You know, going in to see The Day the Earth Stood Still, now out on DVD, I confess that I was a bit concerned.  Fifties-era science fiction getting a remake sounds like little more than a true sign of Hollywood’s deep desperation.  And putting Keanu Reeves in at the lead, who isn’t exactly one of Hollywood’s best, left me even colder.  So with all that working against it—a tired premise, a relatively obscure canon piece as foundation, a soap carving for a lead actor—you can just about imagine my shock when I discovered that the whole would actually be somewhat watchable, if just a smidge on the preachy side.

Basically, in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Keanu Reeves appears as Klaatu, part of a group of races who’ve decided that humanity has become untenable on the planet Earth, and is thus risking the destruction of several million species.  Thus, Klaatu has been dispatched to gather up representatives OF these several million species and tell humanity metaphorically where to stick it as the races Klaatu represents launches a full-on destructive sweep in the form of a massive cloud of nanotech.

Granted, the ending is less than satisfactory—anyone else remember Escape From L.A.?  Yeah, it’s a lot like that, except nowhere NEAR as much fun.  And yes, the whole couldn’t be much more preachy if Al Gore were playing Klaatu instead of Keanu Reeves;  though it would be awesome to see this, there’s just no way the average human being could take exposure to that level of condescension and not set the theatre on fire, possibly taking him or her with it..

Frankly, I’m getting sick and tired of being preached at about how my “carbon footprint” is too big or I’m a huge polluter because I still drive a CAR or how the fact that I use electric lights is going to kill the polar bears.  I especially hate it coming from celebrities with their own jets.  Like somehow my car puts out more carbon and does more pollution than your eighty-foot Lear jet.  Yeah, okay, call me when your feasibility upgrades arrive.

But anyway, this aside, the resulting film is really not that bad.  Yes, it’s preachy.  In many places it lacks coherence.  Keanu couldn’t be much more wooden in his portrayal of Klaatu—some say he looks bored and distracted, and frankly, I see it.

But it’s not unwatchable.  It’s a beautiful movie that looks great and watches at least fairly well.  Sure, I wouldn’t have paid the extortionate prices the theatres often charge to see it there, but would I watch it on DVD?  Sure.  There’s no reason not to give this one a spin, especially if you’re any kind of sci-fi buff.  Of course, it really doesn’t hold a candle to the original, which actually almost managed to completely omit the great classic line Klaatu barada nikto, and if that’s not a dark sign I don’t know what is.

But there’s one thing that remains clear—this movie looks good, and it’s actually watchable.  It’s a good rental, but not one to keep.

So I have to admit, I was baffled by the recent release of Will Smith’s movie Seven Pounds.  Why?  Because I had no idea at all what relevance the title had to the rest of the movie.  Normally the title tells you something about what’s going on, or maybe about a main character, but Seven Pounds?  What did that have to do with anything?

Thankfully, over the course of the movie, we’ll get at least an idea of  just what that whole “seven pounds” thing is.  But that really doesn’t answer the main question here—is Seven Pounds worth perfectly good time and money to watch?

Describing the plot is impossible to do without spoilers, since so much of the plot isn’t actually revealed until the ending, so I’m going to have to REALLY pussyfoot around here—basically, an aeronautical engineer is looking for a way to make seven people’s lives better, by any means necessary and at any cost necessary.

There are a lot of choice words and phrases to apply to Seven Pounds.  Most of them involve obscenities and a lot of screaming.  Some of them involve the little vein on my forehead popping out so far it looks fit to burst.  But some of them that are fit for family dinner table consumption are words like:

Overwrought. I really can’t remember the last time I heard so many Drama Screaming Rants in one movie.  Seriously—listening to Will Smith cut THREE of them short with a bark of “stop it” sounded almost EXACTLY like when Peter Griffin was dressed up like Jesus in that one episode of Family Guy.  And when Will Smith, who has shown himself to be at least a decent actor on several occasions, starts to sound like Seth MacFarlane, you know somewhere the world just split open and the Crack of Doom is shining a dull red.

Confused.  It took me better than an HOUR into the movie before I even understood the TITLE.  Even worse it took better than an hour before I managed to get a decent sense of the plot out of this.  They’re going to space the exposition throughout almost the entire movie, making it one of those strange sort of movies in which you can only watch it forward but understand it backward.  In some cases, that’s actually a good thing—it adds to the unexpected nature of things, and actually makes some things, especially in a horror setting, extra creepy for the unexpectedness.  But in Seven Pounds’ case, all it does is make an already impenetrable plot all the more obscured.

Preachy. If Will Smith’s character tried to put one more word out there about who deserved what I was going to throw something large, heavy and preferably pointed right into his smug little face.  Seriously, this was just the most preachy thing ever—the only way it could have been more so was if Will Smith looked into the camera and said “MESSAGE!” right before he said something preachy, like they did in Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.

It’s a bad sign when I spend half a movie perplexed and the other half enraged.  Oh, and bored.  There was also a lot of boring—I think those were the parts where perplexed and enraged mixed and became kind of a brackish sludge that felt like boring.

The answer, folks, to the question I asked above is an unequivocal no.  Emphatically no.  I can’t be clearer, this is godawful tripe.  This is an overdramatic, overwrought slag heap that practically begs to be put out of its—and my—misery.  There is no scrap of comedy in here to separate it from being a vein of melodrama so pure it will likely blow out your drama lobe.  Its vague attempts at being a romance are awkward and uneven.  It’s a mess.  A pure-on mess.

In no way can I recommend this to you unless you’re truly desperate for Will Smith or you’re a masochist and just plain old love the pain of a pompous, overblown wreck of a movie.

Another famed actor from the famed 80s TV sitcom Golden Girls has passed away. Beatrice Arthur died at the age of 86 of cancer. Beatrice Arthur was that tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows “Maude” and “The Golden Girls” and who also won a Tony Award for the musical “Mame”.

Arthur died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family at her side, family spokesman Dan Watt said. She had cancer, Watt said, declining to give details.

“She was a brilliant and witty woman,” said Watt, who was Arthur’s personal assistant for six years. “Bea will always have a special place in my heart.”

Arthur is survived by her sons and two granddaughters. No funeral services are planned.

(Source) OMG

Ah, remakes.  I love you so.

And when I first saw the trailers for the remake of Bangkok Dangerous, featuring no less than Nicholas Cage as hitman Joe, I confess that I had some serious reservations.

Why?  Because that trailer looked about as dull as a burlap sack full of wet hair, that’s why.  And when I watched the movie, I was pleasantly surprised…but not by very much.

Hitman Joe is the best there is—a fact that a whole lot of other fictional hitmen would LOVE to dispute via all manner of lethal hardware—and he’s on his way to his final job, four kills in Bangkok.  He hires a local pickpocket to serve as his go-between between himself and his bosses, but eventually takes a liking to the pickpocket, training him in the art of killing as his student.  Joe’s first three kills go off with varying levels of resistance, but his fourth kill, the Prime Minister of Thailand, isn’t so easy.  The pickpocket Joe trained has made it abundantly clear to Joe that the Prime Minister really IS one of Thailand’s finest, and Joe’s trust in his pickpocket friend / student is getting in the way.  Now, Joe’s on the run, and his pickpocket friend is now in danger from the syndicate that hired Joe in the first place.

When you compare this one to the original, there is almost no comparison at all—every line that comes out of Nicholas Cage’s mouth is a violation of the original canon.  The original hitman Joe, you see, was deaf and mute.  The comparisons only get worse from there.

Frankly, I was somewhat surprised that the movie itself wasn’t as dull as the trailer looked to be, but then, I wasn’t at ALL surprised to find out that the movie itself was only slightly more exciting than the dull-as-dishwater trailer.  Still, I actually found my mind drifting occasionally during this one, a bad sign for an action movie, and a DEADLY bad sign for a remake of an Asian action movie.

When even fiery explosions aren’t sufficient to keep an audience’s attention, you’ve really got to question the value of this movie at all.  And frankly, after watching Nicholas Cage snarl and growl his way coldly through this whole thing, I’m all the more convinced that he needs to stick to suspense / thrillers where he can see what’s coming.  Because when he’s without his precognitive state he just can’t seem to carry a tune, metaphorically.  Seriouly, watching Cage as a hitman who grew a conscience on his last hit left me as cold as the corpse of Lindsay Lohan’s career.  And while I’m at it, can we PLEASE put that whole theme to bed once and for all?  I’m getting sick of hitmen who go through life snarling and growling and just being cold toward everybody until the last twenty minutes or so when they have this epiphany that, son of a bitch, they’re killing ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS!!

It’s like watching a really unpleasant version of Soylent Green, where Charlton Heston’s running around with a Big Bear .50 caliber rifle with a monster scope, screaming “I’ve been shooting at PEOPLE!  At PEEEEEE—PUHHHLLLL!”

And sadly, that image will be the most fun I got out of Bangkok Dangerous.

So thank you, Pang brothers, for executing a truly craptacular remake and wasting my time by making the whole thing only slightly less boring than one of the worst trailers I’ve ever seen.

They say that no is the first word you ever learn.  And there are people out there who think that it’s the first word we should forget.  And then, there are some people who stick to it like a three foot thick sheet of battleship armor.  The word no can be a shield, a bludgeon, a razor wire fence that keeps the worst of the world at bay.  And nowhere will that be so readily apparent as it is in recent release Yes Man.

Featuring Jim Carrey as Carl, a recent divorce who’s not taking it very well, he’s discovered the value of “no” to keep the slings and arrows of the world at bay.  Risk?  Not a good thing to Carl, who makes his living as a loan officer, and for whom saying no is an entire way of life.  But when Carl finds himself at a seminar, convinced into making a “covenant” with himself where his answer to every offer he receives must be “yes”, his world quite literally turns upside down, and we discover that while “no” may protect you from the good in life just as much as the bad, “yes” can let in the exact same thing.

As the kind of person who sees the value in “no” himself, I really got kind of an eye opener on this one.  It’s a great question—how many things do we say “no” to that may well be good for us?  How often have we refused to go out into the world and do something that leaves a worthwhile memory in its place because we were afraid, or because we were tired or discomfited or otherwise uneager to leave the safety and peace and comfort of our houses, couches, and DVD players?  And the same goes to the “yes” crowd—how many times have you walked into serious trouble because you said yes to something you shouldn’t have?

Philosophical issues aside, Yes Man is a funny movie driven both by its surprisingly substantive script and the sheer comic dynamism of Jim Carrey.  Let’s be honest, folks—we expect nothing less out of Jim Carrey than a fast-talking firecracker.  The one time he tried to break out of that role that I can think of—when he did suspense film The Number 13—it ended poorly for both him AND us.  But stick him in that frenzied wild man role—light his fuse and stand back—and you’ve got EXACTLY the kind of spark plug that can drive just about any script’s engine.

There are legions of laughs to be had here, of both the genuine and the uncomfortable sort.  I’m not sure how Jim Carrey getting fellated by an elderly woman qualifies a movie for PG-13 ranking, even IF it’s off camera. But at the end of the day, the simple fact remains—Jim Carrey in his proper element and allowed to run amok adds comic juice to just about anything, and this script, which is actually a bit derivative of his earlier work (especially Liar, Liar—come on, he goes from “I CAN’T LIE!” to “I CAN’T SAY NO!”.  Tell me that’s not derivative.  I mean, what’s next?  “I CAN’T USE EVEN VAGUELY POLITICALLY CORRECT LANGUAGE!”?) it’s still funny.

Jim Carrey brings the funny, and the script and supporting cast are right there to help.  This is exactly the movie for you, whether your word of choice is yes or no.

Today we see a lot of famous personalities and popular celebrities doing their share of promoting eco-friendliness and going green. If you ask around, the list can go on and on. But apparently there are two people who have stood out above the rest. Their names? Leonardo DiCaprio and Oprah Winfrey.

DiCaprio beat off male counterparts Bono, Brad Pitt and actor Ed Begley Jr. to top the male category in the survey, which was carried out by GreenDaily.com and Bebo.com, to mark Earth Day today.

Winfrey out-shined Angelina Jolie, Hayden Panettiere, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sir Paul McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills to lead the female category.

Meanwhile, Mariah Carey was ruled to be the least environmentally friendly star, following reports she regularly flies her personal trainer from the Caribbean to New York to keep her fit.

John Travolta joined her on the hit list, after research found the qualified pilot generates 800 tons of carbon emissions each year flying around the world.

(Source) Vancouver

Whoopi Goldberg hosts a Summit with former Star Trek stars: Patrick Stewart, Jonathon Frakes, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy.  Such a wonderful clip and I want to see more of this interview because each personality is so different and intriguing.

Jackie Chan is by no means a popular figure in Hollywood now. But while he has worked his way towards the hearts of American admirers, it looks like some comments have made him the black sheep in his own land.

The controversy all started when Jackie Chan said that “China may need to be controlled” for now. On freedom, he said he is uncertain if it should be given at this point. Apparently he was referring to guidance to which decision-making in China may sorely be lacking.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said Saturday. “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

He went on to say that freedoms in Hong Kong and Taiwan made those societies “chaotic.” Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders, but did not sit well with lawmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“He’s insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren’t pets,” Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung told The Associated Press. “Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law.”

(Source) AFP

On behalf of Lionsgate and Screenhead, we are pleased to present the poster for More Than a Game, a remarkable true-life coming of age story about friendship and loyalty in the face of great adversity.   This moving documentary follows NBA superstar LeBron James and four of his talented teammates through the trials and tribulations of high school basketball in Ohio and James’ journey to fame. 

The teaser poster says it all about the game. 

More Than a Game will be released in theaters October 2^nd!

Warner Bros. 17 Again out played all the other movies Friday placing Zac Efron as an audience favorite headliner whom they love and adore. Sorry folks, but I really think he is adorable.  17 Again is a teenager movie.  I am sure younglings are in the movie theaters, too. I know my eight years old wants to see this film. I haven’t quite decided yet if she’ll see it.   

Warner Bros. sent this to me: a wonderful program for teenagers to get Zac Efron on your phone.  I don’t know about the phone, but how about my house (I’ll just stop there.) 

Anyway, all you do is text 17 to 58671 to get the latest on Zac’s new movie 17 Again.  The hit movie is now in the theaters starring Zac Efron and Matthew Perry.  Get more news and free stuff on this hot new movie by becoming a 17 Again mobile member.  Mobile members have a chance to WIN 17 Again prizes including a Zac signed basketball.  Also find out where you can download free 17 Again (Zac) voice tones, mobile wallpapers, clips from the soundtrack and more!