Screenhead

I love that line.  Really I do.  Because in it is the entirety of the movie Zombieland, opening in theaters today.

Zombieland brings us back with Jesse Eisenberg, the Michael Cera knockoff whom you may remember macking on a surprisingly able Kristen Stewart back in another movie about land, Adventureland.  Anyway, this time, naturally we’re in Zombieland, a world vaguely like our own but jammed to the hilt with zombies.  Those few human beings who are left find themselves forced to make deadly choices every day for the sake of survival, but yet, even here, they still manage to have dreams.  Simple dreams, for the most part. Thoroughly American dreams.  But will they capture those dreams?  Or will they be zombie chow?

After I finished watching this one, which I had been longing to see ever since I saw the trailer, one thought hit me like a bolt out of the blue.  This is just the Americanized version of Shaun of the Dead.  Zombieland was another hilarious zombie comedy, the only real difference here being that the thoroughly British qualities of Shaun of the Dead had been replaced by thoroughly American qualities.

Sure, everyone’s got a gun in Zombieland, but they’ll also feel that British influence (after all, Great Britain really IS the mother of America if you want to get metaphorical about it) by striking out with whatever’s handy.  Rakes, hedge clippers,  the Garden Weasel (the weirdest garden tool ever), even pianos on ropes–we’ll take out zombies with whatever we can get our hands on.

Yes, Zombieland is hilarious.  Woody Harrelson is much more talented than anyone gives him credit for (he actually WAS an action hero of sorts at one point), Jesse Eisenberg makes a great foil for Woody’s over-the-top lunacy, and the fact that Bill Murray is in this just made my jaw drop.

But Zombieland will actually make you think, too.  Think about the common dreams we all share.  Oh, sure…in Zombieland, the goals of the day are amusement parks, family and Twinkies, but is that really so far removed from baseball, mom and apple pie?  And in the end, when faced with those horrible choices, and left to, as the movie so dynamically puts it, “nut up or shut up”, you’ll find that more often than not, you’ll be better equipped to nut up than you thought.

There’s so much to like about Zombieland–hilarity, personal growth, violence, zombies, Bill Murray–that the list alone is reason enough to see this.  Zombieland is an incredible movie, and as such, I can’t believe what I’m about to do.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shares my horror and wonders if I’m going soft as I pound its override button like a test-your-strength mallet into a clown’s face and award Zombieland a full-on ten out of ten.  This is just too funny and too action-packed and even too scary not to see.

First off, yes, Kristen Stewart DOES in fact have an action figure, based on her character Bella from the truly godawful Twilight series that everyone seems to love despite all logic and good common sense.

But anyway, she’s not terribly happy with that action figure, and you won’t believe why.

It turns out it has…ahem…larger attributes than she does.  I’ll let her be more specific:

“I think she has a much bigger rack than I have,” Kristen said. “I also think she looks much older than me.  I guess I can live with that. In fact, I’m getting used to the bigger rack.”

There are a great many things that could be said at this point but most of them would likely get me sued by somebody for some reason or another.  I’ll just suffice it to say that Hollywood’s weirdness truly knows no bounds.

Twilight fans may find these two interviews lacking a bit of substance with a few words. The behind the scene footage isn’t much either, but you get a feel for how fast Kristen and Taylor can run.

The story New Moon picks up where Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is troubled by the unexpected departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).  As most relationships happen with mystical creatures, she lightens up as her friendship with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) starts to burn strong.  Before she can pull back and realize where her true loyalty belongs, she is in the world of the werewolves, ancestral enemies of the vampires.

How bad do things in Hollywood have to get before actors come out of the woodwork trying to be the next Michael Cena?  Well, if you ever wanted to know just HOW bad it had to get to get to that point, just ask Jesse Eisenberg, coming off his disastrous performance in Adventureland, the crappiest attempt at a comedy movie on Earth!  Well, this week, anyway.

In Adventureland, Jesse Eisenberg stars as James Brennan, a young man who’s just graduated from college, ready for his future with a degree in…comparative literature?…well, I guess that qualifies him for plenty of jobs.  Jobs like…waiter.  Oh wait, he couldn’t get that job.  Perhaps he can drive an asphalt mixer!  Nope…not that either.  In fact, there are a LOT of jobs that James can’t get, which he finds much to his dismay as he gets the news that his father’s been demoted, and thus the gravy train he was accustomed to has suddenly been derailed.  Thus, there’s no dream trip to Europe for James.  And no apartment rent help…and even his dreams of graduate school seem to be much in doubt.  Thus, James goes job hunting, and ends up in the one place where they’ll employ pretty much anyone with a pulse—Adventureland.

From there, James becomes embroiled in steamy coworker romances (it’s unimaginable to me how this total dork, who admits to reading poetry for entertainment, manages to land so many hot chicks throughout the course of the film), gets threatened at knifepoint for large stuffed animals, discovers that small time amusement parks cheat like no tomorrow when it comes to their ridiculous games, and of course, discovers that you too can become highly popular if you have several dozen joints available to pass out like lollipops at semi-random intervals.

Come to think of it, maybe THAT’S how he landed all the hot chicks.

But anyway—it’s hard to harsh on Adventureland too much.  Despite the fact that this thing sucks harder than certain astronomical phenomena (black holes!), it tries to be a good movie.  It really does; it’s as earnest and eager to please as its main character.  And it’s hard to hate a movie that really, REALLY wants you to like it.  And there are times when Adventureland pushes at the fabric separating good movies from bad.  You can tell, at some points, it’s really stretching the surface tension of that terminator between good and bad…until it just can’t keep up the effort and does something stupid or awkward to shut down its own progress.  It’s really rather sad.

Plus, I’ve got to throw a nod to always-competent Ryan Reynolds, and surprisingly-competent Kristen Stewart.  After the misery tour that was Twilight, I’d thought that she was a complete writeoff, but no…no, she actually managed to turn in a solid performance.

At least until the less-than-conclusive ending; if you actually subject yourself to it, chances are you will end up as disappointed as I was.

Despite Adventureland’s best efforts, it can’t manage to pull itself off the kiddie coaster and become a full-fledged high-flier.  It’s hard to hate a movie that wants so desperately to be good, but hate it I do, nonetheless.

You may well have been waiting for the review on this one with baited breath.

Yes, that’s right…today, just for you, my dear readers, I have descended into the valley of the shadow of suck and I have emerged on the other side, stronger for my trials but at the same time weak and weary from the road.  It took me just two hours to walk down that misery trail…but it felt like five.  Maybe even five and a half.

That’s right, I watched Twilight, and it was indeed as bad a movie as I had feared it would be.

The plot is fairly simple, and not too bad in and of itself–in Twilight’s world, vampires exist, but they’ve been heavily modified for the clear consumption of twelve year old girls.  Their condition is spread via the transmission of venom, they move with alarming speed that ALMOST but not quite looks like teleporting, they have superhuman strength, and they drink blood.  Any blood will do, surprisingly, but human is best.  Oh, and forget about the whole “sunlight and crosses” thing–sunlight just makes them sparkly (no, I’m NOT kidding) and crosses don’t seem to have any effect at all.  I seem to recall them walking past a couple without incident.  The only way you can actually KILL one of these things is to, according to the film itself “tear (them) apart and burn the pieces”.  So of course, a transplant teenager from a recently broken home named Bella is going to move within a few miles of one of these sparkly vampires, and naturally, they fall in love.

If you too can taste bile at this point rest assured you are not alone.  Twilight is easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through.  This isn’t hyperbole, either.  This is sheer truth.  This movie HURT to watch it.  It caused me physical pain, mostly in my stomach but a bit in my head.

First, the acting is a solid lump of huge embarrassing failure.  Kristen Stewart should not be allowed within thirty feet of a camera ever again and Robert Pattinson’s every word makes me cringe.  It doesn’t help that they’re given some of the most overblown lines on the face of the earth, either–if Edward Cullen whined one more time about what a monster he is I was going to shoot him myself just to put him out of MY misery.  Let alone his–this guy is one of the biggest emo jerks I’ve ever seen.  What made the whole thing even harder to swallow was how it whipsawed so frantically between different KINDS of suck.  First it’s overblown, then it’s angsty.  Then it’s just boring and they spend twenty minutes talking about stuff.  It takes fully twenty minutes for the first interesting thing to happen in the movie, and frankly, it’s not that interesting.  Then they’ll spend roughly ten minutes TALKING about the interesting thing that happened!  And just when I think that’s over, suddenly my pretention meter starts pegging because Bella’s talking to her friends about what “strong, independent women” they are.

Perhaps the worst thing about Twilight is the fact that it is only the first in as many as six movies.  The misery has only just begun, folks…it’s only just begun.

And I’m not looking forward to anything else that comes out of this franchise.  This is as godawful as movies get, and I’m not eager to see how they tear open the floorboards and start digging now that they’ve found the bottom of the barrel.

Dakota Fanning is growing up. She is in talks to play lead singer Cheri Currie in The Runaways, the biopic of the ’70s all-girl band that will also star Kristen Stewart (Twilight) playing Joan Jett.

Scripted and directed by Floria Sigismondi, the film starts production in late spring.

Dakota is 15, the same age Currie was when she made her debut with the Runaways as the lead singer who belted out hard-edged tunes like “Cherry Bomb.” Currie became caught up in drugs and a hard-partying lifestyle.

I dated a guy who loved Joan Jett (photo.) So, when I read Twilight star Kristen Stewart will play her in The Runaways, the rock ‘n’ roll biopic of the 1970s all-girl band, I didn’t realize Jett was that popular to have a biopic.

As I continued to read in the Hollywood reporter article, I found out that The Runaways were hugely influential as the first successful all-girl hard rock band; its members included guitarists Jett and Lita Ford, drummer Sandy West, singer-keyboardist Cherie Currie and bassist Jackie Fox. The band was brought together in late 1975 by impresario Kim Fowley, who thought a novelty act of teenage girls performing in leather and lace would be an easy sell, but the girls ended up proving to be serious and influential musicians with songs like “Cherry Bomb.” The band lasted about four years together, falling apart over management and money issues.

However, Jett sustained her rock career into the ’80s, forming the Blackhearts and producing hits like “I Love Rock N’ Roll” and “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” Today she even continues to record and tour.

The film storyline revolves around Jett and Currie as we follow them from the band’s meteoric rise as teenagers to their dissolution and disillusionment.

The production is hoping for a 2009 start date with the contingency around Stewart’s commitments to the two Twilight sequels.

We all know how chick-flick Twilight fared at the box office, which essentially guaranteed a gazillion sequels. But you would think they’d have the decency of not spending so much more money on the sequel? Well, no, in fact they are increasing the budget from the first movie’s $37 million to quite a lot more.

First victims of the increased budget are Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart – two unknowns – who are set to net a cool $12 million from New Moon, the upcoming sequel; they earned a meager $2 million in the original by comparison.

New Moon continues the story from the original, moving to various locales including Alaska and Italy; it also introduces werewolves into the franchise.

“Twilight” is the best-selling young-adult book and is sure to be a big screen box office winner in December. I mean, just take a look at Robert Pattisnon, — he’s a real looker — who plays the vampire, Edward. He played the doomed Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Hundreds of teens camped overnight outside the San Diego Convention Center for a chance to see early footage of the Twilight and look over the cast of heartthrobs who will bring the teen-vampire tale to life.

Kristen Stewart also stars with Pattinson. She plays the story’s heroine, Bella Swan.