUTIVES sit at a table.

BIGWIG: We have a problem, gentlemen. Looking at our upcoming slate I see nothing that will be in 3D.
FIRST JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: Actually, I –
BIGWIG: I know, One, but I looked into it and the technology to properly make Pogo Ball: The Movie In 3D is still five years away.
FIRST: Awwwww.
SECOND JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: Didn’t you say that five years ago?
BIGWIG: It wasn’t going to be in 3D then. Surely Pogo Ball deserves nothing less than the best we have to offer.
FIRST: I guess. I mean, who would want a Pogo Ball movie to be bad?
THIRD JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: The Internet.
BIGWIG: Who cares about the Internet? I remember the Snakes on a Plane fiasco. Have you already forgotten the lesson of Five?
THIRD: No. No, I haven’t.
BIGWIG: Right. People have heard Samuel L. Jackson say “motherfucker” many times already. They are not willing to pay for that experience again. They will gladly accept it as a bonus, but that is it. Where was I?
FIRST: Pogo Ball!
BIGWIG: Yes. And no. So what ideas do you have for our 3D slate?
SECOND: I’ve got a beach volleyball flick we could post-convert to 3D. Imagine the titties.
THIRD: That’s not a movie. That’s some home video you took. Without permission.
SECOND: It works when Joe Francis does it.
FIRST: Oh oh oh! I have an idea! Let’s do a monster movie in 3D!
THIRD: That’s actually not a bad idea.
BIGWIG: Indeed. What monster movie will we remake in glorious three-dimensional spectacle?
FIRST: We could make our own brand new monster movie.
BIGWIG: Don’t be stupid.
SECOND: Godzilla?
BIGWIG: That’s locked up for another decade.
FIRST: King Kong?
BIGWIG: Too soon.
SECOND: Dracula?
BIGWIG: Too played.
FIRST: Frankenstein?
BIGWIG: No Universal monsters.
SECOND: Freddy Krueger?
BIGWIG: No.
THIRD: Piranha. The rights are available.
BIGWIG: Can we make it work in 3D?
THIRD: Fish swimming straight at the viewer?
BIGWIG: Sounds possible. I believe this idea is suitable, but we need to be sure we can film it cheaply.
SECOND: I know some locations in Arizona that owe me a favor.
THIRD: Arizona?
SECOND: Are you going to be all “a bloo bloo bloo what about the Mexicans” because last I checked we want to make these movies cheaply.
THIRD: First, you’re a horrible person.
FIRST: What?
THIRD: No, not you. I mean he’s a horrible person and I have more than one thing to say.
FIRST: Oh, that’s okay then.
THIRD: The more important thing is that we are talking about a killer fish movie and you just suggested that we film it in a desert.
SECOND: Arizona has lakes.
THIRD: It has man-made lakes. How are we supposed to spring killer fish on people with man-made lakes? They stock the lakes themselves!
SECOND: I dunno. Mad scientist. Geez, why do you gotta be picky?
FIRST: Ooo ooo ooo I know! It’s not a mad scientist! There was an earthquake, and it opened up a fissure to the ocean!
A pause.
THIRD: But Arizona is very far away from the ocean, you know –
BIGWIG: No, no – this could work. Zoological oddity, sort of a thing. Works better than the mad scientist idea.
SECOND: Hey!
BIGWIG: Now, now, Two. This movie is nearly there, but it needs your special something to make it work.
SECOND: Here in front of everybody?
THIRD: He means an idea.
SECOND: Oh. Well, see, I like the idea of killer fish, but if you’re going to have killer fish, why not have tons of college girls in bikinis for the killer fish to eat? We just take that whole plot from Jaws and put it into our movie. Except instead of stupid boring families, we have college girls in bikinis.
BIGWIG: That seems like an excellent way to add tension and also to rack up the body count when we need to do so.
FIRST: And then the killer fish can fight the town sheriffs! And the town sheriffs will be all “HAH TAKE THAT YOU KILLER FISH” and they shoot them and stuff but then the killer fish are all BWAAMMMMMM and they jump out of the water and kill people and the town sheriffs have to fight them hand-to-hand! And then the piranhas make a giant whirlpool to suck people down into the water so they can eat them!
THIRD: That makes no sense whatsoever.
BIGWIG: But will it look good in 3D?
THIRD: Does anything look good in 3D?
BIGWIG: No, but will people believe it looks good?
THIRD: …you realize his eyes have glazed over because he’s imagining the climactic fish-sheriff fight, right?
BIGWIG: We’ll send him down to the storyboarding room later on. It’s more profitable to us then sending him into therapy.
FIRST: …and then Christopher Lloyd says “gadzooks!”…

…is not nearly as bad as the reviews would have you believe, especially when you take into account that seemingly half of all people reviewing this movie do so in the following manner: “where is the singing and the archery versus knights and where are the Merry Men and why isn’t everybody an anthropomorphized fox THIS IS NOT HOW ROBIN HOOD IS SUPPOSED TO BE.” Which, okay, I get that some people want Robin Hood to be fun and frolicsome, but it’s not like you need a new Disney/Costner Robin Hood because that’s already there so try something else with the story elements. (If anything this film comes off as a more impressive version of the Patrick Bergin/Uma Thurman Robin Hood, which went the Robin McKinley route for historical relevance, and posed the Robin Hood story in Norman/Saxon antagonism – whereas this grounds itself in King John’s struggle against the northern English barons and the eventual signing of the Magna Carta.)

Granted, it’s not perfect by any means, and in particular appears to suffer from a bad case of too-long-for-feature-release-so-let’s-chop-the-running-time-itis; some plotlines end up just feeling incredibly rushed and I expect that in the long run this will follow the same path as Kingdom of Heaven, with a special “extended cut” edition showing up on DVD that’s actually far superior if you don’t mind a three-hour running time. But I enjoyed it well enough.

Occasionally clunky-to-the-point-of-groaners script and Scarlett Johanssen’s “acting” (as opposed to her stunt double, the wonderfully named “Heidi Moneymaker,” who is amazing) fail to ruin an overall enjoyable comic-book movie experience.

It is said that they’re making a fourth Mission: Impossible movie, and that Brad Bird is in talks to direct it. I think this is a fantastic idea.

A big reason for my enthusiasm is, of course, the involvement Brad Bird himself, a talented filmmaker who made one of the best superhero movies there is with The Incredibles, and who topped it by making a movie about a rat with a keen interest in French cuisine just as engaging.

But the fact of the matter is, I love the Mission: Impossible movies. “But Justin,” you might well say, “the Mission: Impossible franchise … well, it’s hardly even a franchise at all, is it? It’s just generic spy action – those could be any movies. Why, you don’t even have a memorable lead character! Ethan Hunt has no distinguishing characteristics; he’s just Tom Cruise with a gun, which means all he really does is alternate between his intense face and that cocky smile he does, depending on the situation.”

Well, the first thing I would say is that Cruise may only have two expressions, but he does them both so very well. I usually like watching Tom Cruise in things, and I can think of no reason for this other than he just radiates charm; certainly it’s not a mystery why this guy is a movie star, right?

But onto the larger issues … look, the thing is, not a whole lot of people today – especially not in that youthful demographic the films are aiming for – have ever seen the original TV show or know what it was like (for the record: I’ve never seen it either). But you know what everyone in America does know, even if they’ve never seen that show?

Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!

Um, and so on. They are not making the movie version of the show, they are making the movie version of that song, because that is one of the most stirring television themes ever written.  The producers felt pretty safe that as long as you had that theme, a couple of catchphrases from the show (“Your mission, should you choose/decide to accept it” and “This message will self destruct in five seconds,” which everybody also knows despite never having seen that show) a bankable leading man, and a lot of explosions, you could put pretty much anything in there and it would sell.

Instead of being a weakness, however, it turns out to be the franchise’s greatest strength.

See, James Bond movies are very clearly defined stylistically. There is a relatively narrow range of things you can do with Bond, and when you start moving out of that range, moviegoers go, “Hmm, I don’t know…it doesn’t feel like James Bond.” You could never put, say, Quentin Tarantino, or Edgar Wright, or John Carpenter on a Bond movie. It wouldn’t work, because their styles are all so distinctive and so not-Bond. What you need are extremely talented, but not flashy, directors to do 007. The direction must serve the franchise.

But the Mission: Impossible franchise, as it exists, has no unity of theme or character or style, so it doesn’t matter if they don’t match up. There is no recognizable franchise to serve, so you can get very talented directors and just let them go nuts. So the first movie is very much a Brian DePalma movie, very stylish and glossy. The second movie is John Woo doing his ultracool gun stuff, right down to the doves. And the third one lets J.J. Abrams revisit his Alias political-intrigue-and-personal-stakes bag of tricks. Three different directors with three different styles produce three movies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. So the sort of metatextual brilliance in all this – which I’m sure was not planned, but it’s there anyway – it’s not just Ethan Hunt being given his assignment, it’s also the directors…

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make an action movie using the following elements:

1. Tom Cruise, and a box for him to stand on when interacting with taller actresses.

2. Ving Rhames as a guy who constantly points out how dangerous/impossible/crazy the mission they’re on is as a way to pump up the tension a bit.

3. A pre-existing suspension of disbelief that you can make masks so lifelike that they’re indistinguishable from the original person (despite differences in height, weight, etc.), yet peel off painlessly with one good tug.

…and of course…

4. Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!”

Yes, I know, I’m a guest contributor and I’m totally hijacking one of MGK’s personal topics, but how can I resist the lure of the giant soapbox? It’s a chance to tell large numbers of people to go see a movie I like, and you will all listen to me oh the POWER MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! In case that doesn’t clarify, let me stress again: I’m not MGK. If you have seen this movie, and do not think it is good, don’t blame him for my opinions. Oh, and also, you clearly hate babies and puppies and things that are awesome and are probably a Twilight fan or something.

So, on to Slither. Slither was a 2006 horror-comedy (with the emphasis on horror) written and directed by James Gunn, a horror veteran who got his start writing for Troma Films. His profile had been seriously raised by his screenplay for the Dawn of the Dead remake, and it wasn’t too surprising that he eventually got a shot at directing his own feature. It was, perhaps, a little surprising that he wound up making a film that was such an unabashed throwback to the splatstick horror movies of the early 80s; at the time, horror fans accused him of ripping off Night of the Creeps, but that misses the point. Slither isn’t ripping off any particular 80s horror movie any more than Metallica was ripping off any particular heavy metal band. They just knew they liked the sound and made it their own.

In the same way, Slither takes the tropes of splatstick (physical comedy, combined with grotesque body-horror) and makes them its own. Human beings bloat up like balloons as they gobble down vast quantities of rotting meat, only to be consumed from within by slugs that then jump down people’s throats and burrow into their brains…all so that they can proceed to deliver a speech about marital fidelity in perfect unison. Then spit acid at people. It’s the kind of unabated, disturbing freakishness that requires an R-rating to deliver…and unlike the vast majority of horror films of the last decade, Slither doesn’t water down its horror to cater to a PG-13 audience. This is the kind of movie you used to have to sneak into, back in the day; unfortunately for Slither‘s box office, it’s harder to do that now.

But Slither has more than just gross-out comedy and startle moments going for it; the film has a charming cast of characters that make you genuinely root for them, aided in no small part by the cast. Gunn went for character actors over stars (at this point, I will remind you that there’s an entire comments section in which to debate my labeling of star Nathan Fillion as a “character actor”.) Gregg Henry, one of those quintessential “nobody remembers his name, but everyone remembers his face and performance” actors, makes you delight in every narrow escape of the sleazy mayor as things go from bad to worse (to worse to worse to worst.) And Michael Rooker gives a great performance in a thankless role, taking the thoughtless husband who becomes the host of an alien parasite and making him sympathetic even under a metric fuckton of prosthetics.

But most importantly, Slither is sneakily subversive about the tropes it’s borrowing. Characters constantly behave just a little different than you expect them to in a movie like this; the teenage girl who might as well have Obvious Victim written on her forehead turns out to be a smart, determined survivor, and the brutish heel who’s destined to turn into a monster winds up having a sweet, decent streak in him that you only find out about just before things go bad. The movie’s subversive streak can be summed up in a single scene: One of the characters, having been turned into a breeder for brain-slugs, begs Fillion to kill him. Before you have more than a second to anticipate the traumatic, brutal decision he has to make, Fillion whips out his gun and blows the guy’s brains out. Because jeez, did you see what he looked like?

Unfortunately, Slither bombed at box offices (in no small part because the perfect audience for a splatstick horror movie is sixteen year-old boys, and they’ve cracked down a lot on sneaking into R-rated movies since the golden days of the 80s.) But movies like this are destined to do better as cult DVD hits, building up their reputation through word of mouth and devoted fans. I know I’ve had to practically force a couple of horror fans to sit down and watch it; afterward, one of them said, “Slither is this generation’s Evil Dead II.” High praise, indeed.

And if none of that convinces you, I will say that this movie has the single best karaoke scene ever committed to film. Seriously, I would watch a full 90 minutes of that woman singing karaoke. I’d describe it, but…it has to be seen to be believed. Just like Slither.

SCENE: A STUDIO BIGWIG and his three JUNIOR EXECUTIVES sit at a table.

BIGWIG: Shareholders these days are worried about investments in star vehicles that are unproven commodities. Therefore, I have decided that all of our projects for the next six months will come from one-word trademarked items with significant visibility. One, begin development on “Cable,” “Hilton,” and “Steakums.”
FIRST JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: You know, “Popeye” is only one word and it’s a visibility.
THIRD JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: I think you mean “trademark.”
FIRST: No, I mean “Popeye.” Who would go to see Trademark: The Movie?
BIGWIG: Adventurous idea, One. Three, shop Trademark: The Movie around to indie directors. Maybe Spike Jonze can do something that ironic hipsters will enjoy.
THIRD: Am I shopping anything else around? “Alka-Seltzer,” perhaps?
BIGWIG: That is technically two words, as is “Pepto-Bismol.” However, see what you can do with “Xantac.”
FIRST: Oooooh ooooh make it a robot! With laser vision! I’ll trade you “Steakums” for it!
BIGWIG: No trades. Three, you will also get “Oz.” I recommend combining the HBO prison drama with the Baum books. That way, we get two audiences at once.
THIRD: That’s… actually interesting.
BIGWIG: You’re welcome. Now, you’re going to help Two out on his assignment.
SECOND JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: Oh, come on. Is this is because of what happened with Anne Hathaway?
BIGWIG: This is exactly because of what happened with Anne Hathaway.
FIRST: I hear she still walks with a limp.
SECOND: It wasn’t my fault she crashed that Porsche into that other Porsche that the drug dealer was driving at us at full speed because I convinced him that baking soda was cocaine.
BIGWIG: Nonetheless. Two, you have “Pledge,” “Tweety,” and “Marmaduke.”
SECOND: Okay, I get that Pledge is clearly a movie about sorority hazing involving floor wax, and Tweety is a sex comedy involving Twitter in some fashion, like maybe Kate Hudson is a girl who’s afraid of commitment and loves shoe shopping, so she breaks up with guys via Twitter while she goes shoe shopping, but then she falls in love with a hunky programmer who works for Twitter –
THREE: There are hunky programmers?
SECOND: We can get Dane Cook to play one.
THREE: Of course.
SECOND: But what the hell am I supposed to do with “Marmaduke”? Nobody loves Marmaduke if they’re under the age of eighty. I mean, I like some questionable things, sure, but even I don’t like Marmaduke.
FIRST: I don’t like it either.
SECOND: There you go! See? The guy who wrote most of Anthony Anderson’s dialogue in Kangaroo Jack is too intellectual for Marmaduke. This one is impossible, boss. I say we give it to Uwe Boll and back away slowly.
BIGWIG: We spent a lot of money acquiring the rights to make Marmaduke. Stop whining and come up with a multimillion-dollar film franchise. What do I pay you for again?
SECOND: …can we have Marmaduke have sex with a lady?
BIGWIG: No.
SECOND: Okay, I’m out of ideas.
THIRD: Wow, you didn’t even mention whores once.
SECOND: I know!
FIRST: I have an idea!
(A pause.)
BIGWIG: Yes…?
FIRST: Let’s have Marmaduke talk! That’s what brings this movie into the 21st century! He can be all “I’m a dog, and I’m talking.”
BIGWIG: Does he talk to humans, or to animals, or to the audience, or what?
FIRST: I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.
THIRD: Didn’t Look Who’s Talking Now bomb?
FIRST: I don’t know what that is!
BIGWIG: You forget, Three, that nowadays we have computers. We can use computers to make the dogs’ mouths move so it looks like they are actually talking. Children love this.
THREE: They don’t find it kind of creepy?
BIGWIG: Children love this.
THREE: I see.
FIRST: So Marmaduke can talk about dog stuff. Like, how much he likes pooping, and how much he likes eating, and then pooping, and sleeping, and pooping…
SECOND: Wait wait wait. Isn’t Marmaduke, in the cartoons, really huge? And he does all this stuff because he’s so big?
BIGWIG: Yes. So?
SECOND: In real life Great Danes don’t quite get as big as Marmaduke is in the cartoon.
THIRD: My god, are you actually making a cogent observation?
SECOND: I dated a professional dog breeder a while back.
THIRD: You dated a woman? More than once?
SECOND: Okay, it wasn’t a breeder, it was a Kardashian. But she really, really loved dogs. She wouldn’t shut up about dogs. Or maybe it was hats. Same thing, really.
BIGWIG: This is a fine point, Two, but again. We will fix that with computers.
THREE: We’ll make the dog larger with computers?
BIGWIG: Of course not. We’ll just have him do all the Marmaduke things and be a normal-sized Great Dane, and anything that’s especially physical, we just do it without the dog and CGI in a dog in post. Honestly, Three. Do I need to explain computers to you now?
FIRST: Also maybe we could have all the dogs dance in a dance routine with computers!
SECOND: Wait, wait – maybe dog society can be just like high school! People love it when shit is like high school!
THIRD: I guess we could throw in a talking cat. If we have talking dogs, we can have a cat as well. Some people like cats better than dogs.
BIGWIG: Gentlemen, this is what I call development. Who can we get to star?
THIRD: I think William H. Macy owes me a favour.
FIRST: Will he let us kick him in the nuts?
THIRD: I’m just going to assume you meant in the movie.
FIRST: Of course I meant in the movie. I’m not stupid, you know.
BIGWIG: We all know that, One.
FIRST: So, how many times will we kick him in the nuts? Fifteen, or twenty? I say twenty. It’s funnier that way! Just imagine him getting kicked again and again and again!
THREE: I think his limit per movie is two.
FIRST: Aw. What if he gets headbutted in the nuts by a dog instead?
THREE: Still two.
BIGWIG: We’ll make it work. Still, we need somebody famous to be the voice of Marmaduke. Who can we get?
THREE: Jon Stewart?
BIGWIG: Too self-conscious.
SECOND: Leonardo DiCaprio?
BIGWIG: Threatened to set us on fire if we contacted him ever again.
FIRST: Vince Vaughn! Vince Vaughn! He can say “poop” in so many different ways!
BIGWIG: Not bad, but he doesn’t owe us any favours. Wait a second. Two, can you contact Owen Wilson?
SECOND: Great thinking, boss! I’ve still got those incriminating pictures from the set of Marley and Me! We’ll get him to –
THIRD: Why don’t we just pay him instead? It’s not like he has standards.
BIGWIG: Because we want to save money. Offer him half his going rate plus the negatives, Two.
SECOND: Will do.
BIGWIG: Well, it looks like this has come together. Good work, everybody.
FIRST: My turn! My turn! So, I’m thinking Steakums can be like Transformers, except that instead of being robots, they’re made of ground meat product…

I’m still not entirely sold on Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, but this instills me with more confidence. Oh, Edgar Wright, how could I doubt you?

A few people emailed me after the last time I had an open call for post requests asking me to “rip into” George R.R. Martin for taking such a long-ass time finishing the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which… no. I mean, just no. Even if we could get around the amazing hypocrisy of me calling someone out for taking a long time to finish a creative work, it’s something I just wouldn’t do regardless, because writers work at their own speed and it’s not a uniform process that’s the same for everybody so expecting Martin to crank out books on a yearly basis like Terry Pratchett does is silly and also Neil Gaiman said stuff I agree with. And so forth.

But I will say this: by getting HBO to sign on to a Game of Thrones series, Martin has – intentionally or not – set himself a deadline. And he’s set himself this deadline for one reason: he’s written a series which features young characters which is now being converted into an ongoing telefilmic series. In order for that series to work, it needs to film itself as quickly as possible. (It can be released on whatever schedule HBO likes, but that’s a different thing entirely.)

Think about it for a second. People complain quite frequently that the young actors in the Harry Potter movies have aged too quickly to portray the characters effectively. Now, granted, this is a pretty stupid complaint given that the first movie started production in 2000, when Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were all eleven (just like in the book), and thanks to a fanatical devotion to cranking the movies out on a schedule that would probably be considered near-slavery if it weren’t for the enormous salaries involved for everybody working on it, they’re just about finished shooting the double-film adaptation of Deathly Hallows now, ten years later. Filming seven years’ worth of progression in ten years is honestly pretty amazing – and people still complain that Radcliffe, Watson and Grint have aged too much.

But the Harry Potter experience is nothing compared to what awaits production on A Game of Thrones and so forth, because the latter is a series of novels where young protagonists go through much more in an even shorter timespan: as of the end of the fourth book, they’ve covered in between two and a half and three years. Assuming that the rest of the series follows this pace, that’s seven novels covering about five years and change. Given that some major characters – Bran and Arya Stark, for example, as well as lesser characters like Thomen Baratheon – are out-and-out little kids (not even tweens), these series are going to have to film relatively close to one another, even faster than release times in order to keep from aging the younger characters too fast onscreen. (Especially considering that it’s been made clear that the show plans to produce one season per novel.) If they don’t, the show has the danger of pulling a Walt-from-Lost, where they have a young character clearly aging faster than the timeline of the show he’s on can handle.

Now, this isn’t impossible to film. Difficult, yes, but certainly not impossible – especially given HBO’s production budgets and the likely enormous return on investment. But all of this difficulty puts Martin’s back up against a wall, because up until now it was just his ass on the line if he got further delayed in finishing the books. Now it’s not just him: it’s everybody working on these shows. Previously the only other people affected by Martin’s slow writing speed were maybe a few people at a publishing company and some fans with an enormous sense of entitlement. Now, though, it’s a horde of people who are completely dependent on him finishing the books so they can produce the TV shows.

I don’t know if Martin can handle that pressure or not. I hope he can. I just know that I wouldn’t want it.

I’m not going to turn this blog into trailer central or anything, but apparently you could see this in 3D if you went to see Alice In Wonderland in 3D but instead I saw it in a theatre with really crappy sound so I didn’t get to see this and holeeeeeeeeeeeeeee shit.

This is more important to me than a dozen Iron Man sequels.