Movie Magic

Wasn’t that an exciting weekend in movies? 21 Jump Street lead the way with an incredible debut of $35 million, which is crazysauce for a comedy that doesn’t seem particularly funny. It really is the summer of Channing Tatum! John Carter, which debuted at #2 last week with $30 million, fell 55% to $13. 5 million in Week 2. At this rate, it will take approximately…infinity years for this movie to recoup its $250 million budget.

(For well over 15 minutes, I actually attempted to figure out the exact number of weeks it would have taken to make $250 million starting with $30 million in week one, with a 55% decrease every week…but I could not summon enough rudimentary calculus ability to even begin to form a possible equation describing the issue. …is it even a calculus question!?! I am a proud holder of an University of Toronto bachelor of science degree.)

This now marks two straight big budget sci-fi Disney films about longhaired dudes jumping around in the desert that didn’t really do as well as anticipated…although Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did sell pretty well internationally. Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that hypothetical Dune or Mad Max movie remakes won’t be financed by Disney any time soon.

Also, did you know there is already a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action movie scheduled for Christmas 2013? The name will be shortened to just Ninja Turtles for extra sleekness, produced by Michael Bay, and replace the whole radioactive waste origin story by instead featuring them as lovable aliens. God, I can’t wait.

Though to be fair, a big chunk of the late 80’s cartoon and comic were entirely in space. A lot of the supporting characters like the Triceratons or Wingnut and Screwloose were straight up aliens. Krang was from Dimension X, as was Lord Dregg who replaced him. Honestly, if you don’t know Cudley the Cowlick then maybe you are lacking the required nerd credibility required to properly complain about such things on the internet.

If I could kindly request the next childhood franchise for Hollywood to exhume and corpsefuck to be either The Bots Master or Street Sharks, that would be most appreciated. Both lend themselves pretty easily to some Michael Bay or Battleship type production…I actually would seriously be interested in watching both of these hypothetical adaptations. The potential for political incorrectness would be off the charts. Imagine how entertaining it would be to have a varied ethnic voice cast of just completely over the top accents (already kind of in place, I mean it was the early 90’s still) – Ninjzz gets the “ah so sowee!” treatment, Cook becomes crazy Italian, and the Sport Boyzz are ripe for stereotyping. Like a fiery Latino baseball robot, an “urban” basketball bot (think Jazz or the Twins from the Transformers movies), and maybe combine the tennis/golf bots into one with a voice like Dave Chappelle’s white person impersonation. And if you spin the teenage human/mutant shark principles of Street Sharks into adoptive brothers instead of actual brothers, it works just as well there!

– As advertised by the previous trailer for the trailer for Prometheus, the highly anticipated trailer for Prometheus has just come out, and it is full of Inception-type BRRRMMMs and other types of cool wacky stuff like black people in space and those cool Mr. Terrific orbs, including a quick clip of what can only be the Space Jockey from Alien to remind us all yet again that this is still NOT a prequel of Alien and it really has nothing to do with those movies so stop fixating on all these baseless comparisons. Man, this movie looks good, but goddamn are anthropologists in sci-fi movies the worst or what?

– Here’s a neat tidbit to drop at your next cocktail party or miscellaneous social event that you’ll need to make inane conversation at…turns out free apps eat up your phone battery just sending ads – a disproportionate amount of battery is used just in downloading ads and tracking/uploading user data. Isn’t that interesting? Perhaps put forth this neat discovery as your own hypothesis! Then everyone will be very impressed by your insight. You’ll be the smartest person there!

– I don’t remember how I stumbled onto this clip of Kyle Eschen performing his comedic deadpan magic show (or his magical deadpan comedy routine) but I enjoyed it, and I feel like maybe you would as well. This guy is a serial killer now…probably.

“Now Andre, do you see yourself more as like a rapist who does magic or a magician who also likes to rape?”
“Well with me, magic always comes first.”