Friday! Oh man, what a week. I am up against a wall and ready to crash. Tuesday I had the Saturn Awards (read all about it here on the blog!), Wednesday I celebrated my good friend Fowzia's b-day with some excellent Mexican cuisine. And at work, out long construction process is finally entering its second phase, and I finally moved out of the copy room (!) back into the cube-land. Generally though, I am more than ready for the weekend. For one, I'm completely psyched for Wall-E. Pixar + Robots seems to be the perfect recipe for a true classic, and the reviews so far seem to be unanimously superlative. I plan on hecking out Wall-E tonight, so check back soon for the review. And then, WANTED looks to be a pretty badass movie in its own right. Seeing as how it's a Universal picture, I get to attend a free screening tomorrow, so stay tuned for more on that one soon as well. But in the meantime, this is one of those days of drudgery ... I wouldn't mind if Angelina Jolie burst into my office and recruited me into a clandestine league of assassins sometime before 6 pm ...
- Most of all though, movie-wise, I am truly beginning to get on the hype train for THE DARK KNIGHT. Not that I wasn't super-pumped before, but seeing Peter Travers' early review this week in Rolling Stone, I am now basically salivating to see what looks to be the ultimate big-screen adventure of the Caped Crusader. Check out the review if you haven't read it:
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/16155928/review/21477208/the_dark_knight
But wow, his opening sentance alone is enough to get the ol' adrenaline pumping: "Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies."
- And don't worry, loyal readers. In the next few weeks leading up to the next big-screen Batman, keep checking back for all kinds of special entries in order to build up to Christopher Nolan's magnum opus. Since this movie features perhaps the reatest fictional villain of all time in THE JOKER, you can bet I'll be counting down the Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, The Greatest Joker Artists of All-Time, and The Joker's Best (and by default, Worst) Moments. Personally, I love the Joker, and I was enveloped with chills at the end of Batman Begins when Jim Gordon reveals the joker-is-wild card to Batman. "Escalation," says Gordon. Yer damn right.
- And of course, there's also an X-FILES movie coming out in a few short weeks. You'd barely know it thanks to FOX, who seems to be really dropping the ball on marketing this one. I had better see a bombardment of TV ads and movie trailers in the next few weeks, because I'm psyched for the film and would love to see it do well enough to warrant the franchis treatment. I mean, we need the X-Files alien invasion movie in 2012, dammit! So come on, step it up, FOX! The new clips that surfaced this week are pretty interesting, too. It looks like Mulder and Scully have gone their seperate ways following the series finale. I had assumed they would have lived out the last few years as a happy couple, but looks like that may not actually be the case. The cool thing about this being a standalone film though is that it should hopefully really allow for some intense character moments, without the film being overwhelmed by an overly complex plot. So rest assured, even as I'm doing my own personal X-Files marathons to prep for this long-awaited film, I'll also be filling out the blog with plenty of X goodness.
- I watched NBC's FEAR ITSELF last night, hoping that this would be the episode that really upped the ante for the so-far struggling series. All I can say is: wow, that was one strange episode. It wasn't really strange when you look at it from a macro view - actually, the overarching plot and subsequent twist was pretty familiar and even predictable. The basic premise is this: on her wedding night, a soon-to-be bride, prepping for the big ceremony, is handed an ominous note - it says: "The person you are about to marry is a serial killer." So of course, we assume that this innocent-seeming bride's groom is in fact a killer, but we also begin to wonder if this isn't all leading to some big, Twilight Zone-y twist. Is SHE the killer? Are they both killers? Neither? So this is where the episode becomes pretty absurd ... It basically becomeso ne giant effort to convince us that what we THINK will be the twist isn't, giving us one red herring after another, leading us down innumerable random tangents. We meet her groom's sinister-seeming twin uncles. We see her best friends become suspiciously possessive of her and accusatory of her groom. Are they killers? Oh, and William B. Davis, the cigarette-smokin' man himself, plays a hearing-impaired priest. And this is CSM we're talking about - of course he's going to be suspicious. Is HE a killer? Basically, this episode became a ridiculous attempt at misdirection, to the point where it was definitely straddling the line of being intentionally funny or just unintentially laughable. And when the ultimate twist WAS revealed as being exactly what everyone originally thought it would be, it was rendered all the more absurd because everything in the episode to that point had seemed to say "nope, that ISN't where we're going with this." And yet, all logic was thrown out the door so the episode could go M. Night on us. And oh yeah, there was a cross-dressing psycho killer who happens to be related to our killer thrown into the mix as well. If all this sounds like a giant cluster, it was, though it was a pretty entertaining one. Still, mildly entertaining is not good enough for a show that desperately needs a *great* episode.
My Grade: B -
- Okay, had more to talk about but I've got to jet. Stay tuned for more.
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