The trailer for Marvel’s The Eternals dropped:
It’s so lackluster I have to use a meme from the competing DC universe:
There’s nothing there that grabbed me. And I’m a guy who’s seen almost all of the MCU films.
The Critical Drinker has thoughts that largely mirror my own, albeit with more drinking and profanity:
For those who still haven’t backed the new Mystery Science Theater 3000, they just roared past their $5.5 million goal to make 12 episodes and they still have (as of this writing) 13 hours left to go.
I previously covered The Gizmoplex, but here are few of the more interesting tidbits about Season 13 that have been revealed since the campaign launch:
If you haven’t backed the Kickstarter yet, now would be a good time…
And here’s the conclusion of our (sorta) Godzilla Week on Futuramen, The Honest Trailer for Godzilla vs. Kong:
Hopefully more book geeking starting tomorrow.
As you can tell, I liked Godzilla vs. Kong, but I can’t deny that there are a few, ahem, scientific implausibilities in the film, and Screen Rants Pitch Meeting guy digs into those with gusto:
Of course, remember what franchise we’re talking about. Compared to “He must have programmed himself to get big!” (Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon), Godzilla vs. Kong‘s leaps in plausibility are mere hopscotch…
Godzilla vs. Kong
Directed by Adam Wingard
Written by Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields (story), Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein (screenplay)
Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Julian Dennison, Kaylee Hottle and Demian Bichir
This is the best of the Monsterverse movies. The people at Legendary Films seem to have finally figured out what viewers actually want (hot kaiju-on-kaiju city-destroying action) and what they want left on the cutting room floor (boring human backstory).
The movie opens with King Kong contained within a Truman Show-type dome over Skull Island and Godzilla attacking the Florida research facility of sinister Apex Cybernetics (think Yoyodyne or Weyland-Yutani). The movie quickly splits into two strands: Millie Bobby Brown’s character (a bit less useless than in Godzilla: King of the Monsters), her tubby geek friend (Julian Dennison) and a conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry) try to penetrate Apex systems to learn The Real Truth, while Kong, along with his deaf Child Monster Whisperer companion (Kaylee Hottle; think Kenny from Gamera, but much less annoying) and guardian Rebecca Hall (the bank-teller from The Town) help Alexander Skarsgard take Kong to Antarctica on an Apex-underwritten mission to the hollow earth to uncover a new power source.
If the last part sounds extremely unlikely, you’re right, but they’ve cannily kept explanations to a bare minimum to keep you moving on to the next monster scene. (You know that 5-15 minute segment where they have to knock out Kong to get him on the ship? They snipped that sucker entirely out and cut to him already in giant chains mid-voyage.) The first battle between Godzilla and Kong takes place at sea, with round one going to our reigning lizard champion.
There’s some delightful stuff with Kong reaching the hollow earth, where he roams the verdant green-and-purple landscape, fights some Quetzalcoatlesque giant flying serpents (which this rundown dubs “warbats”) and finds a giant ancestral throne room and (plot point alert) a Kong-sized Zilla-spined axe.
In the other plotline, the Scooby Gang discover that Apex is breeding Skullcrawlers (from Kong: Skull Island), and are promptly whisked via high speed underground tunnel to Hong Kong (Monsterverse tech seems to be advancing much faster than our own), where they discover that Apex head honcho Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir, basically playing Evil Tony Stark) has built to his own Mechagodzilla to put man back at the top of the food chain.
If you watched the Toho Godzilla films, you pretty much know how this is going to turn out.
We finally get Godzilla and Kong smashing up neon-lit Hong Kong in a truly epic battle royal that Mechagodzilla later joins. Legendary really makes use of the possibilities of CGI to make you feel like you’re in the middle of a battle between two giant monsters, with the viewpoint frequently swooping in and around the action. There’s even a scene where Mechagodzilla emerges from a hillside that I would swear is an almost exact lift from a Toho hillside monster emergence scene.
This is the Godzilla movie where Hollywood finally figured out how to get out of its own way. No “reinvented” Godzilla, no tedious backstories, no time wasted on pointless human drama, no 15 different studio executives having to stick their dicks in the soup to justify their salaries. Just compelling kaiju on kaiju action rendered with top-notch modern CGI that puts you in the middle of the city-stomping. (And none of the “they make their own weather so everything is dark and stormy” effect used to excess in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.) It bests all previous Moinsterverse films in just about every area (except Kong: Skull Island in cast; Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman and Tom Hiddleston beat Eleven, Ben Affleck love interest and a random Skarsgard hands down).
And it’s light-years better than the 1962 King Kong vs. Godzilla, which features perhaps the saddest Kong ever committed to film. (Banglar King Kong doesn’t count.)
If you like Godzilla movies, this one is well worth catching while it’s still in theaters.
MST3K creator Joel Hodgson has launched another MST3K Kickstarter to help fund the show that was dropped by Netflix after two seasons. Their minimum goal is $2 million for three more episodes (which I think they’re going to breeze past today), with stretch goals out to $5.5 million for 12 episodes (plus 12 short films).
Plus something called “The Gizmoplex,” which he describes as “an online theater for live screenings & special events!”
1. Live Premieres & Events: Each month for our first year, The Gizmoplex will host at least* one live event, where you can join me, our cast and writers, and some special surprise guests. Each live event will be like a night at the theater, and will have a lot of fun surprises. Our live events could include new sketches, trailers (done “MST3K style”), live Q&A panel discussions, interviews, contests… even the return of the MST3K “viewer mail” segment.
2. The MST3K Watch Club: To make it easier to watch MST3K with your friends, The Gizmoplex will also be the official home of the MST3K Watch Club! Each month, you’ll get on-demand access to a new selection of episodes, and the ability to host your own live screenings for up to 10 people! Anyone with a Gizmoplex Pass can join for free, and if you want to invite someone who doesn’t, they can get a “Day Pass” for just $0.99!
And, if we reach our stretch goals, the Gizmoplex Pass will get even more valuable!
3. Gizmoplex Apps: If we raise $3.3 million, we’ll be able to develop apps that bring The Gizmoplex to mobile devices and TVs! Right now, the plan is to include apps for six of the most popular platforms: iOS, Android, AppleTV, AndroidTV, FireTV and Roku. Like Crow says: we’re gonna conquer cyberspace, man!
Also: “I really want The Gizmoplex to feel like something new: less like another Netflix with nothing but MST, and more like a charming, off the radar, suburban cineplex that plays movies for 99 cents, long after their first run.”
Though not stated, the ad campaign suggests they’re keeping the Season 11 and 12 cast, and Jonah Ray appears in the Kickstarter video.
There’s also some interesting discussion of the economics behind the show and Kickstarter:
1. Without a network supporting us, we need to fund everything ourselves. During our first Kickstarter, we estimated that, once production was up and running, we’d be able to produce new episodes for about $250K each. In the end, though, the budget for each new episode ended up being closer to $350K. For the last two seasons, we were able to cover the difference through our deal with Netflix… but this time, we’re on our own. We’ve got a lot of ways we can keep the budget lower, but, you know… it’s still going to cost something. And when you think about it, $350K for 90 minutes of television is still one of the best deals in show business.
2. We still can’t spend everything we raise on Kickstarter to make the show.
Campaign Fees: Between Kickstarter and the credit card processor, we pay about 8% of your pledge in fees. There’s also a fee for CrowdOx, the platform we’ll use to manage all of your surveys and rewards after the campaign ends.
Making Rewards: We reserve about 20% of your pledge in order to design, produce, print, sort and pack all of your rewards. And that’s not even including shipping, which we’re not collecting until after our Kickstarter campaign ends!
Dedicated Support: During our first Kickstarter, we underestimated the amount of work involved in providing customer support and creating detailed backer updates, so we had to depend on volunteers to do a lot of it. This time, we want to make sure we’re prepared, so we budgeted about 4% of each pledge for that.
Building & Running The Gizmoplex: We really want The Gizmoplex to be great, but getting it started will take some work – and keeping it running also means we’ll have some monthly fees to cover. We also need some budget to support all of the special live events we’re planning to host. So, we’re using about 3% of your pledge for that.
When you put it all together, we have to spend about 35% of what we raise just to cover Kickstarter expenses, and to keep all the promises we’re making to you.
He thinks that if they do 12 episodes, per episode cost will be down to just under $300K.
You may remember that MST3K already had the biggest Kickstarter in history up to that time. It’s since been surpassed by several smart watches and board games, among other things.
Despite the caveat that “this might not be a good time for some people to offer financial support to a robot puppet show dedicated to cheesy movies,” I expect them to blow the doors off the totals of their last Kickstarter.
Naturally I’ve already pledged.
Update: Just ticked over the first goal of $2 million.
…it’s only that his metabolism has gotten more selective.
Tony Hendra, Spinal Tap manager Iain Faith in This Is Spinal Tap, dead at age 79.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
A combination of new books that came in and filling in some collection gaps.
I will have copies of Big Lizard, The Magic Wagon and Waltz of Shadows in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog, currently in progress. Drop me a line if you want to receive a copy in email.
The Lego remake of the Star Wars Holiday Special evidently premiered today on Disney+.
Looks less a remake than a complete comic re-imagining.
I don’t have Disney+ (or any other streaming service), so I can’t tell you how good it is.
But it can’t help but improve on the original…
A perennial Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, Space Mutiny is a grade Z science fiction film feature bad acting, a bad script, bad direction, ludicrous sets, thoroughly incompetent continuity, and special effects licensed from the original Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Here the people behind The Bad Movie Bible (which I may need to pick up) take a look at the story behind the film:
I didn’t realize that ostensible director David Winters was also the choreographer for The Star Wars Holiday Special. While that’s an awful lot of evil to pack into one career, any teenage boy whose parents had The Movie Channel in the 1980s are certainly willing to forgive a lot of sins for producing late night “classic” Young Lady Chatterly. (In the “non-evil” department, he was also a Jet in West Side Story.)
The MST3K episode of Space Mutiny is available as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Vol. 4. BLAST HARDCHEESE says you should pick up a copy…