Cinematical

Back in August was when G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra hit the screens, and while I had no reason to expect anything but a merciless brain-pummeling from the experience, I walked out suitably impressed with the flick's popcorn-tastic mentality. I even ended my review with this: "Truth be told, the flick's action centerpiece, a crazy chase through Paris, will soon be on heavy blu-ray rotation around my house." Yes, the director who slapped me with The Mummy Returns and pummeled me with Van Helsing is now back in my good graces. (The awesomely amusing Deep Rising is always the tie-breaker for Stephen Sommers.)

You can enjoy my wonderfully insightful G.I. Joe review right here if you like, but this time out I just want to focus on the blu-ness and not the wackness: If you liked the flick, you want to own it on Blu-ray, trust me on that one. The supplemental features are basic but well-produced: there's an audio commentary with Sommers and producer Bob Ducsay that shows a good deal of enthusiasm and preparation on their part, plus on disc 2 you'll find a pair of rather slick and thorough featurettes: the 30-minute The Big Bang Theory is the "catch-all" behind-the-scenes piece that covers a lot of bases, and Next-Gen Action (about 20 minutes) focuses more intently on the special effects and production design.

Let's say you're watching a horror film in which six or eight people get skewered in relatively explicit fashion. By all accounts, that film should be Rated R: Adults only, unless a parent decides different. That's an example of how a ratings board does good work: They see that a flick called "Saw" has "graphic, extreme violence" and they decide that their 12-year-old can live without that sort of stuff for a few more years. And obviously the same holds true for rampant profanity, nudity, sexual situations, or drug abuse. Some stuff simply isn't meant for kids, period.

So obviously I have no problem with a "ratings board," in theory, but in practice? Sheesh. The one we currently have (the MPAA) is so broken, so twisted, and so confused that I'd like to call for a complete do-over. Fire the whole staff, raze the whole damn building if you have to, and start over from scratch. Because I say the MPAA is either A) monumentally clueless, B) stunningly corrupt, or C) a combination of both. Hell, this is a group that created an "adults only" rating, and then did all it could to make it into the new "porno" label. I can hear your eye-rollings already, and I can't really blame you: Serious film fans have been complaining about the MPAA's blatant hypocrisy for years now, and if you thought that Kirby Dick's ballsy documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated was going to usher in a new era for the MPAA ... sorry to say you were dead wrong.

This year's Oscar ceremony will mark the first time we're looking at ten (count 'em, TEN!) different Best Picture nominees -- and while I firmly believe this is a bad move, it also stands as a case of terrible timing. We're still feeling the "quality pinch" that arose with the arrival of the most recent WGA strike, which means ... heck, 2009 might have had a tough time doling out FIVE legitimate Best Pic noms, let alone double that amount.

But ten it shall be, and now that we're only a few weeks away from the beginning of the Awards Bait movie season, I thought it would be fun to play a simple guessing game. More specifically, which films do you think will be nominated for Best Picture? True, there are still several films that none of us have seen yet, but you don't need a crystal ball to assume that a few December titles will earn a nomination. (Come to think of it, this particular December looks remarkably skimpy on Oscar Bait.)

Based only on the "industry buzz," I'm confident in assuming that Best Picture nominations will go to films like The Road, A Serious Man, Nine, Up in the Air, and The Lovely Bones ... but where do we look after those ones? The Hurt Locker? Precious? Invictus? Moon? (I wish.) Feel free to chime in with your predictions below, and feel free to check out this Film.com piece that asks the same questions.

So there I was on the Twitter, conversing with a few friends and rambling aimlessly about some movie minutiae that was hopping through my head. One of those Tweets was this one, and it prompted an immediate response from several Twitter pals ... and Erik Davis. He insisted that my admiration for character actor William Atherton would make for an appropriate edition of "Villains We Love," and here's why: Mr. Atherton is at his best when he's playing a smug, smarmy, officious authority figure who exists mainly to give a movie's hero something fun to play off of.

Case in point: Val Kimer vs. William Atherton in Real Genius. Bill Murray vs. William Atherton in Ghostbusters. Bruce Willis (and Bonnie Bedelia) vs. William Atherton in Die Hard and Die Hard 2. Pauly Shore vs. William Atherton in Bio-Dome. Certainly no one-trick pony (you also know this actor from The Sugarland Express, The Day of the Locust, and The Last Samurai), but the man's just great at playing a snooty villainous bastard. For those who require some evidence, I refer you to the post-jump territory.

More on Atherton: To find out which giant TV show he'll be guest starring on during its final season, head over to SciFi Squad.

So here's some "less is more" comic book flick news* that may make you feel a little better about Spider-Man 4: Apparently A) there will be only one villain, which would be great, and B) that villain will (finally!) be Curt Connors aka The Lizard. And here's the best part: We don't have to wait for some gimmicky casting ploy, because the franchise already has the excellent Dylan Baker playing the role! Yes, Peter Parker's one-armed college professor will, after waiting patiently through three villain-packed films, get to shed his humanity and terrorize our favorite web-slinger with cold-blooded reptility. (Reptileness?)

Both MarketSaw and Collider have more information, but of course details are very sketchy at this early point. If these early reports are true, I offer a back-pat to Sam Raimi and his writing / producing team for trying to scale the next sequel back a bit, instead of trying to wedge six baddies into the flick just to sell a few extra Happy Meals. It's safe to assume that Mr. Raimi considers Spider-Man 3 the weakest of the series, and if the new goal is to simply deliver an old-school mano e mano face-off between a man-spider and a man-lizard, well I'm just fine with that.

Odds are you'll see more Spider-Man 4 news at this very website as it becomes available.

*MarketSaw.com seems pretty confident that their source is accurate on this information, but of course we should take it all with a grain of salt until we get word from someone on the production team, and on the record.

Now how's this for a cool premise? "U.S. states secede from the U.S. and form their own governments that wage a civil war against each other after Washington, D.C., is wiped out in a nuclear blast and chaos ravages the nation." Sounds like it could make for a fairly novel action flick, eh? Well, as Variety informs us, that's the exact plot of a 2005 video game called Shattered Union. (Just because I've never heard of it doesn't mean it's not good. If you've played this one, leave us a mini-review in the comments section.)

The tale of a dystopian American Civil War Part II will come from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (don't act surprised), who in turn will entrust the adaptation to one J. Michael Straczynski. Serious genre fans know this gentleman as the co-creator of Babylon 5. He's written tons of TV, in addition to Eastwood's Changeling, plus he's got a metric ton of massive projects on the way, World War Z and Silver Surfer among them. The studio will be Disney, so don't expect a hardcore carnage-fest. I'm generally a fan of the Bruckheimer / Disney action conflagrations, and this one sure sounds like something I'd dig. Now hire Peter Berg to direct it.

I'll give you a few details and some material from the press release right here ... but I've made an executive decision to place the brand-new poster for Frankie Latina's Modus Operandi beneath the jump -- but only because it's slightly "adult" in nature. Anyway, this flick sounds like a weird one, and of course I mean that in the nicest way possible.

Described by the Las Vegas Weekly as "a James Bond film directed by Ed Wood," the 8mm Modus Operandi is about ... heck, I'll let the press notes tell you: "Two briefcases with mysterious contents are stolen from top Presidential candidate Squire Parks, setting off a deadly series of double-crosses and betrayals. Desperate warring factions of subterranean organizations will stop at nothing to gain possession of the sensitive material. A covert branch of the CIA calls on notorious black ops agent Stanley Cashay, who has been barely existing in a semi-comatose twilight since the murder of his wife. Cashay is offered the identity of his wife's killer in exchange for locating and returning the cases." And it gets even crazier after that! (More post-jump.)

What has me intrigued is the responses from folks like Eric Kohn at IndieWire ("A mondo B-movie that holds nothing back ... Modus Operandi is a movie utterly content with its own insanity.") and Stephen Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter ("It bursts with campiness and odes to '70s movie outrageousness.") Sounds right up my alley.

Check post-jump for the poster premiere and more of that rather amusing plot synopsis...

If I told you the next Dark Castle horror-thriller flick would star January Jones and Diane Kruger, you'd probably be interested. If I told you that the most recent Dark Castle horror flicks were Whiteout, Orphan, and Return to House on Haunted Hill ... you'd probably be a little less interested. But with the presence of two stunning blondes (and a half-decent concept), Dark Castle's Unknown White Male is starting to sound a little intriguing.

According to Variety, Ms. Jones and Ms. Kruger will join the very busy (and very lucky) Liam Neeson in Unknown White Male, which "centers on a man who awakens from a coma to find that someone else has assumed his identity, and no one, including his wife, believes him." The director is Jaume Collet-Serra, whom the horror freaks may remember from (Dark Castle) flicks like Orphan and House of Wax. The stunning Diane Kruger is best-known for her work in Troy, Inglourious Basterds, and both National Treasure movies, while January Jones (even the name is sexy!) has been seen in We Are Marshall, American Wedding, and the upcoming Pirate Radio. She's also a big hit on that Mad Men series.

Variety doesn't make mention one way or another, but I do believe this film is a feature (loosely) based on this documentary of the same name. And that's a damn good documentary.

Long before it became every studio's fondest wish to remake just about every horror flick ever produced ... it was the 1980s. And back in my day, sonny, we got GOOD horror remakes, ones that used the original films as mere jumping-off points for something darker and more creative! I'm talking Carpenter's The Thing, Cronenberg's The Fly, and ... Chuck Russell's The Blob?

Absolutely. But while those other remakes I just mentioned really did try something new with an old story, the 1988 version of The Blob is basically ... just a remake. Same story, essentially the same characters, etc., but there was a big upgrade in the monster department. In other words, the '80s version of The Blob had some real attitude. He'd suck you down a drain if you weren't careful! So since it's Friday (and October), go grab some headphones, lock your office door, and kick back with Chuck Russell's very amusing remake of The Blob right here at AOL SlashControl.

[Geeky note: This remake was co-written by Frank Darabont, who also worked on The Fly 2 and Freddy 3 before graduating to The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist.]

Just a few days ago my good friend Peter Martin asserted that we should prohibit cell phone usage within movie theater auditoriums. I'd like to take that idea one step further: Let's also eliminate all cell phones from horror films. Why? Because, as the following video clearly (and amusingly) indicates, a cell phone in a horror film is about as useful as a condom in a vasectomy clinic.

Pity the poor screenwriter who must "isolate" his horror film characters for story purposes. And check out how lazy most of 'em are when it comes to taking cell phones out of the equation. ("Ugh, no bars! No signal!") Also, you ever notice how cell phones never work properly in horror movies -- except when it's a horror movie about haunted cell phones? Then you get all the damn signal you want, right? Check out the evidence at Horror Squad!

(Thanks to @flickchart for the heads-up on the video.)