Cutting Room Floor is home to a sea of snark and snippets about upcoming movies, rumors about films, and other assorted nonsense. Sure, the information is mostly accumulated from other reputable sources, but the sarcasm is 100% home grown.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Look upon Tyrese and weep
Folks, we can now resume our daily lives: We now have photographic evidence that Tyrese is, for sure, in Transformers 3: Michael Bay Hates All of Us. 5 things we can tell from this first leaked image from Transformers 3: Poop Strikes Back:
1.) We can finally get some answers to the complex character Tyrese has portrayed in two previous films. Like, how does he feel about skull caps? Is he willing to duck lower than Shia LaBeouf? Does he like military-esque fanny packs? How about elbow tattoos? These questions and more will be answered in Transformers 3: Look at What You've Done, America.
2.) Shia LaBeouf will win any stupid reaction contest you can hold.
3.) The characters in the third movie still think they can shoot giant alien robots with bullets and be effective.
4.) LaBeouf is holding firm to his "only leather jackets" wardrobe clause in his contract.
5.) God still isn't swayed by the evil of Bay enough to have the earth swallow the production of Transformers 3: Nazibots, Teaparticons, and Bigotmachines.
The easiest way to explain this is SAT question style: Spiderman is to Ryan, as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is to Cameron. Now, don't get me wrong, my beloved cartoonish fetish spouts phrases like "With great power, comes great responsibility" whereas his says "Cowabunga," so that formula isn't perfect. Still, I remember the interminable suffering I experienced whilst waiting for them to finally make a live-action version of Spidey I could truly enjoy. Let's face it, although thrilling in the 1990s, the original non-animated TMNT movie eventually led to this:
I included this clip because it featured Vanilla Ice giving his rationale for why he accepted the job. Previously, I thought the answer was "during this time in my life, I just do whatever the great Lord Satan tells me to. If I disobey, he'll instantly take my fame away and leave me starring in a Vh1 reality show with a dude porn star, and nobody wants that." Anyway, Cambo, buck up buddy because we have some real movement on a live-action turtle flick that presumably doesn't involve the worst rapper this side of Andy Rooney. According to Deadline, Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company is going to be stepping in to help the $60 million flick get rolling. This involvement means we're likely going to actually see this sooner than later, as this company gets shit done, yo. See, turtle-lovers, there's nothing to worry about, whenever Platinum Dunes and Michael Bay is involved, you know the story is the single most important thing. Oh, and April O'Neal will now have size 38 DD breasts, all of the turtles will be equipped with rocket launching machine guns, and at least one of them is going to be crazy racist. GOOOOOO TURTLES!
I don't like talking about Megan Fox. Why? Well it's like David Cross once said in relation to Evanescence: "I don't like things that suck." Yet because her vacuous insides are covered by fleshy parts that make men "feel like their bodies are smiling" (a line from the brilliant Mystery Team, which you should really go buy right now dammit), everyone is talking about little miss bought-some-jugs. As we already know, she is not starring in Transformers 3. This much is fact. Whether she quit or was fired is the subject of much internet speculation. Ah, the internet, so much potential, so much discussion about Megan Fox. Anyhoodle, the thing got interesting for me when I read a particularly angry story that suggested Fox had simply had it with the abuse heaped on her by Michael Bay. I know, hard to believe that a guy who practically used a camera to goose an actress in Transformers 2 may not know how to treat women. Combine this with a boatload of stories of pretty-young-things who were abused and damaged by the explosion-meister, and you've got me going all Keith Olbermann with my suggestion that Michael Bay is the Worst Person in the World. Now he's about to cast the following hot body as the new generic love interest in Transformers third attempt at ruining modern civilization. That's Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. She's purty. She's also never acted before a day in her life. Bay cast her apparently based on the commercial he directed that featured her alongside a bunch of other bra-busting beauties. Now, replacing Megan Fox with a model who has never acted does seem relatively fair. What isn't fair is that Bay gets to be a giant robo-douche unchecked just because he can incoherently lens shitty action movies. He participated in creating racist robots in his last film, bullied a bunch of young women around, and is casting based on breast size and that's it. Michael Bay, I hope you get eye herpes.
I mostly keep track of time by how often I find myself writing this junk column. Again?! We've made it through another week AGAIN?! Why that's as shocking as it is spectacular! Before we get started, a quick note to whoever has been blowing up this blog lately (especially clicking the crap out of the ads). I love you to the utmost allowance of the law given that you technically are sending me money (I ain't going back to the pokey on no prostitution charge again).
As you know, I named this column my junk drawer in part because the metaphor worked and in part because it allowed me to make a juvenile reference to "showing people my junk." Yes, I do get paid (minimally) for such cleverness. In reality, this is the place where I show off all the movie news that's too small to warrant its own blog post. We begin by looking at the above image from Highlights Magazine (FOR CHILDREN), which is terrifying to me for some reason. We (and by we, I mean I) then select an item from that illustration and make up a story about it for funsies. Today's item is the fuzzy cord in the middle. Tito had spent his whole life terrified of spiders. He dedicated his life to inventing new and better ways to kill them, ranging from "Whack-a-Spider," a spider-shaped mallet, to "Spider-b-Gone," a spray that released a cloud that would follow the spider, raining acid down upon it. Tito thought of little else in his life. Sadly, the last thoughts he ever had were the following: "OHMYGOD IS THAT A GIANT SPIDER IN MY JUNK DRAWER WITH LEGS LIKE A MINI OCTOPUS" and "Is this technically an ironic death?"
Okay, that's enough nonsense. Let's get right to the good stuff! Here's the news that's mostly fit to print.
1.) Like I've always said, don't worry...Costner's on it - What I'm about to tell you is going to sound impossible or at the very least ridiculous. BP has called Kevin Costner to ask for his help cleaning up the oil spill in Louisiana because of an invention he paid for while making Waterworld. No, you haven't switched to the new Hallucinogenic Mint flavor of Crest Toothpaste nor did your spouse finally cause blunt force trauma to your cabeza while you slept. I'm not making this up, the New York Daily News says that Costner paid scientists millions of dollars to make a device that could purify ocean water. They succeeded in creating something that used centrifuge technology to render oil-laden water 97% pure (the other 3% contains Costner body hair). They have devices in various sizes, the largest can purify 200 gallons per minute. I'm serious, stop looking at me like this. I'm not that clever. I couldn't come up with something this ridiculous on my own. Look, here's a newscast talking about it.
See! So, on the one hand, thank God for Waterworld, right? On the other...I don't want Kevin Costner to be responsible for anything good. I don't want to even accidentally respect him. So, let's pause a minute and talk about his press conference attire. Kevin, when you're part of a team that CALLS the press conference, feel free to wear something slightly more upscale than your beer-stained drinkin' polo. This wasn't ambush journalism...you called this conference. Also, it appears to be quite cloudy, so feel free to take your sunglasses of when you address the people who, for once, actually care about what you're saying. For the next few minutes, you are the donor who helped create valuable technology, not the guy who did Swing Vote. I know you're convinced that your unprotected stare may cause ladies to instantly drop their panties, but those days disappeared with your hairline. If your machine, which appears in the video above to make wine not clear oil, actually works, I'll say something nice about you. Promise.
2.) How bad do you have to be to NOT star in Transformers 3- So far, the only people who appeared in the last Transformers who aren't appearing in this next installment are two racist robots and Megan Fox (and people have supposedly seen the racist robots on set). Claiming it was "her choice" to exit the series, Fox will be replaced, although Michael Bay promises that the quest to find an incredibly hot actress with little talent will be a challenge he may spend years on. Fox, who has committed what I believe to be career seppuku, is set to debut her terrible southern accent in the sure-to-be-a-bomb Jonah Hex before moving on to finding a cure for her toe thumbs. Most kidding aside, I don't think Fox realizes that she's a flash in the pan. There are zillions of pretty boys and girls in the world. Unless she is able to find something that fully plays to her strengths (presumably a 3D silent film), she's going to disappear faster than Costner's hairline.
3.) Tim Burton to cast Johnny Depp as a psychic, teenage Japanese girl? - Okay, that's a little presumptuous on my part. It's entirely possible that Burton could cast his wife, Helena Bonham "OHMYGODDOSOMETHINGWITHYOURHAIR" Carter as the teenage Japanese girl with psychic powers in Mai, The Psychic Girl. The director is adapting the 1980s era manga comic about a....okay, you get the idea. He was supposed to do this awhile back, but it would likely have not fit his "must repeat myself exactly for the next decade" life plan. Now, he's revisiting the project and it is said to be next on his list. Latino Review has some interesting thoughts on the matter, and if I may crawl out of my angry shell for a moment, so do I. This has the potential, and that is just potential, to urge Burton to at least try something different. I see no fairy tale aspects (it's more sci-fi), I see no immediate place to put the two actors I mentioned above (other than maybe some kind of father and mother cameo), and I see no way in which the gothic style he's repeated ad naseum would instantly transfer here. Let's call me cautiously optimistic that even Burton has gotten sick of Burton.
4.) I'm less horrified that this is going to be a movie and more horrified that it's a book - Someone spent presumably hours of their life writing "Blood Oath," a novel with the tagline "The ultimate secret. The ultimate agent. The President's vampire." Someone else then presumably read that novel (or at least the back jacket of it) and said, "let's make that a movie." Now, Heatvision is reporting that we are going to see a movie about a vampire spy. Let that wash over you for a minute. A vampire spy. When I claimed that Twilight was going to ruin the world, I apparently was understating things. We now live in a reality with vampire secret agent movies where Spider-man will be rebooted to capture more of the Twilight-esque teenage romance. I'm not nearly drunk enough to be recounting these events. Also, to the guy who wrote "Blood Oath": Stop it. Just...stop it. If you have the self-control and patience to actually finish a novel, you have the potential to correct your life before it's too late. If you write a sequel where there's a werewolf working for the KGB, I will stab you with a spork. Also, you can't write that now because I came up with the idea first. Someone get my agent on the phone.
5.) Trailers, parked - I'm not going to make you wait another minute for my favorite discovery of the day. The film is called Iron Sky. You're going to want to see it. Why? Well it's a Finnish-German production filmed mostly in English. It's supposedly got humor to it, although I didn't see much in the trailer. Oh, and it's based on the premise that in 1945, Nazis fled to the dark side of the moon and have now returned to take over earth. Here you go!
There really aren't that many other interesting trailers out at the moment, so I'll just leave you this time to rewatch that one again. Seriously. Nazis in space.
Thank God tomorrow is Thursday. Oh, God...tomorrow is still Thursday, right? This week has been so flinging-farging awful that I'm half sure they decided to put a second Monday in there. Provided that they haven't rearranged space and time just to mess with me, I'll be able to cover tons of news nuggets in tomorrow's Junk Drawer. This is a berry berry good thing because so many tiny items dropped yesterday that you'd have thought a fumble-fingered Smurf was emptying his pockets (get it...tiny items dropped). That means today I'm only going to pick the one I can't wait to tell you about (and, mind you, this is a day on which Evangeline Lilly agreed to appear onscreen again, so the fact I chose this one should tell you a lot about how important I find it). Here goes: Michael Bay has mentioned that the next Transformers movie...will not feature Mudflap and Skids.
And there was a great rejoicing. In my humble opinion, as far as blows to racial inequality goes, this isn't quite "I have a dream" but it isn't all that far behind. Had they been given another chance, these shucking-and-jiving, illiterate, "ghetto-talking" monstrosities may have seized any racial progress we've made in the last few hundred years and robo-raped it. You think I'm exaggerating, but KIDS like these Transformers movies. More specifically, kids of the right age. What I mean is, the messages that pop culture presents regarding homosexuality and race may have greater impact on whether or not young adults grow to be understanding in the long run. Don't laugh. If kids grow up thinking these things are okay to joke about or look down upon, because that's how it's always been presented in the pop culture they view, the next generation is boned. And that's a clinical term.
Well, humanity had a good run, didn't we? I mean, sure there was a few acts of genocide, an occasional hate crime, and the entirety of AM radio to apologize for, but we also produced some great moments, like the opening frames of Lost in Translation. So sad it had to end like this. You see, Michael Bay has said he's meeting later this week with Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Ehren Kruger to discuss "ideas" for Transformers 3 (I should hurry up and copyright a robot with a turban called "Sandy Pete" who only yells "CYBER-JIHAD"). They're discussing whether the end-date for humanity...I MEAN the release date for T3: Robo-nut-kick will hit in 2011 or 2012 (FYI: The Mayans predict 2012). Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are "busy," which is good because they can occasionally make me happy (like with "Alias" and Star Trek) and can occasionally make me want to punch them in their stupid, rich faces. Before Bay sodomizes our eye sockets with T3, he's likely to do Pain and Gain, a film about a couple of steroid-abusing bodybuilders who fall in with organized crime. However, there's also a chance that Bad Boys 3 may sneak in before T3. So, the order may be Pain & Gain, T3, Bad Boys 3 or Bad Boys 3, T3, Pain & Gain. Actually, the order is really (fill in the blank), T3, end-of-humanity. There is a silver lining though, given the fighting in the press, there's a chance Megan Fox won't be asked back!
Oh, stop being such a drama queen, Megan. It's not that bad.
Seriously, you have that really crappy looking Diablo Cody horror movie coming out, isn't that something?
Okay, fine. But you know what, I like you best when you're covering your mouth as tight as possible. Also, I totally see your toe thumbs.
If I'm being honest, which I almost never am, I kind of like both Bad Boys movies. In the first one, Will Smith wasn't quite Big Willie yet, and Martin Lawrence was just untalented, not untalented and fat. It was stupid, fun, and made Tea Leoni look hotter than lava-flavored hot tamales (yeah, TEA LEONI). Then, some time later, came Bad Boys II, which is basically Michael Bay's Sistine Chapel. They invade Cuba in the end. Seriously, you read that right, they INVADE CUBA. Somehow two cops end up driving effin' tanks and whatnot in Cuba. That's just...I mean, you have to admit that's totally rad. Oh, don't get me wrong, it had all the sophisticated intellect of a frat boy discussion on how to get less foam from the keg, but it was still awesome. Thus, The Hollywood Reporter's breaking news that Columbia has hired a writer to start working on a third film leaves me feeling, Lord, I don't know. Yes, they are hoping to get Smith, Lawrence, and the perpetrator of Transformers 2: Rise of the Steppin' Fetchit-bots to come back, but Smith is now WILL SMITH, Lawrence weighs 735 pounds and is I believe 65 years old, and Michael Bay now commands a directorial salary of 3 billion dollars along with 2 blonde virgins and an unnamed foreign country. Obviously, without them this means nothing, but with them it could be a bookend to the dumbest enjoyable action trilogy that's ever existed. Besides, Lawrence needs the work (physically for his impending diabetes and heart trouble and financially if he wants to keep the house that "Damn, Gina" built). My only request: they have to up the ante on the ridiculous racial stereotyping in this one. I mean, Bay HAS to challenge himself somehow.
I'll be in Chi-town this weekend, watching my beloved Cubbies try to surge into first in the NL Central. This means I'll be so blotched by the second inning that I'll make out with the mascot. Since I'm in this wonderful mood, I'm going to give you a limerick introduction to my haiku predictions (I'm that rhythmic).
New movies this week are craptastic, quite possibly written by spastics. But I'll guess their take, and if mistakes I do make, I may have to do something drastic.
Here's how I see it (haiku style):
1.) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - $32 million
Harry gets older, and his movies get wiser. Sounds like a win/win.
2.) G-Force - $25 million
This flick might just win. Mostly because of 3D... and rodent lovers.
3.) The Ugly Truth - $22 million
Could not care any less... and Heigl has baby teeth. This one won't last long.
4.) Orphan - $12 million
Creepy kids scare me, that is not an endorsement. Please do not see this.
5.) Ice Age 3 - $11 million
Next week it's all over. I won't mention this again. Make room for more crap.
WILDCARD: Transformers 2 - $9 million
Please, please go away. How I hate you Michael Bay. That would make my day.
5 things we can tell from this first leaked image from Transformers 3: Poop Strikes Back:
5 things we can tell from this first leaked image from Transformers 3: Poop Strikes Back:
