I would say that Marvel has a good idea exactly what audience it’s trying to draw to The Avengers:
(Actually, I always thought her Ghost World co-star Thora Birch was hotter.)
Since Howard and I will be reviewing The Avengers this weekend, I will forbear pointing out how underpowered Black Widow and Arrow Guy are compared to the rest of the team…
Oh Japan, don’t ever change.
But there’s no reason this idea can’t succeed in the U.S. Why not have Freddy Kruger, Leatherface, Jason or Pinhead throw out the first pitch? Granted, this still wouldn’t be enough to get me to watch baseball…
In related news: Hello Kitty Ringu products.
1990s British duo Curve walk the line (if there is one) between Shoegazer and Dreampop on their song “Frozen”:
We now interrupt this blog for some shameless huxtering: Amazon has the complete 6-episode run of the wonderful and completely insane anime series FLCL on Blu-Ray for $18.99.
This is probably my favorite anime series of all time. It’s weird, funny, and endlessly inventive. You spend 5 episodes thinking “This is great, but it makes absolutely no sense!” And then you watch the sixth episode and go “Wait, it does make sense!” It really rewards re-watching.
It’s about a boy a who has a mysterious woman bump into and then start hitting on him. That is to say, bumps into him with her Vespa at full tilt and starts hitting on his head with her bass guitar. After that, giant robots come out of the resulting bump.
Then it gets weird.
It’s awesome. Trust me.
And if a paying media outlet wants an already completed review of FLCL that Locus Online passed on, please let me know…
A continuing series:
She turns 79 today. How nice of Betty White to buy her a gorilla!
In celebration, here’s both parts of the classic “Went With the Wind!” skit.
Sure, Burnett has been immortalized on stage, screen, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But has she been given her own Barbie doll?
The answer is: Yes. yes she has, with the official Went with the Wind! Barbie Doll:
I would like to apologize to Houston Rockets fans everywhere. Two weeks ago, I said that coach Kevin McHale was doing a good job and how the Rockets were going to make the playoffs.
Naturally the Rockets immediately go on a six game losing streak, and yesterday they were eliminated from the playoffs. This will teach me to open my big, er, blog. If I had just kept it zipped, they might have managed to sneak in…
This is almost an extended loop rather than a standalone song, but it’s a very pleasant one, that seems to have been composed as a general tribute to shoegaze.
Today is the birthday for Dwight Brown of Whipped Cream Difficulties, whom I’ve known since God was a corporal. Happy birthday, Dwight!
On the birthday theme, here’s a viral teaser trailer for Prometheus promoting Weyland Industries’ androids, that’s so straight it’s almost not creepy. Which makes it that much creepier:
Plus an imaginary TED talk from Mr. Weyland himself.
Last Saturday I was over at A.T. and Carol’s house watching a Japanese science fiction action film called Returner (imagine every big budget American science fiction film between 1980 and 2000 being jammed into a blender and set to frappe and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the plot elements). It was fine if you didn’t mind the complete lack of originality, but we watched it because I thought it might be the one I saw a clip from a year or two ago. The problem is, while my memory of the clip is fairly clear, I can’t remember sufficient details to find it via a Google search.
In the clip I saw, people were fighting some freaky looking monsters that were obviously some sort of CGI (about the same level of the CGI in Returner, i.e. better than the Skiffy Channel’s cheap monster movies, but not as good as a major U.S. release). I think the monsters were sort of pale and slightly taller than human sized (but not multistory kaiju sized monsters). It was live action, not anime. And they were fighting in some sort of open, brightly lit interior area, like an atrium, or foyer, or perhaps somewhere in a museum. And the monsters weren’t guys in suits and didn’t look anything like the monsters on Ultraman, etc.
This should be enough to find the clip again, but it doesn’t seem to be. Maybe it wasn’t a movie, but part of a TV show. And maybe it wasn’t from Japan, but Hong Kong or South Korea. Or maybe Taiwan. (But not the Philippines. Probably.) And maybe they weren’t monsters, but aliens. Or maybe demons. Beings from another dimension? And I thought I saw it on Fark, but couldn’t find it when I searched there. Maybe it was linked from comments in the thread?
Movies I know it’s not:
Any ideas? It’s driving me to distraction…