Rowling has released a short biography detailing the life and times of Celestina Warbeck, a magical musician who exists in the Wizarding World of ‘Harry Potter.’
Nicki Minaj’s new “Anaconda” lyric video is absolutely insane — and that’s not even mentioning the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” reference at the end. Watch it!
Until today, I thought Legendary Pictures ‘ effort to make yet another contemporary Godzilla reboot was a seriously misguided idea. I know that almost 15 years have passed since Roland Emmerich’s 1998 take on the reptilian Japanese scream queen hit theaters, but that movie was such a dark, senseless and empty mess that it effectively killed my once fervent love of the big-ass monster genre. Okay, so there were other contributing factors, too, like terrorists in planes who managed to knock down the two largest buildings in New York. When that happens, big mutant lizards don’t exactly cut it anymore. But I digress. Emmerich’s Godzilla debuted three years before 9/11, and the thing that’s most infuriating about the movie is his tiresomely conventional attempt to top the original Japanese movies by just making his reboot bigger, noisier and more Godzilla -ier. The same goes for Diddy, then Sean Puff Daddy Combs, who contributed an equally bombastic song to the soundtrack, “Come With Me,” that, as far as I’m concerned is a sacrilegious use of Jimmy Page’s great guitar riff from Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” (Page apparently didn’t think so at the time. He appeared in the crap-tastic video for the song, which references the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.) The more ambitious thing to do would have been to mine the campier, Mystery Science Theater 3000 – worthy elements of the Godzilla movies, such the Peanuts, the Japanese twin-sister singing group who played the tiny priestesses that were able to communicate with Godzilla’s winged rival, Mothra . But who am I kidding? Emmerich doesn’t deal in subtlety or wit. The reality is, that whether it’s Emmerich’s fault or not, movies about giant mutant creatures terrorizing a city or town don’t move the needle anymore unless they think smaller — on a human scale. J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 and the Abrams-produced Matt Reeves-directed Cloverfield worked for that very reason. The monsters in those films were really catalysts for interesting human drama. To a lesser extent, I felt the same way about Gareth Edwards’ Monsters , so my interest was piqued when he was hired to direct Godzilla and, at Comic Con last summer, promised “a grounded and realistic film that isn’t particularly sci-fi,” according to a CinemaBlend post at the time. Well, to paraphrase Leonardo DiCaprio’s signature line in Django Unchained , Legendary had my curiosity, but now they have my attention with the news, reported by Deadline , that Frank Darabont is rewriting the Godzilla script. The beauty of The Walking Dead under Darabont was that the human conflict and relationships taking place over the first two seasons of the AMC series was way more compelling than the creative zombie deaths. Each of the survivors was a distinct, fully fleshed character that I grew to care about over the course of the series, and that made their peril all the more intense and terrifying. Factor in the excellent script Darabont wrote for The Shawshank Redemption and, although the odds are pretty steep, if anyone can make me care about big-ass mutant lizard again, it’s him. [ Deadline , CinemaBlend ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Thanks to the Carly Rae Jepsen smash sweeping the nation, we’ve been treated to a number of hilarious Call Me Maybe covers . But Insane Clown Posse members Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope have now filmed the first-ever Mystery Science 300 -esque breakdown of that track’s music video – and it’s downright awesome. The face-painted artists sit around and breakdown the action in front of them, from commenting on whether they’d get it on with Jepsen… to the video’s unrealistic portrayal of a gardener… to the band’s resemblance to the CreditScore.com guys… to the “twist” of an ending that seems to truly take the duo by surprise. Who came up with this idea? We have no clue. But let’s hope it isn’t the last we see of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope serving as music video critics.
Movieline would like to introduce The Player , a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We’ll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate , an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game. “The game of the movie” is a worse curse than Cruciatus , and usually causes more pain. It’s such a guarantee of failure that even the Street Fighter movie game sucked, and that started with one of the greatest games of all time. They’re terrible because the studio has to acquire the license, and when any company spends most of its budget on lawyers, the lawyers are the only ones who get to have any fun. Once the rights are secured, there’s usually enough cash left in the kitty for a design team of two interns and a crayon. FreakZone Games found a way around this: Start with the worst movie of all time. That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate. (To watch the entire movie, if you dare, scroll down to the YouTube video below). This abomination was made when an insurance and fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren bet that he could make a horror movie for less than $20,000. He failed spectacularly. The results would have less painful — and more coherent — if he’d filmed himself drinking $20,000 worth of tequila. The actors are so bad that they can barely talk. One is so bad he can barely walk. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, handyman and henchman to the villainous “Master,” appeared to have taken his acting classes from electroshock therapy. Reynolds’attempts to look supernatural make his appearances look jerkier than an art student’s stop-motion film — and more tedious, too. It can take up to three minutes for him to cross a scene, and if you think the camera or actors do anything to distract from this you are wildly overestimating: a) their commitment to the project; b) their understanding of cinema, c) their baseline brain activity. Then there’s the movie’s title villain, The Master, played by Torn Neyman. At one point, he studies himself in the mirror and declares, “Yes, I am the face of horror.” That’s him in the poster with the fancy moustache. Scary, right? In addition to being widely recognized as one of the biggest stinkers in filmdom, Manos is also a testament to the healing power of laughter. The movie is now a cult favorite thanks largely to the crew behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, who mocked it to pieces in 1993 , and, on Aug. 16, mauled it a second time — this time, live — when they reunited under the name of Rifftrax . FreakZone took a similar approach. The video game version of Manos: The Hands of Fate is an homage to retro gaming and a satire of almost every other movie game ever made. It avoids sucking by wallowing in the cliches of video-game movie adaptations. And there are many. In the 1980s and ’90s, every movie franchise was turned into a platformer. Childish sword and sorcery tales, action movies, romantic dramas, tearjerkers about people in wheelchairs who were scared of heights — it didn’t matter. Manos, the game, improves upon the movie right from the get-go with better acting. It also reminds you of how evil games used to be before they started being built for the mediocre skills of broad movie-going audiences. In FreakZone’s Manos , it’s possible to die at the first jump. Tap A and misjudge the distance, and that’s it, you’re dead. (In Manos , the movie, the Master takes a good 20 minutes to get around to killing Torgo.) There are also invincible immortal enemies (who do nothing but float up and down), edge-of-the-block jumps for bonus items, and even curse-inducing sine-wave-flying enemies to knock you off platforms and trigger Castlevania flashbacks. The real glory of this game is proving that the internet is better for creativity than a whiteboard made of LSD. Hollywood spends more money to minimize risk than the Secret Service, and the gaming industry hasn’t just been taking notes. If you walked into a video game publisher in the ’90s and told them you wanted to make this game, they would have hired new security to escort you out of the building just so their regular security didn’t have to touch you. But now a few people with the right combination of skills and mental problems can build and sell a game like Manos: The Hands of Fate for a couple of bucks, and it’s fantastic. There’s a real chance the $1.99 I paid for the game will represent 50% of the publisher’s entire profit on the sale, but I’m still glad I gave it to them. That’s because with Manos: The Hands of Fate , FreakZone has achieved the impossible: It made a game that was better than the movie. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
With Shout! Factory releasing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 take on Ray Dennis Steckler’s horror musical The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies on DVD this week — coming on the heels of the widespread acclaim for Sundance midnight entry Hobo with a Shotgun — it seemed like as good a time as any to look at some of the most unwieldy, memorable, and occasionally even poetic movie titles ever concocted. Such as:
Everyone was puzzled upon learning that Jerry Seinfeld ‘s triumphant return to NBC would be as the producer of a reality/game show called The Marriage Ref . After seeing the first episode, we are still puzzled. The Marriage Ref is a mess. The Marriage Ref is about married couples getting in absurd arguments and the panel of celebrities who riff on them. Seinfeld told The New York Times that the marriage refs do not themselves need to be experts at marriage. This is good because judging from his screamy phone calls and rage-related divorce from Kim Bassinger, we could not imagine Alec Baldwin would handle a fight with his wife with the same wit and charm as he did the problems of other couples. Plus, if all celebrities who sucked at marriage were ruled out of the show, it would basically just be Michelle Obama and Kevin Bacon up there wisecracking every episode. (although Wikipedia tells us that both Seinfeld and Kelly Ripa, the third ref, have improbably functional marriages.) Many things are bad about The Marriage Ref . The worst is that the married couples never actually appear in the studio, except in a short docudrama introducing their problems, and via satellite to hear the refs’ judgment. So limited, The Marriage Ref falls into the reality show trap of making real relationships seem more contrived than anything even the hackiest comedy writer could come up with. The first marriage our panel referees is being torn apart by the husband’s desire to have his dead dog taxidermied. The dog’s name is The Fonz. The wife hated The Fonz. If this is an actual argument two real humans had (the excruciatingly edited video suggests not) there is something strange going on in this man’s head worth exploring: Is he an insane person? Is he dangerous? On what obscure message board did he meet his wife? This could have been funny! Instead, the conflict is framed in the video basically as: Husband = lovable, bumbling schlub; Wife = no-fun evil harpy. There is a funny dark moment when the wife reveals that the day The Fonz died was the best day of her life, but it is spoken with such a practiced sneer that it obscures the real sadism that is a necessary component of love. If there is justice in the universe, the Fonz’s ghost will take a ghost shit on this couple’s bed tonight for disrespecting his memory with this tripe. It’s just way too fake, and you have to pity the panel of legitimately funny people (well, Kelly Ripa is funny, sort of) who have to dredge jokes out of relationships that are so poorly caricatured—without making fun of the caricaturing itself. It’s like if the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys could only make jokes the characters of the terrible sci-fi movies they riffed on would find funny. Even with this sparse material, Alec Baldwin got off a few good one-liners (“I think if you’re going to stuff your dog, you should stuff it in either a useful or an attractive position.”). Seinfeld managed to dice up the marriage problems in a humorous way, and Kelly Ripa told it like it was, in that way she does. The host, comedian Tom Papa, was generally agreeable but laughed too much at the panels’ jokes. But the humor behind many of those jokes came from way too similar a place as The Jay Leno Show , which, in a nightmare world, would be The Marriage Ref ‘s lead-in, and NBC would feature an hour-and-a-half of an audience laughing at the fact someone said the word “thong”—just the word itself! Not even a joke about it! In this world, it would be as if there never was a wildly popular sit-com called Seinfeld that showed how the funniest parts of a relationship are often the least obvious. A show that changed comedy in such a way that it is possible to imagine an actually funny version of The Marriage Ref , where all of the show’s guests (Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais and Larry David will all be on future episodes) get together at a nondescript diner after taping the show and kvetch about how hard it is to say no to something you absolutely know is a terrible idea.
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