Got to see Green Lantern: First Flight yesterday, and… well, I kinda give it a thumbs in the middle.

continue reading "First Flight"

LIKED

– Harry Potter and the Sixth Movie is decent. It’s not in the league of Star Trek or Up for summer quality, but it’s entertaining and well-made on all levels, which has been a fucking rarity in the land of the summer blockbuster this year. You have to really admire how the movies manage to take everything of quality out of the increasingly mediocre progression of books and ignore all the extra flotsam. (For example, Dobby has not shown up once since the second movie, which just goes to show you that the producers understand that Dobby is horrible in all ways.) This time around, Emma Watson really steps up her acting a notch, and Tom Felton makes Draco compelling and sad, which the book never really managed to do.

– Also finally got around to seeing Adventureland and was terribly impressed by it. It turns out Kristen Stewart can actually act when she is not in a shitty movie about sparkle vampires, and Ryan Reynolds’ turn as the park handyman/fading rocker is magnetic in the sort of way that Brad Pitt was in Thelma and Louise. And Jesse Eisenberg is like Michael Cera if Michael Cera wasn’t sometimes horribly annoying in a sort of “I need to punch you in the face” way.

– After a couple of marathon sessions I can safely say that Small World is definitely my frontrunner for “best board game of the year.” It’s quick (about an hour per session when people know the rules), strategic without being boring, has that random element that makes games interesting without being overly luck-based, and best of all it’s the sort of game that’s inherently funny. “A-ha! The Bivouacking Sorcerers strike with great vengeance upon your Dragon Master Halflings!”

DIDN’T LIKE

– Yeah, Blackest Night sure sucked.

LIKED

– Tales From Monkey Island Chapter One: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is the first Telltale games adventure “episode” ever that I felt really lived up to the promise of the point-and-click-and-grab-things genre. Most of their previous offerings have been marked by puzzles that fell somewhere in between “unintuitive” and “nonsensical.” But Tales‘ puzzles make sense; they’re not easy, but they’re not so obtuse as to ruin the fun of the story. (Which is fun, incidentally; the story is so far on par with the best Monkey Island games.)

– Wipeout Couples was actually even more enjoyable than regular Wipeout, which is one of the great “sit back and have a beer” teevee shows. Seeing people root for their spouses on the obstacle course (and cheer, and complain) makes it even more fun. Whodathunk?

– The Magic: The Gathering 2010 base set is just shitloads of fun. People complaining about the rules changes need to get slapped for a number of reasons. The base set has knights and dragons and genies and goblins and everything that should be in a Magic base set: the traditional archetypes and things that are awesome about Generic Fantasy Literature ™. And the new spells and cards are flavourful and well-designed.

MEH

– I know I’m going to get pilloried for this, but: Wednesday Comics. The strip quality was good to excellent overall (exceptions: the incoherent Teen Titans and the very been-there-done-that Metal Men and Demon/Catwoman strips), but a lot of the comics didn’t give me the feel of the old weekly serials they were trying to echo: they felt like first pages of short comic stories and nothing more. Which is fine and I enjoyed them, but I’m not gonna go jerking off over the thing because the first page of eleven or twelve stories is awesome; it’s just too small and early a sample for me to call it “good.”

I’d also call into question the value. People have been exclaiming how this is the same price as a normal comic, but normal comics are overpriced. The giant-size of the layout is nice, definitely, and there’s something to be said for the experience of reading a comic newspaper-style – but it doesn’t give me more story. In fact it gives me less. Yes, yes, I’ve seen multiple people talking about the “square foot of comics” measure as if that was somehow relevant (next up: “Wednesday Comics gives you 24% more wood pulp for your dollar!”). And if they were trying to echo the old serials, why wasn’t this thing printed on cheap newsprint and sold for a buck? That would have been a marketing revolution. As it is, it’s just another (admittedly novel) exercise in marketing to the hardcores, and I can’t get that excited over marketing to the hardcores, because that is what is killing superhero comics.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Lesbian Vampire Killers desperately wants to be the next Shaun of the Dead. Here is all you need to know: it is nowhere near being the next Shaun of the Dead. Avoid. Like the plague.

Ryan Reynolds promises that in the Deadpool movie, Deadpool will break the fourth wall.

That is about the most perfect thing imaginable.

LIKED

– Finally got around to seeing The Quiet Earth, the mid-80s New Zealand sci-fi movie about a guy who discovers that, as a result of a scientific experiment he worked upon, every person on Earth has disappeared. It’s flawed: needs better actors, and the tail third kinda drags a bit – but it’s still very compelling and well worth seeing if you’ve got the means. (By which I mean the internet.)

– Caught Total Wipeout, the British version of Wipeout, this week, and it’s all the dumb fun of regular Wipeout except the jokes from the host are actually clever and kind of witty!

DIDN’T LIKE

– Maybe it’s a bit harsh to say I “didn’t like” Public Enemies, because Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard are both amazing and Christian Bale quite good, and they are the bulk of the acting time in the movie – but the movie just drags. Even the gunfights are boring, and this is a movie about frigging bank robbers. How can a movie about bank robbers have boring gunfights? Well, this one does. (I’m also not a fan of the DV cinematography in this case; it sometimes makes the film look cheap.)

– People have been emailing me to ask if I’ll do a remix of Justice League: Cry For Justice, and I don’t really see the point, because this comic is so painfully bad the jokes are too obvious to bother making. This is a comic where Green Lantern demands the heroes be more “proactive” and nobody bothers to point out that he already did that, and in the process temporarily destroyed the universe, except whoops it was a giant yellow space bug controlling him or something. This is a comic where the Atom tortures a bad guy by stomping on his brain and nobody points out that his wife killed one of his closest friends by accident doing the exact same thing. This is the shittiest comic I have read in god knows how long. Ultimatum is a better comic than this, because as stupid and offensive as Ultimatum is, at least in that comic people in tights fight other people in tights. This is stupid and offensive and absolutely jack shit happens.

Top comment: Why the heck DIDN’T they put Grimlock in the new movies? — Beacon

Because car companies aren’t manufacturing dinosaurs, I guess. — Evan Waters

LIKED

– Detective Comics featuring Batwoman was as good as everybody says it is, and frankly, given that it’s stupid boring sucky Batwoman, this is nothing short of a miracle even though Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams are the ones doing it. (Let me put it this way: regardless of how good a filmmaker Steven Spielberg might be, I would stll be skeptical if he said he was going to make a children’s adventure film about Benito Mussolini.) The Question backup feature is the first one of these backups that has really genuinely impressed. (The Blue Beetle one in Booster Gold was inconsequential fun and little more; the Renee story has meat to it.)

– The Philanthropist shouldn’t work – I mean, come on, the adventures of a billionaire? – but it does. A friend of mine called it “kind of like Iron Man without the armor,” and that’s pretty accurate. James Purefoy is really good in it, too, combining that Stark-like mix of insouciance, hedonism, stubbornness and genuine idealism to create a genuinely engaging lead character. Dunno if it can keep it up, but the pilot was a lot of fun.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Gotham City Sirens is crap. You know, for all the flak Marvel is (rightly) taking over their horribly sexist, amazingly tone-deaf comics like Marvel Divas and Models Inc., it’s worth remembering that DC is really only marginally better in this regard and is just as willing to shove out blatant T&A like this book, which is little more than an excuse to draw Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and Catwoman in a variety of anatomically impossible “sexy” poses. (Additional note: I am really, really sick of hack writers coming up with a stupid villain concept and then telling the reader “hey this guy is stupid” and having everybody in the book beat him with ease. Remember back in the day when Spider-Man would fight a new villain every issue? Sure, some of them were silly in retrospect, but the writers back then made sure Spidey took every one of them damn seriously. Actually, one of the good things about the new “He’s Single And A Loser So He’s Spider-Man Again Just Like When I Was Six!” run is that they treat their new villains, even the ridiculous ones, as genuine threats.)

– I probably should have known better than to go see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but what are you gonna do when your date says she wants to see big robots fighting one another? (Answer: you go see the movie. It is possible some of you might not have known this. This is a basic truth regardless of the gender of you or your date.) Anyway, yes, it is as shit-awful as you might think. Michael Bay still thinks the mere utterance of a profanity constitutes a punchline. Michael Bay still doesn’t know how to make a fight scene between giant robots – something which should practically direct itself – visually coherent or interesting. Michael Bay still doesn’t know how to set up plot elements effectively or indeed tell a story. And really, saying “still doesn’t” isn’t entirely accurate, because in the last five years Michael Bay has made at least one genuinely entertaining film (The Island, which didn’t do well because the public is essentially stupid), so we know that he has some understanding of story; it’s just that when he makes a Transformers movie, he knows he doesn’t have to bother being good because, as the opening weekend revenues demonstrate, people will eat that shit up regardless of how shit the shit is.

Top comment: I think the best point in RotF was when John Turturro was lecturing the old robot about structuring his stories. — enlight_bystand

LIKED

– Bloody Confused! by Chuck Culpepper is a great little piece of sportswriting – a journey alongside Culpepper during his time in England as he lives there for a few years and, being a sports fan generally, settles in and picks a football team to cheer for (in his case, Portsmouth), and in the process discovers why he likes sports. It’s engaging and intelligent and is readable both for the fan (for whom it will illuminate many of the reasons non-soccer fans have trouble understanding or appreciating the game, and how to get past those issues), and the nonfan (for whom it will illuminate both the joy of being a fan generally and the joy of being a soccer fan particularly).

– Punisher #6 is actually the execution of a pretty good idea: namely, bringing back everybody Scourge ever killed from the dead, and siccing them on somebody. That it is the Hood siccing them on the Punisher just makes it even better, because the motivations all make sense (the Hood wants a no-cost plan to kill or at least inconvenience the Punisher, the villains want to not go back to being dead once the spell runs out, and the Punisher wants what he always wants). All this, plus the return of Death Adder (probably one of the coolest minor Marvel villains ever), and hopefully the promise of getting, however briefly, into the mind of Turner D. Century.

– Caught up (finally) on the back end of Friday Night Lights‘ third season, and oh man does this show ever get bad? Other than last season’s “Tyra and Landry kill a guy” plot (which was dealt with in a mature enough fashion that its sensationalism was forgiveable), this show just doesn’t make missteps, not ever. Plus this is the first season where they’ve actually had enough stability to set up the fourth season, with a brilliant hook (forcing Coach to take over the just-reopened decrepit poor high school’s football team and letting the uber-successful Dillon Panthers now be the nemesis rather than the scrappy underdog). With the show’s cast set to change drastically next season (only Matt and Julie of the kids set to stick around, and one hopes that Matt Saracen will finally for once in his damn life catch a fucking break and pull a Smash by the fourth episode or something) the show needed exactly this sort of tactic to remain the powerhouse that it is.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Dance of the Dead turns out to be a real disappointment, a movie that can’t decide if it’s a zombie comedy movie or a zombie parody movie and by extension mostly fails at both. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. It’s not even internally consistent. (This is a movie that seemingly can’t decide between “slow zombies” and “fast zombies,” instead going with the truly retarded decision of “both.”) Large chunks of it are really stupid. Large chunks of it are really predictable. Practically none of it is entertaining. And the obvious societal commentary that could be done with zombies plus prom is almost completely ignored. I know this was a low-budget movie, but you don’t need a high budget to make a good zombie movie – that’s one of the plusses of the genre, for crissake.

– You know, I’ve often said that Padma Lakshmi, the host of Top Chef, is a wooden self-important she-jackal. And this is true. But Kelly Choi, host of Top Chef Masters, makes Padma Lakshmi look like Julia fucking Child.

– Maksim instead of Kupono? Really, Nigel? (And you know this comes down to Nigel.) Are you trying to utterly invalidate the entire concept of dancing for your life? Because when Kupono A) dances like shit in his competitive dance and then B) pulls out a crappy, distracted solo, while Max A) dances well in his competitive dance and then B) nails his solo, your preferences become obvious. Yes, Max looks like a Russian mobster, but that’s not his fault. He is Russian, after all. (And now, lay odds on the new Kupono/Kayla pairing to get a contemporary routine next week so Kayla, obviously one of Nigel’s favorites, can make top ten.) Also, Ashley danced better than Kaitlyn did and similarly should not have gone, but they were both chaff anyway so it’s more forgivable.

It’s just my allergies acting up, that’s all.

BringtheNoise in response to yesterday’s Punisher post:

So, what brought this on?

For starters, here’s a list of the top 30 movies of 2009 thus far:

Star Trek
Monsters Vs. Aliens
Up
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Fast and Furious
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Taken
Angels & Demons
The Hangover
Terminator Salvation
Watchmen
He’s Just Not That Into You
Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail
Knowing
Hannah Montana: The Movie
Coraline
Hotel for Dogs
I Love You, Man
Obsessed
Race to Witch Mountain
Friday the 13th (2009)
17 Again
Bride Wars
The Haunting in Connecticut
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
My Bloody Valentine 3-D
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
Confessions of a Shopaholic
The Unborn

Look at that list. What do you see? A whole lot of adaptations, remakes, reboots and sequels. (Fast and Furious is a sequel to a remake.) Amazingly, the top ten is actually half original films (even if one of them is Paul Blart, Mall Cop), but expect those numbers to jiggle around a bit yet: we still have Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, G.I. Joe, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, The Time Traveler’s Wife, I Love You Beth Cooper, H2, Inglourious Basterds, The Road, Whiteout, Astro Boy, The Wolf Man, Twilight: New Moon, A Christmas Carol, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes, and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakwel. And that top 30 list will eventually include The Taking of Pelham 123 and maybe even Land of the Lost.

Now, maybe it’s understandable that Hollywood has gotten fiscally conservative and doesn’t want to throw money at unproven properties; hell, even intellectual property that seems solid combined with hot talent can end up biting you in the ass (e.g. Speed Racer). But it’s disappointing to consider the fact that, after Friday the 13th basically tanked after opening weekend (because it was dogshit), the studio went ahead and immediately greenlit yet another fucking Jason movie. In this time, he will be in the snow. (Read the comments, incidentally. A great example of the “Robocop Game.”) Because “we haven’t seen that before.” This is their way of reinventing Jason: by putting him in the snow.

It’s not that I’m pissed that they’re reinventing Jason by putting him in the snow. It’s not even that I’m pissed that they’re bothering to try yet another fucking Jason movie when the last god knows how many Jason movies have A) sucked and B) flopped. What pisses me off is that Hollywood is now a place where Star Wars could never get made. No, not another Star Wars sequel – I mean the original Star Wars, or something equivalent to it. “It’s a ginormous fantasy/sci-fi epic with no big names and it will cost a shitload of money!” Yeah, execs will rush to bankroll that, right?

And that’s depressing. And it’s why there’s a fourth Punisher movie in development somewhere; for no reason other than that there have already been three of them.

2012: Marvel Studios, in partnership with Lionsgate, makes Punisher War Journal, starring Adam Baldwin as the Punisher, Hector Elizondo as the evil Mexican drug lord Cervantes, and Molly Parker as the whore who falls in love with Frank Castle. Joe Quesada explains in interviews that the previous Punisher movies “weren’t violent enough” to capture “the true Punisher spirit.” Over the course of the movie, the Punisher bludgeons to death seventeen men, explodes eighty-one more, shoots one hundred ninety-six, garrotes three, sics a rabid tiger on two, and stabs one guy in the nutsack repeatedly. The movie makes about $10 million at the box office.

2015: Marvel Studios, in partnership with MGM, makes Punisher: Long Cold Dark, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the Garth Ennis comic story of the same name. It stars Dane Cook as the Punisher, Seth McFarlane as the evil Irish drug kingpin Lonegan, and Julia Stiles as the whore who falls in love with Frank Castle. “This time,” promises Joe Quesada, “we will really get to the heart of the Punisher.” Over the course of the movie, the Punisher shoots one thousand six hundred and twenty-two people, an average of 17.4 people killed for every minute of the movie’s 93-minute running time. Critics are appalled by the movie’s seven-minute long sequence where the Punisher skullfucks Julia Stiles with the barrel of an Uzi when he discovers she has been working for the drug lord. The movie makes about $14 million at the box office.

2018: Marvel Studios, in partnership with Universal, makes Punisher 3D, starring Joe Jonas as the Punisher, Mike Myers as the evil Scottish drug kingpin Macdougall, and Abigail Breslin as teenaged prostitute Angie, who turns out to be the Punisher’s long-lost baby sister. Joe Quesada enthuses, “this is how the Punisher was always meant to be seen.” Many movie audiences report mass vomiting as they are forced to watch uncannily realistic blood squirts combined with Mike Myers’ comedy Scottish accent. The movie makes about $6 million at the box office.

2020: Marvel-Fuji releases Lady Punisher, starring Megan Fox as the Lady Punisher, Tracy Morgan as the evil Jamaican drug lord Baquon, and Macaulay Culkin as Stevie, the doomed hyper-meth addict. Joe Cyrus-Quesada explains that “it was time for us to really take the Punisher in a new direction, and you can’t get more new than making the Punisher a hot chick.” Critics uniformly question director Sofia Coppola’s decision to have Fox deliver all her lines in a “pirate accent” and pretend to have a peg-leg. The movie makes about $13 million at the box office.

2024: Fuji-Marvelsoft releases Punish-R, a computer-animated movie about a cute little robot in the far future who decides to kill all malfunctioning robots. “We’re taking the Punisher concept and expanding the franchise,” says Joe Quesada Jr. (no relation to the original Joe Quesada, who disappeared in 2021). Critics wonder at the presence of six musical numbers written and conducted by Fred Durst. The movie makes about $9 million at the box office.

2032: Fumarvo releases The Punisher, a back-to-basics movie about Frank Castle (played by Colin Hanks) and his war on crime. The movie is set in the early 90s; Castle is an aging Vietnam vet. “This is what the Punisher is,” says Joe Quesada (having reappeared in 2029). “No tricks, no gimmicks; just straight-up action and drama, very dark. This is what the Punisher should always have been.” Critics applaud the tense action, the performances, and the skillful direction of Michael Bay Jr. and his robot dog/cinematographer Floppy-12. The movie makes about $6 million at the box office.

Top comment: A step by step guide on how to make a decent Punisher movie.

2. That’s IT. You’re fucking DONE. How hard was that exactly? Yeah, that’s what I thought. — Doktor Puppykicker

“What’s the most important thing in life?”
“Respect.”
“Too dependent on other people.”
“Love?”
“A little Disneyland, isn’t it?”
“God’s will.”
“Close.”
“What is it then?”
“Necessity.”
“As in?”
“As in people do what is most necessary to them at any given moment.”

The 90s were actually a pretty damn good decade for movies, but even given the richness of the decade there have been any number of overlooked gems. Three Kings is probably the biggest. I went looking for top ten lists of 90s movies and after an hour on Google, Three Kings does not show up on a single one of them. For the sake of comparison, Kingpin shows up twice; Titanic, four times. American Beauty, Sam Mendes’ overwrought and overblown tribute to the spiritual death of suburbia, appears on countless lists of this sort despite it being rather crap. So does Saving Private Ryan, a movie which is technically brilliant at portraying battle but hardly one that says anything especially profound. (“Hey, did you know war is hell? And it’s violent?”) Dances With Wolves makes a lot of lists, and I wouldn’t say that’s a bad movie but it’s not exactly top ten list material, you know? And of course the usual suspects – Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, Unforgiven, Fargo, Pulp Fiction and The Silence of the Lambs – make sure that top ten slots are hotly contested.

Three Kings won no major awards; it made about $60 million at the box office, which was sort of respectable in the break-even sense, but far from noteworthy. It tends to float under the radar, and out of top ten list range – and as time progresses I’m discovering more and more people who haven’t seen it.

“What would you feel if I bombed your wife?”
“Worse than death.”
“Yes, my friend. Worse than death.”

All of that having been said, there is no reason this should be the case. Three Kings is one of the unsung masterworks of the Nineties; morally and ethically complex, and similarly astute without being preachy. The setting (the first Iraq War) is one that hasn’t been overused in the slightest (the only other Gulf War movie I can think of is Courage Under Fire, and that one kind of sucks). The plot (a small group of American soldiers try to steal some of Saddam’s gold and get caught up in the Shi’ite rebellions in the southern tip of Iraq) isn’t cookie-cutter, the cinematography (giving everything a washed-out feel) is bleakly apropos, and the dialogue clever and well-tuned.

“Are we shooting?”
“What?”
“Are we shooting?”
“…are we shooting?”
“That’s what I’m asking you!”
“…what’s the answer?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”

And the performances are uniformly excellent. George Clooney turns in what was one of two game-changing performances for him (the other being Out of Sight) as Archie Gates, a guy who really wants to be an amoral mercenary just this once, but discovers – much to his obvious chagrin – that he just can’t step aside. Mark Wahlberg’s everyman corporal is exactly right, and as his hysteria and exhaustion ramp up through the course of the film you can really get a sense of someone who never had it that easy to begin with finally finding out how desperate life can really get. Ice Cube’s Chief Elgin is Ice Cube being a moral, upright, total badass, which is what Ice Cube does best. And Spike Jonze – who hasn’t acted in a movie since – absolutely steals the fucking movie as the stupidly gentle redneck Private Vig. Jonze is so good it makes you wonder why he doesn’t act more, and the only answer I’ve ever figured that makes sense is that he wanted to try it out and see what acting was like.

“Lord knows what kind of vermin live in the butt of a dune coon.”
“Why do you let this cracker hang around with you, man?”
“He’s all right, man. He’s from a group home in Dallas. He’s got no high school.”
“Don’t tell people that…”
“I don’t care if he’s from Johannesburg. I don’t want to hear “dune coon” or “sand nigger” from him or anybody else.”
“Captain uses those terms.”
“That’s not the point, Conrad. The point is that “towelhead” and “camel jockey” are perfectly good substitutes.”
“Exactly!”

The four soldiers drive the film’s action, but every performance in this film is dead-on. Jamie Kennedy’s dumbass grunt and Nora Dunn’s veteran journalist are both great little performances, and Judy Greer turns in a wonderful little cameo as a slutty TV reporter, but the real meat of the supporting cast comes from two of Hollywood’s go-to Arab-looking guys: Cliff Curtis (who’s actually a New Zealand Maori, but has played so many Arab characters it’s kind of crazy) as the Shi’ite rebel and Said Taghmaoui (a genuine for-real Arabic person, albeit one born in France) as the Iraqi army interrogator. Curtis matches Clooney (one of the truly great movie stars of our time) presence for presence whenever they share the screen; Tahgmaoui’s scene with Wahlberg when the two talk about their respective baby daughters (one living, one not) never lets the viewer go.

“Any questions?”
“Yeah, is it true to be special forces, you gotta cut off an enemy’s ear?”

But what really sets Three Kings isn’t its great performance or story; it’s the fact that this is the rare movie that just about perfectly blends drama and action. Most movies that attempt to combine the two end up being dramas with a soupcon of action (No Country For Old Men) or are action movies that have a stronger than average dramatic core for the genre (Saving Private Ryan). Three Kings, in comparison, shifts gears from action to drama (with occasional sidereels into comedy) repeatedly without ruining the tone or feeling schizophrenic; it does this by diving deeply into the surreality of war and using its weirdness to accomodate everything David O. Russell wanted the movie to do.

“What happened to the Jesus fire, Doc?”
“It’s around you right now, man. It works on this side or the other side.”
“You never told me that part. I guess I could go to one of them shrines that erase the bad you did…”
“We made the right choice today, Conrad.”
“We did good, right?”
“We made the right choice.”

In short, it should be on more top ten lists.

Top comment: Said Taghmaoui is actually Berber, not Arab. — Distantfred

LIKED

– The Hangover justifies the hype; it is bust-a-gut funny and often, for a comedy where a guy humps a tiger, wickedly smart. If you had told me a couple of years ago that Bradley Cooper would finally make the jump to true stardom in a comedy where the funniest bits all go to Zach Galifianakis, I would probably have looked at you funny and said “how does that go again?” But it’s true, because Cooper is obviously the leading man in this movie and Galifianakis and Ed Helms are his support.

– President’s Choice makes passionfruit (and diet passionfruit) pop now? I sometimes think there is a little room at President’s Choice headquarters where there’s this one guy whose sole job is coming up with new flavors of pop. (I mean, it would explain the lychee soda they introduced last year.) But the passionfruit is easily their best entry since blackcurrant a couple of years ago (and why did they discontinue blackcurrant)?

– Holy shit, The Brothers Bloom is staggeringly good. Clever, funny, charming (even if I didn’t already have a massive crush on Rachel Weisz I would have one now), and it has plot twists that you genuinely sometimes do not see coming, which is all too rare in modern moviegoing these days. Terrific performances, dialogue, visual conception, everything. It is hard to explain how amazingly good this movie is.

– Okay, I’ll admit it: Wipeout is a guilty pleasure. The jokes have gotten better since last year (not much better, but still), and the obstacles have gotten more clever. It’s still television gone stupid, but it’s good for a laugh.

DID NOT LIKE

– Flash: Rebirth reads like Geoff Johns trying out his greatest hits album on repeat. “Hey, Green Lantern Flash is back from the dead but there’s a problem and also Sinestro Professor Zoom is not, in fact, dead but actually behind a lot of the new problems that Hal Barry face, plus everybody else who was ever a Green Lantern Flash gets to look vaguely incompetent as well.” Beyond a nice, brief interaction with Superman, this is almost more offensive than Ultimatum due to sheer badness.

LIKED

– Batman and Robin #1 I liked for two reasons. Firstly I liked it because it was a fantastic, fun comic and return to form for “good” Grant Morrison (as opposed to the “eh” Grant Morrison of Final Crisis). But more importantly, I liked it because now I can start a pool wherein whoever is closest to figuring out how late each of the first twelve issues is wins the pot. (I am guessing #1-3 on time, #4 a week late, #5 three weeks late, #6 five weeks late, #7-8 two months late, #9 two months two weeks late, #10-11 six weeks late, #12 one month late.)

– For Dead Set, the British miniseries about zombies attacking the set of Big Brother, I will make an exception to my “zombies are the new tired old meme” belief, because at least this is zombies with a clever twist, and so long as I don’t just get handed another frigging zombie story (which most zombie stories, let us be honest, are), I am fine with it. Come on, you have to love any series that turns Davina McCall into a zombie and does it straight up.

– Also an exception to my general zombie disinterest: Pontypool, the zombies-as-memetic-disease horror film from Bruce McDonald. Given that Bruce McDonald (Dance Me Outside, Highway 67, and so forth) is generally a pretty awesome filmmaker, I went into this with high expectations. I was not disappointed; he’s still got that same clever sense of timing that always makes his films so surprising when you don’t expect it.

DIDN’T LIKE

– I got to see Land of the Lost for free and that is about what it was worth. Why doesn’t Will Ferrell do more movies like Stranger Than Fiction? I mean, it was a critical success, did okay at the box office (not that Ferrell needs it, he’s got to be richer than Midas by this point), and Ferrell said he enjoyed making it, so why aren’t there a few more good quirky dramedies being offered to him? It would be nice to see Ferrell play something other than Loud Shouty Asshole (But Not Really An Asshole) Guy again and again.

– Got about twenty minutes into Sex Drive, which I watched because multiple people told me it was a cut above the usual dumb sex comedy, and then gave up because it is decidely not a cut above the usual dumb sex comedy. In fact it is rather below a cut. Can something be below the cut? This was below the cut.

LIKED

– Pixar films, at this point, are either an A+ (Wall-E), an A (Ratatouille) or an A- (Cars). On this scale, Up is a solid A – not quite reaching the peaks of Pixar but definitely not one of their “lesser” efforts (where “lesser” is something just about any other filmmakers would kill for). Ed Asner’s voicework fits his character perfectly (and if you don’t at least sniffle in that first ten minutes, what are you made of?) and the little kid character steals just about every scene without feeling forced. The second great summer film of a thus-mostly-starved 2009.

– Panic Breakout is really only fun the first one or two times, but what a one or two times!

– Finally got around to reading Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and really enjoyed how a treatise on the history of modern Chinese food could serve as commentary on globalism, cultural mutation, immigration, racial attitudes, appropriation and reconcilation. Fascinating, and also brings with it a number of “oh, must try that” food ideas.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Mental is a terrible case of medical-procedural-by-the-numbers, pretending to be daring because it’s dealing with mental illness, but come on – using special effects to make schizophrenia more exciting is both overdone and tasteless. Chris Vance, in the lead, is particularly ill-equipped to handle his role; of course, even if he were a great actor, he’d still have a boring “look I’m kooky and nontraditional for no explicable reason” character to deal with, but he’s not a great actor; half of his work feels like a weak Hugh-Laurie-as-House impersonation minus the balls that makes House so interesting.

– “The Princess and the Dragon” expansion for Carcassonne? Oh my god, is it bad. Mutates one of the best board games of all time into an unrecognizable, not very-fun mess. Avoid. Do not get this expansion.

– Man, what a terrible set of audition episodes for So You Think You Can Dance this year. I went back and speed-rewatched the most recent set of Australian audition episodes for a comparison, and then last year’s Canadian and American auditions, and it’s not just me; this year’s American auditions focused more on jokey bad auditions that were supposedly funny much, much more than average, and the American show is the only one that still even bothers to show many bad auditions at all; in the Aussie and Canuck versions you can literally count the number of joke auditions on one hand, which ironically makes them funnier because they stand out in sharp relief to all the really great dancing. I’m honestly a bit nervous about this season now because I can’t help but wonder: did they not have enough good dancing to showcase?