The 2011 Oscars are on in a couple hours. I know it’s supposed to be cool for movie fans to say they don’t care about the Oscars because it’s all meaningless and etc., but FREDDY VS. JASON was meaningless too and I still wanted to see who would win. Of course that one was ambiguous, I say Freddy won because of the wink but Jason got to do that cool strut holding the severed head. So I’m calling a best director/best picture split tonight.
I mean there’s nothing wrong with it. We all understand the inherent flaws of an award show, but you can still enjoy them, just like you enjoy seeing everybody’s stupid lists of the top 10 of the year or all time best explosions or whatever so you can get mad at what they left off or agree with some unexpected choices they made or whatever. It’s part of being too into movies, don’t get all uppity about it.
This year I was kinda feeling like I didn’t have a bird in this cockfight, because I didn’t even think I had a favorite theatrically released movie this year, but then I remembered that I did and I just didn’t want to admit it because it was about ballet.
I crammed and watched WINTER’S BONE and 127’S HOURS this weekend, so I’d seen 9 of the 10 best picture nominees. I knew it was gonna be a bummer to watch the only one I hadn’t seen be the winner so I went and saw KING’S SPEECH too. (read the rest of this shit…)
It has been brought to my attention that a 
, but I think that one’s hard to find now. There’s another one that’s supposed to be good called 
. I enjoy these posters because of their crude look and occasional extreme disregard for movie accuracy. Also I like when they obviously didn’t have much reference material, so they’ll put Arnold Schwarzenegger in his RAW DEAL undershirt for T2 or something. 
MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT is part 1 of a 2 part French true-ish crime saga about Jacques Mesrine, international terror, mustachioed robber of banks and casinos, killer of forest rangers, escaper of prisons, etc. One of these lovable maniacs who make the world worse and the movies better. This review is just of the first part. Both parts have been available as an import for a while but I waited for the official American release, so I gotta wait another month for part 2.
After 
I don’t know how I missed this one, because it’s a good one. 
Everybody knows Isaac Hayes’s music for SHAFT, but he also scored TRUCK TURNER. And while he was at it he decided to also star as Truck Turner. Why not? I guess at one point it was gonna be Robert Mitchum, which would’ve made for a really weird blaxploitation movie.
Did you know that Prachya Pinkaew, the director of ONG BAK and 
Okay, I remember this being a thing when Sam Raimi made his first Spider-man picture (we’ll call it SPIDER-MAN A), but I kinda forgot about it. Now there is some hubbub now that the other guy is doing the other Spider-man picture (SPIDER-MAN B). See, in SPIDER-MAN A the guy had what the nerd community refers to as “organic web-shooters,” which means that he has the power of a Spider-man and can shoot spider-webs from his wrists although he is the size and shape of a man and does not suck the blood of flies or any crazy spider shit like that. In SPIDER-MAN B he has non-organical type web-shooters, meaning he’s just a regular non-webshooting individual who owns little web-shooting machines that he invented, on account of he is a huge nerd. This is considered a victory for all Americans because apparently this is how it was done in the comic strip books. 
After the one-two Avid fart punch of 
Lately alot of us have been noticing the decrease in high quality action movies on the big screen and the increase of them in the direct-to-DVD world. Some of us are starting to suspect that there’s been a switcheroo, that the DTV format – once designated as a 100% crap zone – has become the more reliable place to find good action movies. At least for English language movies it seems like most of the best ones (the UNDISPUTEDs, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER REGENERATION, BLOOD AND BONE) go straight to video, and anything on the big screen, even the ones I end up enjoying (THE EXPENDABLES, THE MECHANIC, NINJA ASSASSIN) you can pretty much 100% assume is gonna be compromised by some blurry, muddy, sloppy, close-up, confusing, de-thrillified action scenes.
