Well, in retrospect, it’s the kind of thing we should have seen coming.  Considering the Smurfs were looking to take on Green Hornet AND the Yogi Bear movie in the upcoming holiday movie season, it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the powers that be over at Sony decided they weren’t even going to bother.

That’s right, folks, the Smurfs movie has been officially pushed back, back, WAY back….all the way back to 2011.

Here’s the strange part, though…rather than falling back to, say, March 2011, it’s apparently going to take a run at the summer movie season of 2011 instead.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t think the Smurfs have the kind of firepower necessary to take a summer movie weekend by storm unless everyone else manages to stay home for a weekend.

Well, here’s hoping for the best for the Smurfs, and that neither Gargamel nor bad reviews will keep them away from success.

Look, I’m as tolerant of weirdness in my movies as the next guy.  I can watch Nick Nolte without throwing up OR screaming.  But man…when I watched Ghost Stories Volume 3 from the good folks at the former ADV (there’s only two volumes left–we’ll hit them next week after the big Friday premier of Whatever Shows Up In My Area This Week), my every weird vibe started pinging like a steel drum at a shotgun convention.

Anyway, we’re still in with our crew, Satsuke’s actually a bigger bitch than ever, Keiichirou is actually less coherent, Momoko now comes with Vaguely Creepy Past involving drugs and freaky sex, Hajime’s still sort-of hitting on Satsuke and Leo, thankfully, is still Leo.

And the ghosts are actually pulling our kids into the spirit world.

There’s a whole lot of contact with the spirit world here, plus one whole episode is devoted to hearing how Satsuke and Keiichirou’s MOM DIED.  Seriously, I don’t want to hear about how the two year old Keiichirou went to get apple juice from a vending machine and got back JUST IN TIME to hear his mom die.  I mean, the hell?  What do we do for an encore, skin a puppy and roll it in salt while he watches?  There are just some things you don’t do!

But just when I think it can’t get more horrible, they go and break the tension as only Ghost Stories can…by giving Satsuke and Keiichirou’s dad a shot with two nurses.  Rock.

Yes, I KNOW his wife was on her deathbed at the time.  So it’s heavily conflicted rock, but still.  Rock.

So I was catching up on some news and what do I spot, but Warner Brothers has officially launched DC Entertainment, an arm of Warner designed as, from the press release: ” a new company founded to fully realize the power and value of the DC Comics brand and characters across all media and platforms”, or, in normal people-speak, to pump milk out of the cash cow that is the DC lineup like no freaking tomorrow.

And it hit me.  THAT’S why Disney bought Marvel.  We all know that Disney’s stock with the boys has been suffering for some time now.  Disney’s biggest market is girls: between the various princesses and the various tween hits like Hannah Montana, Disney pretty much owns the girl market.  Warner, meanwhile, with its stake in Cartoon Network is pretty much for the boys.  With Warner now poised to run Superman and Batman and all the rest like no tomorrow, Disney pretty much realized that if they didn’t do something they’d be left in Warner dust.  And what’s the direct antithesis of DC?

Marvel.

So now, in a big flash of open-mindedness, the whole move makes sense.  Now we just see how two titans with two titanic proxies do battle.  This should be good.

The story is about a fox named Mr. Fox (George Clooney). In order to feed his family, he steals chickens, ducks, and turkeys at night from three mean, stinky and wealthy farmers: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The farmers are fed up with this and try everything to kill him. One night they wait outside his foxhole in an attempt to ambush him. When Mr. Fox emerges from his home, they fire at him but only succeed in blowing off his tail. Ouch!

Determined to catch him, the farmers use spades and shovels to dig their way into the foxes’ home, but Mr. and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) and their son dig a tunnel deeper into the ground and manage to escape. The farmers even resort to using bulldozers in order to dig deeper into the ground.

More happens in the story. The trailer is fun to watch - it’s wildly nutty.

(Source)

Seems like the more I watch the Ghost Stories series from now-defunct ADV, the happier I get about it.  Why?   Simple–because like I said in the title, it’s a study in rapid-fire contrasts.  Somehow it’s managed to become both scarier AND funnier than the first volume.

We’re still neck-deep in the adventures of our gang of five, who are still grappling with the various ghosts released since the condo development got started: tough girl Satsuki, her lecherous psuedo-boyfriend Hajime, nerdy Jewish boy Leo, born again right wing fanatic Momoko and Keiichirou, Satsuki’s semi-coherent crybaby of a little brother.

The ghosts, meanwhile, are getting a whole lot more belligerent…and a whole lot more murder-y.  Everything from ghosts who murder children left home alone to the Buddhist river of the dead will be represented here.

And even more, there will be plenty of jokes.  Everything from Christian Slater’s career to internet dating will be skewered here.

The dichotomy going on here is what’s really amazing–you’re going to laugh, AND you’re going to be scared.  The dialogue that these kids generate is an absolute riot.  Okay, so maybe there are a few too many weed jokes sometimes–but the fact that this anime can even generate weed jokes is interesting enough.

The Screenhead Ten Scale recognizes that this series is bringing its A-game and hands the second volume of Ghost Stories an eight out of ten.  I only hope it can continue to improve at this rate.

Well, as you all no doubt know if you’ve read the blog in the last two days, you’ll know that ADV went under.  So I figured it might be a good time to go back through some of the series that they had to offer.  Might as well give a little help to the new guys so they can stay in business, huh?

And Ghost Stories, covering a five-volume set featuring four volumes of the original show, is definitely one of the good ones they had to offer.  Basically, Ghost Stories revolves around a group of five kids who find themselves regularly dealing with ghosts after going into an old schoolhouse.

This first set really doesn’t do much more than introduce the whole thing, and show how a condo development going in nearby is about to unleash an evil that could destroy the planet.

One of the really impressive parts about this series is how it starts.  Within the first ten minutes, we’re getting acquainted with a whole slew of ghosts.  And watching a bunch of kids react to a slew of phantasms roaming around wild is pretty entertaining.  However, one of the funniest things about Ghost Stories is also its biggest liability–it’s jammed full of pop culture references that may not be so pop down the line.

But at least for now, Ghost Stories Volume One will have plenty of laughs and even a few good scares in it.  This is light horror comedy anime at what might be a contender for its finest.

Well, folks…stick a fork in one of the best anime companies in the United States, because ADV is not only dead, but its corpse has been picked clean.

Going to the ADV website, if you’re up for such a depressing, pallid little journey, reveals that it’s been replaced in its entirety by a massive press release that states that the various components of ADV have been sold off.  Aesir Holdings now owns the film library, with Section 23 Films handling the distribution arm.  Meanwhile, the Norse mythology keeps on a-comin’ with the revelation that Valkyrie Media Partners purchased the Anime Network arm of ADV.

While I’m personally distressed to hear about this–my library is chock full of ADV and they handle some of my favorites including most everything that Nabeshin does–I remain hopeful that the new purchasers can make something come out of it all.  And to that end, my hope is somewhat encouraged by the fact that Section 23 has already announced a spate of upcoming releases.

That’ll do.

Oh, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it, folks?  So I’ve got terribly new casting data on the upcoming Bunyan and Babe animated movie.

You may already know that John Goodman (yeah, from The Big Lebowski!) will be handling Paul Bunyan’s voice work, and this is probably a good move.  The guy’s got a good deep larger-than-life sort of voice when he wants to.  And you might further know that Kelsey Grammer is handling the voice of “an evil developer” who will apparently be serving as the foil for Paul.  Again, fair.  This smells like Sideshow Bob from a couple miles out.

But the big-and news?  Babe, who I never remember as having a lot of speaking parts in any of the original tall tales, will be voiced by Jeff Foxworthy.  Considering the guy played a chicken in Racing Stripes not so long ago, this probably isn’t a big stretch for him.  But I’m not the only one who noticed a huge Shrek reference in all this–tell me they’re NOT trying to make Babe into Donkey.

Still though–family fare usually gets fair returns, so I look for this one to do all right.

Well, it’s official, folks–Tron Legacy has a release date and that release date is December 17, 2010.

Its upcoming competition?  You’re going to love this–it’ll be taking on Yogi Bear, The Smurfs and The Green Hornet, which means it’s almost certain to be the top movie of that weekend if for nothing else than it’s based on the most recent source material?  Or was it the Smurfs that’s most recent?  Well, anyway, they’re both almost thirty years old at least, so chances are the adventures of Kevin Flynn’s son Seth will not be the overlooked one at the box office next Christmas.

I don’t hold out anywhere near so much hope for the Smurfs, however.  Or for Yogi…or for the Green Hornet for that matter.  But either way, I know which one of the four I’m actually hoping to see, and if my opinion is shared by any decent number of people, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.