Screenhead

Today I want to personally thank the Miller-McCune Group for blowing a whole lot of time and personnel dollars to engage in some serious spreadsheet fun, all meant to reveal one of the greatest truths of the media universe–not all critics are created equal, and some of them just love or hate things unaccountably.

As a token of my appreciation, the Miller-McCune Group will be receiving a large novelty pre-voided check for one hojillion dollars.

Anyway, they’ve built a whole lot of interesting graphs here revolving around a smattering of data from Metacritic, the critic amalgamation site that gives you a general idea of what a whole bunch of critics said.  On a side note, as though anyone would want that–I mean, come on…half the point of reading film criticism is to enjoy the wordplay and the clever comparisons and whatnot.  If you wanted raw numbers you’d play with a calculator.  You want the advance word from a person you can trust.

Some other interesting points include that Michael Wilmington might want to sleep with one eye open lest he be branded a quote whore sometime in the future (most of his work seems to be positive, and interestingly, so does Roger Ebert’s!  Ebert a quote whore?  Say it ain’t so!), Marc Savlov is a tough act to please, and Rene Rodriguez and Mick LaSalle seem to have the best balance of positive and negative work.

Look, I’ve said it before–the best thing you can do is find a critic you can trust.  And the only way you can do that is not with charts and graphs, but rather with a long term commitment and regular readings.  Find the one you know you can trust, and stick with them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s here at Screenhead or somewhere else (though we’d prefer it if it were here at Screenhead), just as long as you can trust it.

See, I knew it.  I knew this was coming.  I knew that, somehow, Katie Featherston was going to burst onto the scene as, at the very least, the flavor of the week in Hollywood after the incredible success of Paranormal Activity.

One, she’s pretty good.  Two, that movie did unbelievably well.  But it’s actually one of the ballsiest things I’ve ever seen to consider what her next movie is.  It’s either phenomenal brilliance, stupidity or hubris for them to retitle Featherston’s next movie from Walking Distance to…

…Experimental Activity.

No, really.  They changed the title from “Walking Distance” to “Experimental Activity” JUST BECAUSE of Paranormal Activity.  Oh, sure, they’re downplaying the title change in interviews, but you know and I know and the half-blind family DOG knows that’s why they did it.

I’ve heard about…Experimental Activity…and it sounds like a pretty awesome movie regardless.  The question of the day, of course, is will more people follow because of the change…or in spite of it?

I don’t know where to begin telling you how HORRIBLE an idea this is.

See, there was something I noticed long, long ago that I quickly developed into a law of horror movies.  Ouija Boards Are Always Bad News.

I thought it was strange that, pretty much every time one of them was used in a horror flick, it was only a matter of time before someone got haunted, possessed or just plain old dead outright. And upon further investigation, I discovered that  Ouija boards were roundly condemned by–and you’re going to want to brace yourself for this:

1. Virtually every Christian group (no real surprise there)

2. Most every type of pagan

3. The paranormal research community

Look, under normal circumstances, getting these three to agree on ANYTHING is tougher than getting the Mossad and PLO to double-date (thank you Bruce Bethke!), so when they all agree on something you’d best pay attention.

And now I hear that Platinum Dunes is developing a movie around these?

Yeah, great work guys…I loved your movie the first time I saw it.  Back in the early nineties. When it was called Witchboard.  It had a SEQUEL, you jackasses.

Ouija, however, will be coming to theaters sometime in 2010, or so the current word goes.

And I don’t mean A Terminator, either.  I mean the whole shooting match. Lock, stock, boxtop and rights.  You too can own the rights to a pretty successful franchise that usually costs plenty to exploit, though it usually makes its money back.

Interestingly, though, Joss Whedon actually made an offer for the Terminator rights, but it was significantly less than the current owners wanted:  a whopping ten grand.

He even had some pretty sweet ideas, including branching out into porn (cue that wa-wa pedal guitar!) and even doing a musical.  He thought twice about the musical, but I say it could work.  I’ve actually got part of the opening song already written and would be happy to contribute for the low, low cost of ten percent of the grosses.  You’re welcome, in advance.

But seriously, this is a move that might actually end well, assuming the right people get a hold of the rights.  I doubt they’ll get the twenty five million they want for them, though.

I’m aware that, chances are, after you read that headline above, you’re probably going to have a minor embolism.

Rest assured that you DID read that correctly, and by all accounts, someone, somewhere,  at Disney has greenlit a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

You may not, however, be aware that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was actually based on an old conspiracy theory proven terrifyingly accurate about how a coterie of companies came together to take down the Los Angeles streetcar system and replace it with a freeway, which is pretty much what happened in the original.

There are some rumors that say that we’ll have much the same thing in this one, with another conspiracy theory being targeted and analogized to fit into a ninety minute cartoon / live action hybrid film.  Naturally there’s no proof of this as the script hasn’t even been started on yet, but the concept remains, and in all honesty, I’m looking forward to it!

I loved that film when I was a kid, and have fond memories of going along with a group of childhood buddies to catch it.  It was downright amazing.  And I can only hope that a whole new generation of kids will have the same opportunity to laugh at a moron bunny that I did.

So okay, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that, assuming the Earth doesn’t crash into the sun or something first, that there will be a sequel to James Cameron’s upcoming blockbuster Avatar.

And in order to stage Avatar 2, there’s whispers afoot that it may actually go out past the planet of Pandora and into other targets.  Check out this advance quote:

“What would you think if I told you that should a sequel to AVATAR happen, it might not even take place on Pandora? It’s all up the air as of now. But remember I’m telling you this. Pandora is not the be all and end all of the Consortium.”

Well, you know, everyone said G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was going to be a monster hit too, but as of the weekend of October 18th, it STILL hasn’t made its shooting budget back yet that I can tell, despite having made nearly a hundred and fifty million bucks at the domestic box office.

I wonder if that won’t happen here too….

After hearing the various rumors flying around the Star Trek remake, which was still one of the all time greats as far as the Star Trek series specifically goes, and probably as science fiction in general goes, it was a surprise to catch up to this new chunklet of news.

Apparently, there’s talk that no less than William Shatner will be coming back to the second installment of the remade Star Trek.

J.J. Abrams himself is apparently looking at bringing Shatner on Board, saying that he “would love to work with him (Shatner)”, but the big problem was that “his character died on screen in one of his (Shatner’s) Trek films and we that we wanted to adhere to Trek canon”.  So let that be a lesson to you, kids…Shatner cares more about Shatner than he does established canon.

It’s pretty much shameful how Shatner’s been handling this pretty much since the inception of the Trek remake got started, so frankly, I’d sooner not see him back at all.  But if Abrams can work out a way, I’m willing to work with it.

And just when you think a  movie about the creation of Facebook is strange. News is just in that Julian Jarrold, director of Becoming Jane and the remake of Brideshead Revisited, is in talks to direct a film charting the rise of Paul Potts. And who is Paul Potts? No, it’s not about the leader of Cambodia’s communist movement (now THAT would be an interesting film). Paul was the rather shy young man who wowed the audience of Britain’s Got Talent with this video of him singing an operatic aria. The clip has raked in millions of hits since it hit Youtube in 2007. Since then Paul has gone on to release two albums and has sold them in the millions.

But do we really need to see the story of this in movie form? The majority of winners of these .. Got Talent or.. Idol TV shows seem to end up as one-hit wonders, quickly releasing a record to cash in on the immediate success, and then swifly fading away into cabaret hell. And besides Potts’s rise to fame and fortune, is there really enough dramatic material to warrant 90 minutes? And even if there was, it seems almost futile to portray such backstories when our TV’s and PCs are already inundated with video clips and gap-filling retrospective shows, bringing us through the tabloid headlines covering their lives (and it’s not like this story will be new to a US audience, as in 2008 America’s Got Talent found their own Potts in Neal Boyd). Or will we be surprised by a film of Beckettian wit, in which a man stands in a  mobile-phone store for hours waiting for something to happen? It seems unlikely that a film of Potts would be anything more than a dull biopic, detailing the major facts of his life,  offering little more than a sadly excessive 15 minutes of fame, and deservedly ending up as a Saturday afternoon TV movie.

Fresh details have recently emerged about the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, On Stranger Tides, and they’re actually pretty interesting.  In fact, it’s possible to glean an admittedly rather tenuous concept of the plot at this point, based on earlier reports and the current news.

They’ve optioned a book which is also called On Stranger Tides, but the book’s actually about a puppeteer that turns pirate, Jack Shandy by name, who’s out to stop evil pirates (is there really any other kind?) from taking over the Fountain of Youth.

Remember how, earlier, there was some talk that Johnny Depp might not be back for part five?  Well, what if this Shandy character ends up taking over?  They’d need Jack Sparrow to handle four, which is planned to be thus, but five could be handed over to Shandy without much trouble.  Would people follow Shandy?  That depends on how well he handles things in four.  But that’s a definite possibility–even if we’ll have to wait a while to see how it all comes off.

Well, folks, it was really only a matter of time, and I do mean the above sincerely, because we’re going to need all the help we can get to ensure that Resident Evil 4: Afterlife doesn’t suck sour frog ass.

We can take some small comfort in the reported knowledge that both Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter will be reprising their previous roles as psychic Alice and Claire Redfield, and we can take some further consolation in the knowledge that we’re still going to be in the post-apocalyptic desert on this one ensuring us the best possible chance at full-on dystopia.

However, this being the Resident Evil movie leaves every chance that it’s going to suck, especially considering the lousy time we had with the first two, when it was still crystalline clear that the video game really had nothing to do with the movie except to provide a name for the script.

We’ll get to see how this all comes out when it hits theaters next August.