Lindsay Lohan Joins Manson Family… Movie.

Alright, let’s get one thing straight before I delve into this story. I decided long ago (when I laid the foundation of Quad’s Corner) that this was not going to be a celebrity gossip blog. Poking one’s nose into somebody else’s private life is not the kind of writing I enjoy, or partake in. Dash whatever hopes you had of me reporting on a whipped cream toga party when you saw the name “Lindsay Lohan” in the headline.

What I’m saying is that a new movie about the Manson Family is apparently coming out (according to Ain’t It Cool News and Entertainment Tonight’s website) and Lohan happens to be in it. She will portray Nancy Pitman, who joined up with the Family, but never actually participated in the murders. She later fell in with the Aryan Brotherhood and was eventually arrested for being an accessory to murder.

The movie will be called Manson Girls, and will concern, presumably, the ladies in Charlie’s bunch. Other than that, I got nothing. There’s no official website, and no IMDB entry either. Here’s some more information on Pitman if you’re interested in that.

“Superhero Movie” Continues Tradition of Greatness.

So what we have here is apparently a parody of Spider-Man (2002). Not Spider-Man 2 or Spider-Man 3, but the first installment. The one that came out six years ago.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the pharmacy to buy some pain medicine. My sides have practically split from laughter!

No.

No.

Weekend Links

Steve Urkel once guest-starred on “Full House”. The pain. The pain! (poeTV)

The UK battle over “Manhunt 2” continues. (Gamepolitics)

Microsoft is cracking down on profane gamer mottos. (Joystiq)

The Angry Video Game Nerd posted a review of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” Atari 2600 game. Possibly NSFW due to language. (Gametrailers)

Saw V is scheduled for an October 2008 release. Enough already! (ComingSoon.net)

Filthy tears apart The Heartbreak Kid. NSFW, language. (The Filthy Critic)

Nintendo Vice President: No Wii Price cut soon. (Game Revolution)

Classic “South Park”. I’m tired of these language warnings, go for it. (poeTV)

Resident Evil: Exinction is Going to Blow

The poster’s tagline says “All bets are off”. If they only knew how RIGHT they were…

When one creates a film based on previously written work, transferring between two different mediums is hard, and staying true to the nature of the original work is tricky. Books (which give the author the advantage of omniscient viewpoint) are a world apart from movies and television, which have to rely on telling the story visually. How do you retell a novel onscreen without diminishing with the writer originally had in mind? How do you show the written word the way it was meant to be seen? It’s a difficult task, but a lot of people have pulled it off.

Unfortunately, in the case of videogames I can’t come up with a single example where anyone ever, ever got it right. Oh sure, they’ve tried, and in some instances almost made it. Regardless, game-based movies have always been a stigma on the world of cinema. No matter how much effort is put in, the end result always comes out wrong.

When comparing the two Resident Evil films that are already out, I’d call the first one the ‘best’. It was lousy, but writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson used original characters and situations so viewers couldn’t claim they’d already ‘seen’ the ending. Other than lots of zombies and flying bullets, it was the only thing appealing about that movie.

Then he wrote Resident Evil: Apocalypse and pissed away his one good idea. Not only did he cram as many characters from the video games as he could, he introduced them all in the cheapest, most cliché action-heroy ways imaginable. He gave the sole surviving heroine of the first movie amazing superpowers (hey, they’re dating in real life) and made her even more powerful at the end. (oops, did I spoil it?). And he rounded out the cast by breaking a cardinal rule of decent storytelling: throwing in a wise-cracking goofy black man. Wow.

Resident Evil: Extinction will hit theaters everywhere on Friday. I can’t reveal specific details about it (I haven’t attended any pre-screenings) but I do know a few things offhand. First of all, it’s not going to be very good. That’s pretty much common sense. Second, it’s going to include Claire Redfield and Albert Wesker, two more characters from the game series. Oh, wonderful. Are they going to show up in the same manner that Jill Vallentine and Carlos Olivera did in Apocalypse, bursting onto the scene wielding two pistols and blasting away at zombies?

Or maybe I’m wrong in thinking Extinction will be another asstastic game-based time waster. Perhaps it will end up being the greatest movie of the year, hailed by critics as the action/horror event that forever changed the face of moviemaking. Maybe it will inspire others to create videogame films that remain true to the source material while allowing creativity to shine.

Nothing’s impossible!

“The Simpsons Movie”: Redemption, or the Final Nail?

Yesterday, I was busy doing what I normally do (lying around, being an introvert, not meeting new people) when a hard fact suddenly hit me:

“The Simpsons” has been around a long, long time.

I was renting “Bart vs. the Space Mutants” for my NES back in 1990, and that was SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO. Since then, my primary, entire elementary, adolescence, teen, and young adult years have run parallel to this show’s continued existence. I was there for everything: the raging soccer mom movement against Bart’s underachiever/sling-shot t-shirts, the show being moved to Thursday nights, the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” specials, Milhouse dealing with his parents divorce, fandom spreading to the Internet, comic books, trading cards, stickers and posters. I once had a towering stack of VHS tapes where I’d religiously recorded edited syndicated episodes, and a separate one where I taped most of the eighth season when it was originally broadcast (this, coincediently, means I also owned a collection of commercials from 1996.)

And of course, I was there when the show hit absolute rock-bottom. Around about season nine or so, all the old writers were suddenly shuffled out the door and replaced with a staff who had never seen a single previous episode in their lives. The character were reduced to one-joke shells of what they once were, and the stories were lame-brained affairs, clearly the result of producers whose hammers were falling on an empty chamber of ideas. But mostly, it was the jokes. Out of the blue, they just stopped being funny.

So I completely stopped watching any new airings of the show. Instead, I became content on collecting DVDs of the older, better days, and watched “The Simpsons” collapse into utter banality from afar. For some reason, it continues being on the air despite being the equivalent of a maggot-infested, desecrated corpse. Only the “Simpsons” name is keeping it alive.

Now, in less than three days time, The Simpsons Movie will be hitting theaters. It’s certainly no small event, especially for Fox, who have been advertising the hell out of it. As the countdown to the movie’s nationwide release begins, I can’t help but wonder if this will be the redeeming factor in the show’s history. One big upside is that the screenplay was written by a lot of the old writing staff– the ones who didn’t confuse “The Simpsons” with a “Family Guy” marathon.

Will “The Simpsons” be released from its prison of despair? Or will it keep rotting and be forced to go on living, like a 29-year-old cat with no hair and teeth? Only time will tell.

THIS JUST IN: Rapture to Happen December 14, 2007

You know, I never really liked going to church. The idea of having to sit still for an hour (occasionally standing up in-between) while a guy at the front of the room tells me about how the bad things I did all week are going to get me in trouble with a giant man in the clouds– well, I’d rather be at home playing “Mega Man”, amiright?

Well, I realize now that I was dead wrong all those years. Not only should I have attended services on Sundays, but also Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and any days left in-between. Mission trips? Youth group volunteering? Witnessing to my atheist friends? Oh yes. All of that. Because Jesus is coming back, my friends. Less than six months from now, every holy-roller I ever shut my ears toward will be floating around in a serene heaven, while the rest of us unsaved are stuck on earth dealing with plagues of locusts, rivers of blood, and computer-generated singing chipmunk critters.

I MEAN LOOK AT THAT POSTER. JUST LOOK AT IT. Is that not a sign that the Antichrist is preparing to assume control over a doomed earth? I can practically smell the planet burning to cinders right now. What level of self-loathing is Jason Lee at these days!? And who the HELL thought it was a good idea to turn Simon into a Crip-color-wearing gangsta whiteboy?

All I know for sure, is that Hollywood is a human wasteland these days, where good ideas are tossed to the wind while idiots are allowed to freely hurl their poop nuggets toward the clueless masses, like the devolved apes they are.

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING FROM OUR MISTAKES!?

Happy Birthday George A. Romero!

Yep, the Lich King himself, uber necromancer, Nemesis, etc. etc. turned 67 today. Here’s to many more awesome years and zombie Armageddons.

SIDE NOTE: Today, the Sci-Fi channel is airing a marathon of their “Ghost Hunter” series. Give me a break. I love restless spirits as much as the next guy, but I don’t give a crap about them right now. Sci-Fi should be paying their respects to The Great George and showing ZOMBIE movies.

Lonely Blogger Has Low Expectations for Upcoming Parody Franchise Installment

Call me old fashioned, call me humorless. I don’t care. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why they keep making these godawful ‘films’.

Oh, wait, yes I can. It’s because they rake in millions of dollars at the box office. And when people pay that much money to sit and watch familiar scenes get ‘enhanced’ with grossout comedy gags, that’s a general indication of what our population finds funny, right? It’s only common to keep cranking out these assembly line products and feeding them to the masses.

So go ahead. Plop down eight bucks and encourage Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg to keep writing and directing these ‘hilarious’ PG-13 tributes. Then look forward to Scary Movie 5 in 2008, along with the inevitable Sci-Fi Movie, Drama Movie, Porno Movie (also PG-13) War Movie, Black Comedy Movie, Foreign Movie, Religious Movie, Cross-Dressing Comedy Movie, Fish-Out-of-Water Movie and Not Another Movie Movie.

Man Single-Handedly Creates Animated Film. May Need to Ask for Five Years Back?

I can understand creating flash animation or web episodes entirely by yourself. But feature-length animated films? Brother, that’s a commitment.

But apparently Phil Nibbelink (former Disney animator, director of An American Tale: Fievel Goes West and We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story) managed to pull it off. He spent five years in his home studio writing, directing, and animating his own 80 minute movie all by himself. He used family members for voice acting. He took charge of promotion to get word of the project out.

The film is called Romeo and Juliet: Sealed With a Kiss. It’s a somewhat direct adaption of the Shakespeare hit, with baby seals as the title characters and various sea creatures filling out the remaining cast. A trailer can be found on Youtube here, and another on the official site.

An impressive and memorable effort? Well… I’m not so sure. The previews remind me in too many ways of throwaway early-to-mid-90s crap, going as far as having an adorable fish spouting catch phrases at every turn. Plus, that brief scene with the ‘Prince’ gives off a creepy vibe that I can’t ignore. Maybe the whole internet has scarred me.