Worst Robot Swordfight EVER!

We don't often steal from Attack of the Show, since they generally cover different stuff than we do ... but this time they uncovered this increasingly popular YouTube vid before we did, so ... kudos to them. But it is SO Rush-y: not just a sword fight, not just a robot swordfght, but possibly the worst robot sword fight ever filme, with dialoge that gives new meaning to the term "cheesy."  

Sit back and enjoy. Your robot sword fight perceptions will never be the same.

 

Snake Plissken Lives! (And Leave Him Alone!)

To put it simply: it's a bad idea. With a couple of notable exception -- the Kurtzman/Orci Star Trek and the Nolan Batmans -- reboots and remakes always seems to end badly. Consider Mission Impossible, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Halloween, Superman, Bewitched, Psycho, and on and on. And to steal a phrase from the military, when it comes to future projects, like the upcoming A-Team reboot ... confidence is not high.

But once in a while, once in a while you can see a glimmer of hope.  And if Claude Brodesser-Akner's article over at the New York Magazine web site is even half right, there seem to be a slim possibility that  the remake/reboot of John Carpenter's thriller / science fiction / post-apocalypse / action/adventure classic, Escape from New York will not totally suck.  As Claude reports:

"We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken "must be called 'Snake'"; "must wear an eye patch"; and that he would — and we're not making this up — "always be a 'bad-ass.'"; So, if you ever catch the new Snake watching Grey’s Anatomy or complaining that the senator isn't "emotionally available," just know that somewhere, some poor development exec is about to be carted off to jail."

You can read the details of the reboot here, and buy the original here. And hey, turn that anticipatory frown upside down, lovers of Snake Plisskin! It might turn out okay!

Credit Where Credit is Due Department: First word of the New York column came to us by way of columnist/blogger Sarah Weinman's terrific Twitterfeed and Blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.  Well worth bookmarking, following, feeding, and caring for.

 

The Best thing about Legion isn't in the movie at all ...

... it's Craig Ferguson's recent interview with Adrianne Palicki (pictured at left).  Probably best known for 50 episodes of Friday Night Lights (yawwwn .. sorry, did we drop off for a moment?) she is making a bit of a splash, don'tcha know, in the Rush neighborhood, first by playing the diner waitress who is unwittingly pregnant with the next messiah (jeez, how many times have we heard that one?), and next appearing in the remake of Red Dawn, coming this November (bigger!  Better!  This time it's the Russians and Chinese who parachute in and take over America! Much scarier!)  Turns out Adrianne is not only gorgeous, she's smart as a whip, too; she stands up to Craig's classic, "oooh, I rehlly don't cayah," Scottish 'tude  Brash, funny, uncensored -- a real dame, and we likes her.

And there are plenty of reasons:

• She was in John Woo's unsold pilot of the Lost in Space reboot (ahh, Penny!)
• She was in the also unsold Aquaman pilot
• She was Kara, that is Supergirl, on Smallville
•  She was in a Will.i.am music video
• She was Sam Winchester's immediately murdered girlfriend on the first episode of Supernatural

 Catch her interview here, preserved forever on YouTube.  Meanwhile, her own site isn't much more than a place-holder at the moment ... but we'll be watching for her.

Go, Wolverines!

Robert Downey Jr. Won't Be in Cowboys & Aliens ... and that's okay

Of course we love Robert Downey, Jr.  It's kind of required.  He is Tony Stark now, after all, as well as a goofy (and yes, we admit it, fun) alternate-universe Sherlock Holmes. But he doesn't have to be everybody, y'know?  So maybe it's not such a bad thing that Downey has announced that he's passing up the starring role in Jon Favreau's other big project (other than Iron Man 2, that is) -- the big, bad movie adaptation of Cowboys & Aliens. 

Some names are concepts in themselves, and some are just too good to pass up.  Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.  Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  And yes, Cowboys and Aliens.  (In fact, the relative provenance of this whole project is kind of interesting.  Let's see if we have this right: Cowboys & Aliens was actually created by Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg; Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley wrote it, and artists Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima illustrated, the original graphic novel of the same name in 2006. And there's no telling how close the screenplay sticks to that story.  This is clearly all about the High Concept, baby.)

In any event, it's bound to be good.  We hope.  It's certainly getting the first-class treatment: a screenplay from the out-and-out amazing team of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers, Xena, Fringe, and everything else even moderately cool in the decade gone by), along with Damon Lindelof, who wrote and co-produced a ton of Lost episodes, with the AA+ team of producers on top: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Stephen Spielberg and the aforementioned hot-as-a-repulsor-ray actor/director Jon Favreau.  In retrospect, Downey is almost superfluous -- this is already the gold standard, deal-wise  And Downey already has two major-league franchises to exploit; maybe it's time he gave somebody else a chance. Which makes it even more  appropriate that he's giving this up to do a (rumored, potential, blah blah blah) Sherlock Holmes sequel.

This all just happened, so any speculation about who will be replacing Downey as the cowboy-alien fighter Zeke Jackson (love that name!) is way-way premature. And now there are rumors the whole project will be filmed in 3-D, a pretty inevitable thought given the Avalanche of interest in the tech  (Get it?  It's kind of a pun.)  Either way, it's still scheduled to be one of the biggies for Summer 2011, so things had better start happening pretty quickly. We'll keep an eye out ... 

Riese: Gorgeous, Professional and ... Sssssslllloooowwwwwwww...

There are ten zillion web series out there now, and let's face it: most of them are pretty bad.  And the vast majority of them also fall into Rush territory: sf, fantasy, thrillers, mystery, suspense.  Which makes the
bad-osity that much harder to ignore.

The bad-osity isn't entirely because of the low to subzero production values.  In fact, a few -- like the classic, ever-clever The Guild and the lesser-known but pretty damn funny I am NOT Infected! take advantage of the "Hey, we're on the interwebs!" aspect or the non-existent budgets (though The Guild has gotten pretty fancy-schmancy in the last series) as parts of the story itself.  Others are totally obsessed wtih the capabilties of ridiculously inexpensive CGI or the specific sub-sub-subgenre they're part of or spoofing, and some are just plain obscure on purpose (does anybody understand Circle of 8?  Really?)

And then there's Riese, that falls somewhere in between.

Riese (and no, I don't know how to pronounce it. In the three episodes that have been released so far, no one had said it out loud) is a gorgeous wanderer, a mysterious warrior-woman in a damp and misty forest-world that looks slightly sword-and-sorceresque and a little post-apocalyptic. (The medical facilities, for instance, look much like a modern-day health center; the weaponry is pure Society for Creative Anachronism).  She's running from the oppressive religious government run by "The Sect," and they clearly want to get her, too. Oh, and she pals around with a big, beautiful wolf.  Yeah: a wolf.


Riese has production values as high as anything you'll see online, even stuff from the big boys like Paramount Digital and Joss Whedon.  And it's not quite as impossible to follow as some of its kin.  But the pacing?  Slooooowwwwww ... and after three episodes, each about 9 minues in length, we STILL don't know anyhing more a out the main chraacter, really, or the "Sect" that seems to control this mildewy medieval world.(It has that same damp deep-north-forest look that all Canadian series shot out-of-doors has; it owes more to Jeremiah than to Mad Max.

The costumes are great, the production design in general -- especially the matte painting -- is lovely.  But come ON, people, STEP IT UP SOME, willya?  A little less of the ominous and portentous, and a little bit more kickin' ass and telling us who's doing what to whom.  Not to mention how to pronounce "Riese" and why all the women are dressed like extras from that bad Flash Gordon remake froma couple years back.  And if y'all can learn the basic idea of the set-up and the pay-off, the teaser and the cliff-hanger ... well, these nine-minute episodes would seem a whole lot shorter, and we'd be much more inclined to continue.

In oh so many of these web series, you can tell in the first two minutes whether or not the show is worth your time.  Riese definitley is.  Probably.  Potentially.  But pretty soon now, it's going to have to be something other than just pretty to look at. It's going to have to do something, too.

New Model, Original Parts: 27 Movies, 2 Series and 1 Pilot Later...

It’s been eight long  years since the first giddy frames of The Fast and the Furious.  And now here we are, all back together again

Some movie are watersheds – films that bring fresh new faces to light, personalities that define the hext generation of actors.

It's been eight long  years since the first giddy frames of The Fast and the Furious.  And now here we are, all back together again

Some movie are watersheds -- films that bring fresh new faces to light, personalities that define the next generation of actors:The Breakfast Club, The Big Chill, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Godfather. And then there are movies like TFATF, where even the biggest of the stars who started there have never quite fulfilled their expectations.

Not that the four major players in this crash-and-burn classics haven't been working.  They've all made at least half a dozen movies in the last eight years, and they all have things planned for the future.  But world-shaking projects?  Realizations of their genius, first glimpsed in Too Fast?  Not ... so much.

The most visible of course, is Vin Diesel.  Vin had one cult hit before Too Fast, the Australian scifi-thriller Pitch Black, but since then?  Well ... a not-very-good sequel to PB, a couple of mold-breakers in A Man Apart and Find Me Guilty, neither of which made much money.  The howlingly bad The Pacifier, Vin's tribute to Schwarzengger's Kindergarten Cop, and the entirely forgettable Babylon A.D.  The only movie that came close to making any mark at all was xXx, made immediately after Too Fast, and even there it didn't quite catch: Diesel refused to make any sequels to what could have been a halfway-decent action franchise, which has now been driven into the ground by a truly awful sequel starring Ice Tea. 

(Vin does have one thing going for him, though: some of the coolest character names ever. Domnic Toretto.  Xander Cage. Shane Wolf.  And even two one-word names: Riddick and -- my personal favorite, from Babylon -- Toorop.  How true.)

Paul Walker hasn't even been that lucky.  Most of his movies disappeared immediately and without a trace: Timeline (2003), Noel (2004), Running Scared\ (2006) The Death and Life of Bobby Z (2007), and The Lazarus Project.(2008)  And even the couple of highly physical thriller/adventures, Into the Blue and Eight Below, couldn't catch a break.  Fast & Furious is actually the biggest picture he's had since ... well, since The Fast and the Furious.  (And he's only had one cool name, this one from Running Scared: Joey Gazelle.  Yahhh.) 8 movies

Jordana Brewster has made the fewest of the quartet, and the most forgettable.  You got your D.E.B.S. (2004), Nearing Grace (2005), and Annapolis (2006), and there are probably more people in your carpool than saw those films combined.  She did play Chrissi in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, but I dare you to remember which one Chrissi was.  And then Jordana made a break for TV, where she made a pilot for a series based on Mrs. And Mrs. Smith -- it didn't get picked up -- and did a four-episode turn on NBC's Chuck, as his college-girlfriend-turned-spy.  Charming as ever, just not ... very ... lucky.

Michelle Rodriguez has been the busiest, I think, doing a ton of video game voice work (as has Vin), and staying close to her action-adventure roots, in film and on TV.  She's actually got a couple of cult classics to her name, including the first Resident Evil (in which she dies, damn it) and the first Bloodrayne (in which she doesn't make the sequel, double dammit).  And though she was perfectly good in Blue Crush, Control, Bloodrayne, and The Breed, her last couple of choices -- Battle in Seattle and Gardens of the Night -- are essentially missing in action (so to speak).  She has, however, managed to stay visible by being one of the more treacherous (and mysterious) Tailies in Lost. And when she got shot?  Oh, we cried.

But here we are, back for one more round of fast drivin', hot-talking boys and babes screeching and skiddiin' all around the town.  We'll see.  We'd like to be positive, but the fact is the studio hasn't released any copies for review prior to the Friday, April 3rd debut ... and that is almost never a good sign.

Ready ... Set...