Twilight films to finally have Grace

It was nice to see Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) so quickly and eloquently describe the point of Twilight last week on "Community." He explained that the message is "men are monsters who crave young flesh." Yes that seems to be the point. Now, if he'd have thrown in a few notes about how stalking is really just a guy's way to show he loves you and some stuff about falling in love with a baby, you'd have gotten it all in there.

Oh Twilight, it's been too long since I mocked you. Thankfully, I have a reason to pay attention to you today, and that reason is this:

Maggie Grace, shown above in what she wears to church with her mom, is going to star as Spoodlenork, the grand wizardess of the shamalamadingdongs who loves or doesn't love someone and is really pale. The end. Seriously, that's what I read when I read descriptions like "A member of the Denali coven, considered cousins to the Cullen clan as the only other “vegetarian” vampire group. When Irina blames the Cullens for the death of her lover, her actions set in motion a terrifying chain of events.” It's like Charlie Brown's teacher starts translating it to me. I predict Grace will slightly overact but still look amazing, as that's what's written on her business card.

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Seriously? Thursday? How the hell did that happen? This time warp has been brought to you by exhaustion, long summer nights, and work projects you wish would never were but looks like they will be for a very long time. Today's music has been carefully selected by The Reader's own Jesse Stanek, who enlightened me as to "Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows," the John Prine tribute CD. My morning has begun with the explicit instructions to move to the country and eat a lot of peaches. Although I'm disobeying, I think Prine really meant sit in front of a computer and create a blog that has a title intended to sound dirty.

That's right, you haven't come here to hear tell of how brilliant I find the cover of Bruised Orange by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, you've come here to see my junk. You only get to peek at my junk once a week, so this is a special time for you. I don't want to stall any longer. So, I'll begin the normal disclaimer (which is to say that by junk I mean movie tidbits that aren't big enough to warrant their own post) and the normal shenanigans (we take an item from the creepy illustration of a junk drawer above from Highlights Magazine FOR CHILDREN and make up a fictional backstory on it). Cue shenanigans: Today's item is the fuzzy string thing in the middle of the drawer. Carl was a proud man. Carl was also a reasonable man. Carl was a man in love. Knowing full well that his beloved Lucille would never consent to marriage so long as he was the proud owner of the second longest eyebrows in Guiness Records history, Carl threw away more than a decade with two snips. In his junk drawer lay his secret shame, his one ticket to instant marginal celebrity. Then again, because of his newfound hygiene, in his bedroom lay Lucille.

Okay, enough goofing around, let's get to showing the faceless public my junk!

1.) Whoa, Gravity sounds heavy! - Children of Men might be (I stress might be) the best sci-fi film of the last decade. I know I'm prone to hyperbole, but for realz yo, it's all kinds of really good. So, consider me pant-shitting excited for Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, a sci-fi movie starring Robert Downey Jr. Why am I pooping pants for this? Well, The Playlist explained that the 3D film will be 60% CGI, the opening will be a 20 minute continuous shot, and the plot will follow the survivor of a space accident desperately trying to return to Earth. I'm like the elevator in a high-rise skyscraper after a kid with ADD climbed in: All my buttons are getting pushed. Seriously, how does this not sound beautiful and brilliant. In the hands of real artists, sci-fi is the single most promising and vital genre. Why? Because the rules are gone. You can do whatever you want, however you want. Ursula LeGuin once said that sci-fi is just the artist asking "what if?" Let me tell you a "for sure" as opposed to a "what if." I cannot wait for this movie.

2.) News for Twi-hards and those who hate them - The only thing more shocking that Twilight existing is the people who like the series. I know some seriously smart, good people who love the O-negative out of the series. This doesn't change my opinion of them at all, nor does it change my opinion of the series. I'm a Cubs fan, so I get loving things that are just no good. Anyway, you fall into one of two camps: You either read all the books and love the movies and thus won't be spoiled by what I'm about to talk about or you didn't read the books and don't care at all about the movies so you won't care that I'm about to spoil what happens in the final book/movies. Just in case, I'll give you an image buffer before I really get started.
Okay, ready? The screenwriter of the final two movies that spawn out of the single book "Breaking Dawn" told the LA Times that they may not even show the childbirth scene, also known as the only reason I want to see these movies at all. If you haven't, please read Devin from Chud's rundown of the book’s insanity, because it's brilliant. Point is, some seriously, monumentally whacked out bullshit happens in these books and I am dying to know how they're going to handle it. Here's the thing, I can't believe there weren't riots by the Twi-hards when they read the concluding book. I mean, if I were reading "Lord of the Rings," and in the last book Legolas fell in love with Aragorn's daughter AS A BABY, I would have dug up the corpse of JRR Tolkein so I'd have a place to put my pee. And for the last time, there is no way to handle this appropriately. It's not plutonium that can be handled while wearing a containment suit, it's more like trying to scoop up the pieces of an atomic bomb and put them back together again.

3.) I have a fable for you about "Fables"- Okay, Pajiba lies a lot. I shouldn't say lie, that's not nice. They run stories that have less fact and truth to them than Fox News, howsabout that? I just wanted to put that disclaimer on there because the following story, while appealing, makes no sense. The scoop is that David Yates (director of the last 4 Harry Potter movies) is possibly going to direct the adaptation of "Fables" for the big screen. Exciting? No. Wait, why? Why isn't it exciting that the really intelligent comic book series about fairy tale characters living in a secret land in the modern world is going to be made into a movie? Because it deserves to be an ongoing television series (where it would TOTALLY be immensely popular, I promise), which last we heard it was going to be. This source from YEARS ago had it in TV development. Is it possible something changed? Is it possible Yates is directing the pilot? How is Yates that popular when he really hasn't done anything all that insanely noteworthy and yet in one week he's been rumored for both The Hobbit AND Fables? I don't have all the answers. I'm just a guy telling jokes in a column named after his junk. Don't pressure me. Point is, I want a TV series for "Fables," but I will take whatever I can get.

4.) I am ready to run - I enjoy running. I mean for exercise and not when something is chasing me. Of course, what I'm talking about here is the news that Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later, The Beach (he wrote the novel), and Sunshine, is writing Logan's Run. So, I'm on board now. I loved each of those movies, YES including The Beach. I looked on YouTube to find the clip of him in the infamous video game scene from that movie, but the only results I found were for the video "Leonardo DiCaprio - Touch Me There." Now, I like the guy, but I don't need him touching me. He's got greasy hair and starred in The Man in the Iron Mask, he doesn't get to touch me. Anyway, Garland has some really great ideas and has shown with the movies listed above that he knows how to make sci-fi and horror into something more than just popular fluff. As most of you know, Logan's Run is about a society where people are euthanized at a certain age, instead of just being shuffled to Florida to skew our electoral college. There is some obvious ground for social commentary and I am pumped that Garland is involved. There's not a lot of funny in this blurb, but I'm not your singing, dancing fun monkey, okay? Sometimes I just have some good insight. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat a banana while doing a karaoke version of Ke$ha and grinding this pole.

5.) Trailers, parked - We have a buffet of WTF for you today, so grab a plate.

First up is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which (A) yes they made already even though you didn't know it, (B) had its trailer debut on a Brazillian fan site for the Narnia series, and (C) is already coming out this Christmas (a much better time to debut religiously based materials). I don't hold out much hope for it, even though I didn't HATE either of the first two installments. That said, if I can get another poor CGI river Jesus, I'm in. See for yourself.


Okay, next up is...well, nobody knows. The Polish Brothers (finally, some respect for my people) have directed...this? It's some teaser for something that...well, look just watch it and know that the project is set to come out in 2011 even though nobody knows quite what it is or that it existed in the first place.


Next up is Never Let Me Go by...wait for it...ALEX GARLAND! Okay, so it's directed by Mark Romanek, but Garland adapted the famous novel, making this column staggeringly cohesive today. The film is weirdly creepy looking and yet really appealing. You know I'm in. Who's coming with me?


Okay, that's it y'all. Happy Thursday to you. Start getting your weekend preparations straight and I'll see you tomorrow to kick things off, proper.

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In Defense of (attacking) Twilight

Danielle Maestretti from the Utne Reader has a rather provocative blog post up (not that kind of provocative, get your mind out of the gutter I likely put it in with my last post), titled "Critics Pick on Twilight Fans Because They're Girls." Yowza. Reading past the inflammatory title gets you a little insight into her position, which isn't a defense of the movies-turned-books so much as it is a report of an observation by Sady Doyle from the American Prospect that when describing the "Twi-Hards," most critics (an overwhelming sausage fest if there ever was one) take to maligning the "screeching" girlies, deploying massive stereotypes of teen girls as empty-headed and prone to squealing. Her point is that male stupid-movies like Die Hard don't get the same treatment, they usually receive (as she says) shrugs and not derision. Well, as a certain afro-haired actor once quipped, "Allow me to retort."

Do I agree that the by-and-large totally male-dominated critic landscape has teed off on Twilight? Hell yes! It's a pinata and we're passing out bats. Am I at all concerned that a franchise geared towards women is receiving this kind of bashing? Hell yes! That's why for the first film, I recruited a female to review it (she found it to be rather blah). Do I think that we should stop bashing the Twi-Hards, that we should downshift our derision from blatant to shruggery, and that we should rethink our choice of words? Maybe for some losers I haven't read, but for the most part...hell no.

As I see it there are three parts to this: (1) - The attack on the fans; (2) - The attack on the movies/books themselves; and (3) - The overall implications.

1.) As far as the fans go, there aren't a lot of polite, respectful ways to describe people who maul one another for a poster of Robert Pattenson. There aren't a lot of adjectives that don't sound particularly demeaning that can be used to describe the maniacal nature of a lot of these young ladies. They're freaks. They're idiots. By no means are all of them this way. I happen to know several intelligent young ladies who enjoy the series quite a bit. None of them have drawn blood to touch a poster of Pattenson. When deriding the fans, we critics are attacking the extremists. And they're batshit crazy. Period. I will mock the crazy cat lady who only leaves her home to watch soft-core teenage vampire porn. I will mock the lunatic 13-year-old who tears her own hair out because she wants to legally change her name to Bella. I will do it because it is lunacy of the highest degree. If we aren't able to target the fringe elements of society who lose their shit over things like this, we do them a disservice as well as ourselves: it's not okay to behave this way.

2.) The books are shit. The movies (I assume) are also shit. That's my opinion. It's what I'm paid to provide. In particular, this crap offends me because I happen to consider myself a man sympathetic to the feminist cause...and when I see books and movies that glorify males (vampires, werewolves...whatever, anything with a dong) as saviors, as the be-all-end-all of a woman's life, it pisses me off. Just like I loathe "Sex and the City" for its make-believe empowerment (um, the main character is a toy that her love interest plays with for fun), I loathe that the biggest female pop culture phenomenon in the last decade surrounds worshiping dudes. Hell, I saw a trailer for the film (which I assume at least borrowed elements from the book) in which Bella (ugh, even the name is insulting) acknowledges that the only way she can "be" with her vampire boy toy is BY KILLING HERSELF! For this and this alone I kind of want to back over Stephanie Meyers with a Humvee. Then you hire a talented female director, Catherine Hardwicke, to helm the first movie, give her a shit budget and a terrible script, and then FIRE HER when it becomes a smash hit. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? It's just like "Sex and the City" to me. If you are smart enough to see it for what it is, I don't give a crap if you like it. I just loathe it because 70% or more of people who watch it are fooled into believing that it's empowering for them. This series is a feminist train wreck. Period.

3.) The very implication from Maestretti and Doyle that we dudes won't savage dude-movies because dudes like them is insane. Roger Ebert called people who liked Transformers 2 unevolved. I pretty much routinely tee off on fans of Paul Blart (mostly dudes), satirically celebrate The Expendables, and categorically deride any project that deserves it. I am an equal opportunity basher, and I can, will, and have tee off on dipshits of all gender who like crap. It's what I live for. Maestretti and Doyle, whose position I actually respect in principle, should do better to take on the gender inequity in movie reviewing and blogging, should take to demanding better entertainment for women, and should question why, WHY there aren't more women involved in the movie industry. It could be a damn daily column it makes so little sense. Me, I hold out hope for things like Sweet Valley High. Yeah, you read that right. A series of books for girls that is being adapted by Diablo Cody, who regardless of her dialogue "gets it" when it comes to young girls. Howsabout we stand behind her, find some talented people willing to back some promising projects, and at the same time accept that tearing down most full-on Twi-Hards and the insipid series itself is A-Ok and may even be done BECAUSE we believe in doing what's right by girls.

Thus concludes my rant.