George Romero And His Softening Stance On Zombies

by Furious
May 13th, 2009

When you hear the name George Romero, the only thing that you can possibly associate it with is zombies. With Night of the Living Dead in 1968, he created the zombie apocalypse genre, as well as redefined what made up the cinematic zombie. Prior to Night of the Living Dead, zombies were generally people under some type of voodoo spell, not the reanimated dead. I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

I recently treated (some might say subjected) myself to a Living Dead marathon, watching Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and Diary of the Dead back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. There are worse ways to spend a day.

What struck me the most was that, as the movies progress, Romero starts looking more favorably on the zombies and more …

Popularity: 66% [?]

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Do Movies Still Have The Power To Change Our Lives?

by Furious
April 26th, 2009

I’m going to make a couple assumptions here. First, that you have seen or don’t care about the ending of The Mist. It’s just those last few minutes of the movies to which I’ll be referring, so if you don’t care about the ending and still want to read on, you may want to catch up with a review of the movie. Second, I’m assuming that at one point it was expected that watching a movie could change your perspective on life and that generally speaking, those days are long behind us.

I suppose I’m making a third assumption as well- that you’d believe I hold myself to be a fairly pragmatic person. It may seem there’s a plethora of evidence on this site to the contrary, but my normal course of business is to rely more …

Popularity: 27% [?]

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Entertainment Weekly Wouldn’t Know Cool If It Bit Them In The Ass

by Furious
April 13th, 2009

Merriam-Webster defines the slang form of the word cool as:

very good: excellent; also: all right

Using this as a guideline, Entertainment Weekly tried to create a list of the 20 All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. In descending order they are:

20. Sydney Bristow

19. Atticus Finch

18. Batman

17. Nancy Drew

16. Jack Bauer

15. Dirty Harry

14. Will Kane

13. Foxy Brown

12. Captain James T. Kirk

11. Mad Max

10. Spider-Man

9. Robin Hood

8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

7. Han Solo

6. John McClane

5. Ellen Ripley

4. Harry Potter

3. Superman

2. Indiana Jones

1. James Bond

There’s a lot to quibble about with this list, but there is one huge glaring eyesore of a problem with this list. It sits right …

Popularity: 24% [?]

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Will Your Favorite Movie Be Better In 3D?

by Furious
April 9th, 2009

If you hadn’t yet noticed, 3D is coming back to movies in a big way. Every week or two a new release makes it’s way into a few 3D theaters. By most accounts, or at least box office receipts, people seem to enjoy the 3D thing so Hollywood is going to push it until it’s all pushed out. Because you know, it’s easier to get people to spend more money on movies by making them look spiffier than actually trying to make better movies.

The problem Hollywood has is that not every movie is financially appropriate for 3D. Using Monster vs. Aliens (the biggest digital 3D release to date) as a case study, if you’ve got a big tent pole movie that’s going to be released into over 4,000 theaters, then investing an extra $15 million on the …

Popularity: 31% [?]

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Yahoo Knows How To Make A Movie List

by Furious
March 25th, 2009

Movie lists are nothing new. In fact, I’d dare you to find a movie website that doesn’t contain one. The most well known movie list manufacturer is probably the American Film Institute. Those bastards just love turning out lists, most likely with a goal of putting every movie ever made on some type of list.

AFI’s biggest list is the 100 Greatest American Movies. Not to be outdone, others have come up with their own 100 movie lists, such as Time’s All-Time 100 Movies. These lists are nice and all, but trying to list the best movies is so subjective that the lists really aren’t more than a soon forgotten conversation piece.

But Yahoo might have come up with a list that is, for lack of a better word, perfect. 100 Movies to …

Popularity: 45% [?]

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Stimulating The Economy In 3-D

by Furious
March 19th, 2009

Everyone knows that 3-D is the future of movies. Every week or two we get another new 3-D movie event to go see, even dreck like a remake of My Bloody Valentine. You need look  no further for evidence that, like it or not, 3-D is being forced down our throats.

DreamWorks Animation’s next 3-D event will be Monsters vs. Aliens, releasing on the 27th. What they hope is that people will get all hot and bothered about 3-D and opt to pay the premium over the archaic 2-D projection. DreamWorks had hoped to get a bunch of new theaters converted to 3-D in time for this movie, but there was a little issue with the economy that prevented it.

DreamWorks wanted this to be the big movie that took 3-D mainstream and would obviously do whatever they could …

Popularity: 26% [?]

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How Long Is Long Enough To Start Talking About A Do-Over?

by Furious
March 11th, 2009

Though I have already grown awfully weary of superhero/comic book movies, most of the world has yet to embrace that view. You seemingly can’t hit up any movie website without finding a story about some superhero/comic book movie that is/will be/might hopefully be coming out. Even here, where I’m bitching about those movies.

The movie studios and their comic cohorts are trying to make a movie of every damn comic that’s ever been made. It’s like every obscure comic they can find. Fathom, Jonah Hex, or Preacher anyone? Yeah, apparently those are comic books coming soon to a theater near you.

With both popular and obscure superhero/comic movies in the works and decades of comics to pull from, you’d think there would be plenty of fresh new movies coming out for years. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.

As we learned in …

Popularity: 14% [?]

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30 Great Sequels That Haven’t Happened. Yet.

by Furious
March 5th, 2009

Castaway 2: Wilson’s Revenge

The Deer Hunter: The Next Generation

Harry and the Hendersons 2: Let’s Get Hairy

Remo Williams: The Adventure Ends

Chaplin II: 23 Skidoo

The Continuing Adventures of Ford Fairlane

The Return of George Kaplan: North by Northwest 2

American History XI

8ight

The Fourth Man

Platoon 2: In the Shit

Searching for Bobby Fischer 2, Learning to Castle

Jerry Maguire: Holdout

Traffic Jam – An Easy Rider Tale

Yours, Mine and Ours 2: Who’s Your Daddy?

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Out to Brunch!

Freaks 2: Freakier

Singing in the Rain: Thunderstorm

Some Like it Hotter

Tranquilizer: The Big Sleep 2

Fargo 2: Whiteout

Triple Indemnity

Lawrence of Arabia: Trek to Mecca

Full Metal Jacket 2 – Bulletproof

Punching Bag,

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Popularity: 15% [?]

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No One Knows What To Do With These Board Game Movies

by Furious
March 4th, 2009

With a deluge of board game movies in pre-production, and more announced damn near every day, you’d think Hasbro (who seems to be behind all of these things) would have some plan, some formula to get these things on the big screen. It seems like they’re just randomly selecting a property and throwing it out there with a pile of money, giving the project to whomever trips over it. But really, they’ve got to have some plan, right?

MTV was able to get the scoop on a couple of these movies and it seems, just like we may ponder about how the hell it could translate into a movie, the filmmakers haven’t a clue either.

Monopoly executive producer and Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner says Ridley Scott has “built these great big worlds of imagination” and the script is about

…

Popularity: 15% [?]

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