"The trailer is like a comedy sketch parodying 'horse films' "

So there's this movie coming out called "War Horse" directed by Steven Spielberg. You may have heard of him, but have you seen the trailer? It's gotta win the award for hokiest looking piece of schmaltzy Oscar-bait drama I've ever seen. It's just completely unreal. The first time the trailer came on TV me and the wife totally thought we were being set up for a joke, half expecting Jim Carrey to pop out with a reveal for Ace Ventura 3. It would at least be more appropriate.

I delved into the dangerous waters of the IMDB message boards to see if anyone else agreed with me and I came back with the title of this post, ripped straight from a thread made by someone else with a bit of sense. I mean, C'MON, this has got to be parody, right, right?!?

There's just too many awful cliches to count. Luckily, someone on IMDB started counting for me:

- The girl standing up in her car dumbfounded at a horse walking past her like it's the first creature of it's kind to ever walk on earth.
- The single teardrop trailing down the girls face.
- "That's my 'orse!"
- The general sepia tone.
- That shot of the countryside.
- A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM and the rest of them embarrassing title cards.

I'll add quickly:

- Includes the 'untameable horse' cliche.
- Gratuitous glamor shots of a horse riding in some idyllic countryside.
- Includes British people fighting in war to give everything more gravitas.
- Old man/Werner Herzog lookalike spouting off old-timey wisdom.

By the time the words "This Christmas" appear near the end I just can't take it anymore and double, nay, triple over in laughing. "Stop it, stop it!", I say like when you're being tickled and you can't breathe anymore. It's just SO bad that it's HILARIOUS. The sad part though is that I found more than one thread on IMDB with people saying the trailer brought them to tears. These must be the same people who shop at Wal-Mart and get excited to see Shrek 7: Back in the Shrek. I, for one, will not be seeing this movie, no matter how much praise it may get. Also - HORSES!

Westworld (Crichton, 1973)

I confess the sole reason I decided to watch Michael Crichton's Westworld is because I was trying to track down a sample used in a VNV Nation song ("notify ground crews"). That particular phrase is uttered within the first five minutes of the film, but luckily I stuck around for the rest of the film.

Can someone please tell me (perhaps Little Earl) which movie did the whole "robots/theme park gone crazy" motif first, because watching this movie felt like so many others I'd seen before, but then of course this film came long before any modern day blockbusters.

Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crichton, which by the first 15 minutes came as no surprise. As far as I can tell, Westworld is simply a rough draft for Jurassic Park. Good looking well-to-do white folk go on vacation to a theme park with a slightly futuristic concept - theme park goes haywire - theme park becomes hostile - escape is made.

Westworld stars James Brolin doing his best John Wayne impression and Richard Benjamin. Their characters are on their way to Delos, a futuristic theme park where one can live out their fantasies in one of the Disney inspired theme parks, Roman World, Medieval World, and Westworld. Our heroes choose Westworld and upon their arrival find it to be a fully realized recreation of the wild west, with all the parts played by extremely convincing life-like robots. In fact it's nearly impossible to tell who's human and who's robot, which makes for half the fun.

On their first trip to a saloon Benjamin's character is accosted by the Gunslinger, played with menacingly cold conviction by Yul Brynner. After a quick gunfight Benjamin takes out the Gunslinger and all seems well. Soon we are given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the inner workings of Westworld, where we see the Gunslinger being repaired so he can be used again. We also learn that some of the robots are starting to act strange. Needless to say, the robots all eventually go haywire, with the final third of the film consisting of the Gunslinger as he hunts down Benjamin's character with nary a syllable of dialogue spoken by either for a good 30 minutes.

This is also where I realized that not only was Westworld a rough draft of Jurassic Park, but must have also strongly influenced James Cameron and The Terminator series. Yul Brynner does the relentless robot out-to-kill perfectly. I swear there's even a few shots that Cameron ripped straight off of Brynner's performance. The way Brynner walks, his cold, robotic gaze, even the Terminator's infamous half ripped-off face with the glowing red eye - here the Gunslinger is given strange white glowing eyes, but the effect is nearly identical. I felt like I had seen this all before as I watched, but then again, Westworld came first. Really, I'm half surprised Crichton never sued Cameron for stealing his idea and imagery.

All in all, it's not the greatest film. The characters are fairly boring, not much really happens overall, and there's virtually no falling action after the climax, the film just ends. But Westworld was interesting just for the realization of how many things it's influenced, from The Terminator, to the Simpsons (Itchy and Scratchy land anyone?). And damn, does James Brolin think he's John Wayne.

Mega Man: The Movie!

Ok, so the above trailer isn't for a real film. It's just a fan made trailer for a fictional Mega Man movie. There's a lot of fan service going on, so if haven't played a Mega Man game in a while you might not get it all, but for a couple of fans working with zero budget it's pretty damn fun to watch and imagine "what if...". Now, it's nowhere near as good as the fake Legend of Zelda trailer IGN.com put out earlier this year, which looks so real that upon viewing it my girlfriend said "why don't they just make the real thing, millions of people would go see it anyways." Besides the ridiculous looking Ganon, it looks like a real trailer for a real film. Watch it below:

In a world where movie announcers die...

If you didn't hear, yesterday Don LaFontaine died from complications due to a collapsed lung. Who's Don LaFontaine? He's the movie announcer most famous for any movie trailer that begins with "In a world where...". According to CBS news he's recorded more than 5,000 voiceovers for movie trailers and "hundreds of thousands of more commercials and other presentations." Hundreds of thousands, really?? Sounds a bit of an exaggeration to me.

Batman: The Dark Knight: The Gut Reaction

This Saturday night me and my girlfriend decided to go see the new Batman movie on a whim. I didn't really want to go because I thought the crowds would be enormous. We saw the 10:30 showing, it was pretty easy to find seats surprisingly.

I'll try not to give away spoilers, though I might mention a scene or two. Has anyone else seen this movie yet? Overall I sort of liked it. Spiderman 1 and 2 were definitely better. Heath Ledger was pretty damn good as the Joker and he definitely made the movie. The best parts of the movie were definitely the Joker and the Hong Kong sequence, which included probably the most awesome/ridiculous get-away method ever conceived. Gary Oldman was a chameleon as usual, hard to believe this is the same guy who was the villian in the Fifth Element and Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK.

Things I didn't like: The music! In every scene where Nolan wanted to create tension, he used this terribly annoying technique of having this tense droning sound (pardon my lack of music terminology) that he kept turning slowly up. It starts as this slight drone and is slowly turned up as the scene gets more tense, but he used this EVERY single time he wanted to create tension in every scene. I started making a motion like I was turning a knob/dial whenever this music would start, and by halfway through the movie me and my girlfriend would just start laughing whenever the droning knob-turning noise started. Ugh.

Also - It felt like there were a lot of little missing fragments of scenes that maybe got cut for time. Something would be going on with a character and then it would suddenly cut to the same character somewhere completely different and the audience is left to extrapolate "oh I guess he managed to get away." Especially after Batman rescues the girl from the party. Hold on a sec, wasn't the Joker still holding everyone else hostage at the party, what about them? Oh well, it's the next morning now, I guess everyone's ok(?).

Finally, I think the movie suffered a bit of the Spiderman 3 syndrome. It tried to cram too many bad guys into one movie. In my opinion, they should have left the rest of Harvey Dent/Two Face's story to the next movie. I really didn't care about his villain, and I thought his CGI looking face stood out too much to the Joker's more authentic looking smeared makeup. They could have shaved a good 45 minutes off the movie without Two Face. At least he was better than the awful Sandman baddie from Spiderman 3.

Oh, and did I mention that Gotham city is now Chicago? I've never even been to Chi-town and even I could tell you that was it. It practically even had the whole Von Steuben Day parade, I half expected Ferris Bueller to pop out and start singing Danke Schoen.

Best of the 1980s

Ah, the 1980s. Our first decade of existence on this planet...and possibly our least favorite decade of culture. Coincidence, bad luck, or both? The 1980s' artistic highlights were (as far as we're concerned) few and far between, but in the spirit of making lemons out of lemonade, we've realized that such a scarcity of classic works lends the decade handily to the 10 Best treatment, and thus renders it much less intimidating than either the 1960s, 1970s, or 1990s. If anything, it's a bit of an exercise in resourcefulness. It's like picking the ten best popes: you're lucky to find ten you can really get behind.

The 1980s were not a complete wash, however. Hell, if something was good in the 1980s, in a way that makes it even more impressive than something that was good in the 1960s or 1970s; I mean, not only was it good, but it was good in the 1980s! Or maybe it's the other way around: it only seemed good because it came out in the 1980s and everything else was so bad. Chicken or the egg, folks?

Nonetheless, in honor of that golden decade of our youth, we will now be presenting over the course of the next few (days? weeks? months?) our own separate lists of 10 best movies and 10 best albums of the 1980s. Up first: Movies.

1980s cinema got fucked right from the start simply by having to follow the 1970s. It wasn't just the whole "Spielberg and Lucas killed the auteur movie" thing. One of our theories is that all the cinematographers held a secret meeting on New Year's Eve in 1979 and agreed to switch to the crappiest, most generic equipment possible, because as soon as the calendars hit January 1980, the quality of cinematography in movies took a big fat nosedive. Don't ask us why. Ultimately, the 1980s never really recovered from the "highbrow/lowbrow split": all the serious, critically-acclaimed, Oscar-winning movies were too stiff and formally unadventurous, while all the silly, special effects-laden, franchise-establishing blockbusters were too flashy and shallow. In the 1970s filmmakers knew how to make movies that were both entertaining and serious at the same time. By the time the 1980s rolled around, maybe it just wasn't a priority. (ED: We were all too busy watching our themed team adventure cartoons and eating our increasingly sugary breakfast cereals.)

Of course, there were exceptions. And for the most part, the exceptions are what will be featured here. If anything, the best films of the 1980s mostly have one thing in common: you can barely tell they're from the 1980s.

All The King's Men (2006)

I caught the last hour of this on cable last night. As others have said, it was one of the most unfortunately cast movies ever made. None of the actors manage to sound like they are from 1940's Louisiana. They don't even sound like they are from modern day Louisiana. Hell, Jude Law doesn't even manage to sound like he's from this side of the Atlantic. (He really doesn't sound like he's from anywhere. His accent is an amusing mash of tongue-injury patient and idiot.) Sean Penn doesn't even pull off a believable performance. Of course, I'm of the belief that no one really acts like Sean Penn outside of the movies anyway.

The cinematography was mediocre. Several shots faded between black and white, washed out smudge-tones, and color. I think this was a way of telling us we're watching a novel. It looks about as stupid as it sounds, and instantly ruins your suspension of disbelief.

Finally, Kate Winslet's character, for whatever reason, maybe it's not her fault, who knows, isn't very sympathetic or attractive. I thought part of what made the book work so well was the readers natural attraction to Anne Stanton. It made you realize that yes, Jack really is a bastard and it allowed you to appreciate Jack's growth. His relationship with Willie is the catalyst that allows him to move from his boyhood relationship with the judge to his mature adult relationship with Anne. Willie isn't just a funny Southern politician, he's a force within humanity that mature moral people have to face. This movie did not, and could not, face him.