Hey, look! It's Anthony Heald, star of the film 8MM! And he's alone in an attic, praising what's clearly a photo of Sir Edmond Halley (1656-1742).
Yikes, they didn't try to make that thing look like a painting at all, did they? Anthony is excitedly awaiting the return of Halley's comet, which he plans to watch through an elaborate telescope.
There's just one thing standing in his way:
His monstrously shrewish wife! Yes, she's actually wearing curlers and a hairnet, and eating chocolates - just in case you didn't know what role she was supposed to be serving. She announces that the local bankers' association is having a meeting that night, and Anthony's supposed to be there! After all, his father-in-law owns the biggest bank in town, and Anthony isn't making a very good go at being a banking executive! Shrew thinks it's because he's so obsessed with astronomy, and she's going to fix that problem by destroying the telescope with a tiny hammer!
Because I think Being Human may have leapt over it.
Over the course of the third season, the king of London's vampires has been stuck in the main characters' attic, left in a daze, not able to remember who he was. There was a general agreement that he deserved to die, but between Mitchell needing to know the secret of vampire resurrection and Nina's unflagging belief in second chances, he was left alive.
While searching for reference to something on Reddit, I happened across an article with an interesting title: Jason Aaron's "The year I stopped caring about Alan Moore". If you don't feel like reading it, I'll offer a synopsis: Alan Moore hurt Jason Aaron's feelings, so Jason Aaron wants to lash out at Alan Moore in response.
The thorn in Aaron's side is an interview where Alan Moore discussed DC's brainstorming about the possibility of publishing prequels and sequels to Watchmen. According to Moore he was so unimpressed by the concept that he wouldn't even consider it, despite the remuneration possibly including getting the rights to Watchmen returned to him. His main objection, the part that so irked Jason Aaron? His assertion that there were no writers (and possibly artists) working in comics today with the talent necessary to write anything as good as Watchmen. His offer of proof? To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin, if they were talented enough to write something as good as Watchmen, they would have written something as good as Watchmen.
This is what so offended Jason Aaron. Alan Moore announcing that all of mainstream comics is made up of no-talent hacks who aren't fit to shine his shoes. Harsh and overstated - sure. Justified by the facts in evidence? I would say yes. This is the part where I stop explaining the situation, and begin angrily editorializing, so let me just crack my knuckles...
A woman, arriving home with groceries, is yelling at someone over the phone, while also talking to her husband in the next room. When the husband doesn't answer, she looks more closely and notices strange flashes coming from the room. The woman goes to investigate, and is knocked to the ground!
Awaking in a daze, she sees a murderer in a plastic outfit (careful fella, huh?) sawing off her dead husband's hands! Which, you know, ick. The guy was dead at the time, though, shot behind the ear, which marks this as the work of a professional murderer, rather than just the amateur hobbyists that generally show up on this program. Although I'm not sure why a professional murderer is mutilating a corpse and taking photos. That's a little odd... then again, the Iceman was a scumbag, as was the ficitonalized version of him depicted on the show!
Back at the FBI, Greg is watching video of his son playing in a yard. This, sadly, is as close as he's allowed to get to them. And D.B. Sweeny is back, assuring Greg that his family is still safe, even though Greg's Wife called her mother a few times! Oh, D.B. Sweeny, you're going to be soooo dead when that serial killer comes looking for Greg's family.
Joe visits Greg in his office - the new case is in his hometown, and he doesn't want to go! It seems Joe comes from circumstances, it seems, and he has no interest in giving his past a chance to come back and bite him. Greg thinks the case is going to require his insight, although we're not immediately told why. In the briefing scene, we discover that the wife from the opening is missing, and that the 'signature' of people being shot in the brain and heart with a .22 matches a couple of other murders from the area in the past year. Then Emily drops what might be the stupidest line I've ever heard come out of her mouth-
This is why there's an award for stupidity named after you, Emily. Wait, what's that, Reid wants to compete this week?
Christ, Reid, the word is 'restrained'. What is wrong with you people? Is the show just making fun of me at this point? I can't imagine that this is a CSI: Miami situation, where everybody but the actors know they're making a comedy - are they deliberately testing the actors by getting them to say the stupidest possible things and seeing if anyone calls them on it?
One of the victims was starved before murder, another had his genitals removed, and the third - which we just saw, had his hands taken. The team is puzzled because while this seems like the work of a sadistic killer, the mutilations were done post-mortem, so it couldn't have been about torture! What does all this mean?
Well, Reid won't be able to help - because of his injured knee, he's not free to travel! It seems last week he lied about being healthy enough to fly!
The show then does a zoom-in to the crime scene photo, and for a second I thought they were going to do that thing where they push into a picture and cut to the team being there - but while that was a super-popular device for the first few years, it's been almost completely phased out of the show at this point. Now they just zoom in to the crime scene photos that were taken by the killer, being looked at by a mysterious figure!
Is that the killer, or the man who hired him? All we know at this point is that he wears glasses!
Oh, and that he has a murder list. You know, if this show follows its standard format, we just saw Ben killed, Dan's next, and then they'll rescue Boyd at the last possible second!
Is this show that formulaic? Let's find out after the opening credits!
I understand, based on your high production values, direct storytelling technique, and the overly Snyderized presentation of your action sequences, that you would like me to take you seriously. If that is, in fact, the case, I would encourage you to, in the future, not ever again feature a sequence in which a character (in this example, Kano), is thrown by an explosion-
Into a wall of empty cardboard boxes-
Which effectively break his fall-
When you're attempting to make something that is meant to be taken seriously, it's important to ask yourself “What would I have to do to create a parody of the scene I'm shooting?” If the answer is “Nothing!” then you might want to cut the offending shot from your movie.
Can you believe D hasn't ever seen Tango and Cash? Crazy, right? Join us in remedying that tragedy by watching the movie with us! Just right-click here to download, load up your DVD of the movie - I personally got one in a Sylvester Stallone 4-pack that included such amazing features as the Specialist and over the Top!
The story begins, as stories about haunted rooms must, with a little boy carefully checking in his closets and under his bed for monsters. There's one twist, though, which we learn about in a flashback.
This little boy is played by some manner of popular television actor Seth Green!
A sensitive, intelligent lad, he's pushed around by his macho stepfather, the kind of lout who'd try to get Seth to play football by tossing one at his back while he's examining a bug in a jar! The icing on the jerk cake? The stepfather's name is 'Biff'!
When it's time for Seth to go to bed, he has an authentic-seeming ritual where he leaves the hallway door open while checking the room for beasts. It's a nice touch, and a good representation of how a child's mind works - imagining that as long as he has an escape route planned out, it won't be so bad if he actually does find a monster in the closet. Seth then kneels down to pray (wow, remember when that used to happen in fiction? Children praying before bed?) and hears his mother and stepfather fighting in the next room. As always, it's about him, and how the stepfather plans to turn him into a 'man' by playing football and the like. The horror!
With Criminal Minds Suspect Behavior now little more than a bad memory, I thought it was as good a time as any to offer a brand new picto-quiz! As you may now (since I've mentioned it enough), Suspect Behavior was shown so far out of production order that the pilot was aired as episode 5, and dialogue had to be awkwardly looped so as to cover the fact that everyone was meeting Janeane Garofolo for the first time. The only thing we can say for sure about the order things were shot in was that 105 was first and 113 was last (what with the cliffhanger and all.
There is one other clue, though - while everyone else on the team looked the same throughout the run of the show (these people are very comfortable with their haircuts), Forest Whitaker's weight had the bad habit of fluctuating wildly from episode to episode. So here is the challenge I present:
Based solely on the changes in the puffiness in Forest Whitaker's face, use the following pictures to figure out the real production order of the episodes!
Here's what he looked like in the first episode shot-
Now here's what he looked like in the cliffhanger-
There are your guidelines. Now, here are the rest of the headshots in originally aired order:
Okay, last time I looked over the bizarrely cheap new art that Prince of Darkness had been saddled with on Netflix. As if that wasn't bad enough, take a look at the monstrosity that The Thing (one of our greatest movie posters), now has representing it to the world:
Is it an issue of having to re-license the art? Because I can't imagine anyone looking at the second box and imagining it was an improvement.
Now take a look at what's going on with Friday the 13th, according to Netflix.
This is more of a hit-and-miss situation, actually. I'd like to get offended about all of the changes, but some of them were actually for the better. I would have liked them to hold onto the first three posters as-is, but truth be told, the change they made to The Final Chapter didn't really hurt things much - the old one was classier, but a few bloody flames never hurt anyone.
Then five and six are just bizarre - five is a huge improvement over the classic poster, although still inferior to the teaser image I loved so well. Six, on the other hand, is just a generic mess. What the hell is Jason doing using a machete for a backhanded stab? Despite how Jason likes to use it, the thing doesn't really even have a sharp point!
Things proceed to get weird with seven and eight - who could have predicted that New Blood would join the original as the only movie to have its poster untouched. Eight, on the other hand, presents us with an example of Netflix actually undoing a historical tragedy - that poster was famously pulled back in the 80s when New York's tourism board threatened to sue, but twenty years later no one cares any more, and it's been restored to its rightful place as the face of Jason Takes Manhattan!
God, next thing you know they're going to mess with A Nightmare on Elm Street's poster, possibly the single most iconic 80s horror-
A child is running, and it's the past - we know this because everything is sepia-toned.
Is this going to turn out to be the 30s? Because I can't imagine any other reason to use sepia-toning for a flashback. Apparently not, because it turns out to be the memories of one Young Indiana Jones:
Indy is at the drug store to pick up some brain medicine, but his prescription has run out. He's unable to deal with this fact, and the situation quickly escalates to the point where he's shooting people with a gun stolen from an incompetent security guard. It's not entirely his fault, though - during the rampage he recalls being threatened as a child by a man with a knife, so he's almost certainly the victim of (child of?) a serial killer who survived his ordeal, but is much the worse for wear.
Over at Quantico the team is waiting impatiently to see when Greg is getting back on the job - we learn that this is a month after his stabbing (so there's the answer to my question from yesterday), and Derek's worried that Greg is coming back to the job too soon. Will he be able to focus while the Reaper is still out there?
I've got a better question - why are you working on anything other than the Reaper case? Why isn't the entire country on lockdown until this famous serial killer (whose face everyone knows) is apprehended?
Garcia and Reid are also talking about the Greg situation - oh, and Reid is still on crutches! They discuss whether Greg's going to be okay after his ordeal getting stabbed by the Reaper, and Reid volunteers that he wouldn't be. Which, you know, duh - that exact thing happened to you and you became a heroin addict.
The team hears about the case of the crazed Indy, and the team heads off to Louisville to capture him! Before that, however, we see that Greg is still living in the apartment where he was attacked, which seems like masochism to me. Oh, and here's a weird note - despite the fact that they know who the killer is, what he looks like, and where he lives, he hasn't been caught yet.
I'm sure we're all familiar with Lucky, the uncreatively-named mascot for Lucky Charms cereal, and his sisiphyisan attempts to keep his lucky charms away from the grubby mitts of ill-mannered children.
Well, it seems that years of toil and struggle have finally gotten the better of him, because on the front of a recent cereal box, he gives every indication that he no longer sees Lucky Charms as a precious treasure that must be protected.
Now he simply flings them haphazardly in the direction of literally anyone walking by the grocery store shelf. “You want Lucky Charms so bad? Well just take them, then. I hope you choke on it.”
Are you happy, children? You've driven the leprechaun mad.
(Wait - did those kids try to run Lucky off a cliff? That's fairly hardcore.)
No, it's not theAvod's birthday, but I'll forgive you for thinking so - after all, even I don't know when theAvod's birthday actually is! Although, come to think of it, I could simply search archive.org or this website's back posts, but what's the fun in that?
Castle Vardulon - restoring mystery to life since, um... 2009, I think? Maybe 2008?
Anyhoo, there's a new episode, in which we do a few request reviews in respect of "Sarah"'s birthday! To listen, simply right-click here for all your downloading needs!
Interesting title, huh? Will this be an episode about time travel? Oh, we can only hope!
The proceedings kick off in an apartment where Kate is looking over some paintings that her friend David has brought over. They were being thrown out by his landlord, and since Kate is always on the lookout for canvasses, he figured she could paint over the miserable examples of talentless hackery. Kate's a little nervous about the idea, however - isn't a painting a living thing, though, man? What right does she have to kill it by painting over it?
She finally relents, and while she's upstairs looking for the plaster she'll use to resurface the canvasses, something strange happens - an ambulance pulls up outside, and the paramedics knock on the door, wondering where the woman who fell down the stairs is. Just as David gets finished telling them no such thing happened, Kate dutifully falls right down the stairs! So who called the paramedics?
Oh, and before we continue with the plot, there was some foreshadowing in the discussion earlier about the gas stove not being great. So look forward to that exploding a little later in the episode.
