Friday free-for-all

Top of the Friday to ya, faithful bloggites! I hope that your weekend is just sitting there waiting for you, ready to be awesome. Before we get to the debauchery and (gasp) soccer-laden Saturday-Sunday span, we have some business to attend to. From last night into this morning, eleventy billion (the precise number) stories broke, most of which were just boring confirmations of one sort or another. So my choices were (A) only give you the ones that I personally care about (sorry Twilight fans), (B) give you absolutely everything in individual blog posts (but, hellooooo, I'm waaaay too lazy for such things, or (C) make you a nice one-stop-shopping post filled with all the things you may care about in easily digestible portions. Never let it be said that I don't always consider your needs. Oh, a quick programming note: I'm hoping to hit you with this and the box office predictions before returning later today with a Karate Kid review.

Okay, so let's peek into the smorgasbord of newsie-type things that just hit:

1.) How the mighty have fallen - Until 2 weeks ago, Guillermo Del Toro's name was often followed by a parentheses that read "director of the upcoming Hobbit." Now, Pajiba reports that it should read "Van Helsing resurrection specialist." Yeah, you read that right, the rumor is that Del Toro has ditched The Hobbit and his next project may be a new version of Van Helsing. Supposedly the film will deny all existence of the Hugh Jackman abomination (permitted to exist only for it's rampant use of Kate Beckinsale in tight pants). I'm officially worried about Del Toro's career. The director of the first Van Helsing was exiled from earth and now orbits the planet in a spaceship made entirely of bad CGI.

2.) Hotness arrives! - The Russell Brand remake of Arthur just got a whole lot more sexy.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Kill it with fire! His hair wants to strangle my eyeballs! Every flower has an individual murderous personality! OH GOD, MAKE IT STOP.

Much better. Happy place. So soft. So pretty. Nice. Calm. Love.
YOU SON OF A BITCH! I thought you were dead?! Go away forever, you are bad for my life! Bring back the pretty!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how I tell the world that Jennifer Garner and Nick Nolte have joined the Arthur remake. Thanks for playing.

3.) Yeah, but will it have a really icky sex scene? - Vincenzo Natali, who directed The Cube and Splice, is about to tackle William Gibson's "Neuromancer," a book that very much inspired The Matrix. This could be compelling and brilliant, given both the source material and the artist who clearly is off the beaten path. Then again, it could feel redundant (given said Matrix) and could feature disgusting, bizarre, interspecies, semi-incestuous feeling sex. Not to pigeon-hole Natali, but I fear such behaviors may be his calling card, like Hitchcock's cameo or Shyamalan's surprise ending. God, wouldn't that be great/awful?!

4.) More to hate - As has been rumored about and then confirmed but not really confirmed but kind of confirmed and then not really denied but sort of denied: Twilight: Breaking Dawn is going to be 2 movies. Now, it's going to be very important that someone sees these before I do and tells me which one I have to see for the batshit insane bullshit that I've heard happens in the final novel. Clearly, I'm not sitting through both of them, but if someone tells me which one brings the best crazy, I'd love to watch people watch it. I'd love nothing more than to watch Twi-hards drooling over what I personally believe to be the craziest thing I've ever heard about in a work of fiction, and I just referenced disgusting, bizarre, interspecies, semi-incestuous feeling sex above.

5.) Rush is back! - No, not the Canadian rockers whose music makes you sterile, Geoffrey Rush is officially returning to the Pirates series again! This is good, as he is neither Orlando Bloom nor Keira Knightley. Rush's character was a good foil/counterpart to Depp's legendary figure, so I'm hoping they'll revive the magic once more. There's something truly great about movie pirates that has only been captured that first time in this series. If piracy is ever really going to catch on, this series HAS to do better.

Okay, that's all of the important (and semi-important/unimportant) movie news to care about on this Friday. Back atcha with Box Office Predictions shortly and Karate Kid review later!

Follow me on Twitter!

Movie Review: Splice

I'm not reviewing every single movie out there in the world, so here's someone else's opinion for a moment. Justin got to see the creepy Splice this weekend, and here's what he had to say!

It’s Alive!
Splice is Shelley via Cronenberg
Justin Senkbile

Despite its jumping, shrieking trailer, director Vincenzo Natali’s Splice has a lot in common with James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s The Fly; these are movies that are not so much terrifying as they are strangely unsettling…and as far as unsettling movies go, Splice certainly earns its place on that list.

After creating Ginger and Fred, two grotesque lab-made creatures that prove the viability of new gene-splicing techniques, scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) probably should've just gone on vacation. Instead, with hopes of making an even larger mark on scientific history, Elsa coerces Clive into joining her on the next step: adding human genes to their DNA cocktails.

What results is a clicking, hissing creature, distortedly human in appearance but mysterious in every other sense. Clive, sensing the possible consequences, wants to kill it. Elsa, on the other hand, finds a long-buried maternal instinct beginning to blossom.

This is where Splice takes its defining turn, devoting its attention to the dynamic within this synthetic family unit. At first, Elsa dotes on her faux daughter, whom she’s named Dren, dressing her up and showering her with gifts. But as the “specimen” matures (it ages several days in a matter of minutes and is, as a young adult, played by Delphine Chanéac), Elsa becomes cold and harsh, like an exhausted mother losing patience with her temperamental teenager.

Polley clearly dominates the film, her manipulative matriarch Elsa being the driving force behind the experiment itself and the story's eventual fall into violence. Her counterpoint, Clive, is played aptly by the perpetually languid Brody. Submissive but not exactly timid, Clive's inability to stand up to Elsa earns him an equal share of the guilt.

Though Chanéac's is the most exciting role, it's also a pretty thankless one. Because she's heavily made-up, partially computer generated and spends most of the film twitching and squirming, it's easy to miss fact that there's also a bit of acting going on here. Despite of the burden of all the physical alterations, Dren ends up as frightening and heartbreaking as Boris Karloff's lumbering monster from 1931, and all of Splice's most moving moments belong to her.

Things do get pretty bizarre near the end (Macgruber has officially lost the "Most Uncomfortable Sex Scene of 2010" award), but Splice is really more of a close-quarters character study than a hunter-versus-hunted scare-fest. After all, Natali is toying with some weighty moral issues here. Technological and scientific responsibility is the most obvious, but the most striking is the focus on the sticky business of parenting, which, as you might imagine, only gets hairier when you're not sure just how human the kid is.

With all of the hyper-weirdness in the third act, it's debatable as to how successful Splice is in raising and articulating its questions. What's undeniable, though, is that it's magnificently creepy, a smart, surprising piece of early summer entertainment that manages to really leave a mark.

Grade: B

Follow me on Twitter!