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I’m not sure what is worse: the movies … or that I’ve seen three of them (Conan, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus*, and Batman Returns) and enjoy them all in their own special way.

Actually, okay — I enjoy Batman Returns on a lot of levels. I don’t know what to say about Mega Shark & Giant Octopus, except that the trailer got me and wouldn’t let me go.

…aaaaaaand the trailer was also the best part of the movie. After repeated viewings (of the trailer; I could only watch the movie once) I still can’t decide which is more awesome: the tentacle whipping the plane out of the sky, or the shark chomping on the Golden Gate Bridge. All I know is that the world was a dark and lonely place until the brilliance of that trailer shone its light from a million laptops worldwide.

*no relation to the same things in the Iron Seas, I swear (although it would be funny as hell if they were.)

So I came into the middle of Beowulf (2007), and was trying very, very hard to get past the uncanny valley to decide whether I’d like the movie or not. Then, Beowulf took the offer that Grendel’s mother gave him.

For a second, I thought about twittering a billion WTF?s! What is THIS??? Then I realized…

Hold me, Mommy!

If Grendel’s mother looked like A. Jolie and made me the same offer, I wouldn’t say no, either. So the movie might not be any Beowulf that I know, but at least it’s not unbelievable. If he’d turned her down, THAT would have been unbelievable

But I stopped watching after that, anyway.

From a review of the movie The Clan of the Cave Bear at IMDb, this is the fourth paragraph of an otherwise straightforward review.

Some critics scoff at the primative community portrayed here, but it in fact is very accurate. In the DVD commentary we learn that much of the design for this film came from watching a few crude videotapes that were actually made by the Cro-Magnons during that prehistoric period and were discovered, well-preserved, in far northern sub-freezing caves in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, they were in the Beta format.

*dies*

Blame it on my noticing that there’s a movie called Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell up on hulu.com, then glancing at One Million Years BC at IMDb to make sure I was spelling Raquel Welch’s name right, and clicking on The Clan of the Cave Bear.

I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.

I’ve got a post up at Odd Shots featuring the trailers of several paranormal-ish movies that I’m looking forward to (once I get caught up with my writing.) I’m not online much, and I expect that this blog will be pretty quiet through the end of February, but I’ll always be at Odd Shots on Fridays.

So far, my 2010 release schedule looks like this (full descriptions below the cut):

DEMON BLOOD (excerpt added), July 2010
“Here There Be Monsters” in BURNING UP, August 2010
THE IRON DUKE, October 2010

I expect to revamp the site around March or April, and I should have more information regarding the Iron Seas series up then, along with excerpts. I hope everyone is having a fantastic New Year!

Click to see the full descriptions of the upcoming books…which I totally copied from the “Upcoming” page on this site, heh. Cut and paste blogging, you gotta love it.

My love for the original mini-series is pretty well-documented on this blog and elsewhere. I’m going to give the new series a few more weeks, mostly out of nostalgia (and because I like some of the actors).

But, honestly, the first misstep to me was using the ‘V’ as a symbol for the aliens and calling them Vs. Anyone remember that moment in the original mini-series when that ‘V’ was spray-painted across the poster? It was meaningful and inspiring (to me, anyway). Heavy-handed, yes. But more than humans vs. aliens.

ETA2: Aha! Found it (the 2nd video is actually the first appearance of the symbol, but the speech toward the end of the first is what gave *that character* doing it so much weight):

I really hope this series is more than just humans vs. aliens :-/ Because if you’re going to do it … do it right.

ETA: Also, I really hope there is a WTF moment as awesome as this:

…was Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. I’m talking about it over at The Book Smugglers as part of their fantastic Halloween week.

Gary Busey and Corey Haim? You just gotta love it.

My apologies to everyone who can’t look at YouTube videos. I didn’t intend to have two YouTube posts in two days, and I have no idea why I ended up on YouTube, looking up Bob Ross at midnight. I know there was a link that took me there, that there was a reason I wanted to see a Bob Ross clip, but then I hit this and totally forgot it:

Awesome. And it’s the only parody I saw (that I bothered to watch all the way through) that worked, and that had a point.

I used to love this show when I was a kid, and maybe that’s why so many of the parodies I saw just didn’t work for me. Not because Ross is untouchable, but because an “outtake” of someone with foofy hair saying “fuck” isn’t really close to my image of him, and parodies should be very close to the source material, not just throwing in a toilet word now and then. Now, an outtake of the real Bob Ross saying “fuck”? Funny, because it’s surprising.

Then, because I’m a dork, I watched this, which is someone using the Bob Ross technique in Photoshop (and compressed for time — this actually took an hour and a half, according to the info):

And someone doing the same thing in GIMP, but this one isn’t speeded up (and I’ll admit I didn’t watch all the way to the end. It’s a fascinating process, but without the soft voice and the happy little trees, just not the same. Sigh.)

So. This isn’t a review, because the more I think about this movie, the less happy I am with it, so I’m going to stop thinking too much about it.

This is one of those movies that I mostly enjoyed while I was watching it (especially the first part, before I realized that nothing I’d hoped or expected to see in a Terminator movie was going to show up) and right after I came back home, and I would have enjoyed a lot more if I hadn’t been such a fan of the other Terminator movies (1&2 — you know I don’t really count 3). This didn’t *feel* like a Terminator movie to me, and I didn’t realize until coming out how necessary the role of someone as protector was to my idea of these movies.

I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter that a lot more went into the explosions than into character, and that I really felt the heart of the first two movies was missing here. There weren’t any characters to connect with, not really. John Connor’s character wasn’t revealed in any significant way, and if he had an arc, I didn’t see it so much (but, to be fair, we did see how he became the leader of the resistance). The people around him were … well, they didn’t really have any personalities. I didn’t feel any connection *between* them, and I felt as if I was being told that there was a connection there, just because I knew the relationships — but we were never shown any kind of connection, and nothing to any of the characters beyond the surface level.

Also, the Terminator movies have always been about Sarah and John Connor, and someone in a protector role. I could accept that Sarah was gone in this movie … but although John was there quite a bit, the movie wasn’t his. No, it was Marcus’s, whose character didn’t really have an arc or decision to make, either — although he was the most sympathetic character in the movie. I missed the setup of someone as protector (Marcus didn’t really fit that, though I thought they were *trying* for that — as I mentioned before, far more affecting, to me, would have been a reversal: Connor trying to protect Reese after the kid was scheduled for termination…then after saving him, sending him off to the past to be killed.) And even if I just watch it as a post-apocalyptic movie, it doesn’t bring anything really new to the table (a few scenes felt like they came straight out of the recent War of the Worlds movie … but it does have some nice action scenes).

So, there it is. To me, the movies have always been about relationships (Kyle/Sarah, Sarah/John, John/the Terminator) and there just wasn’t much here to see. We never got below the surface. And although I was pleased by some of the surface stuff … it just doesn’t hold up.

Sigh.

ETA: I’ve heard that the script and the production was rushed through after the writer’s strike. I can definitely, definitely see how that might have affected this movie, and the lack of characterization. I think the bones are there, and good … the execution and the whatever-it-is about these movies that makes me *care* just didn’t come through. The late Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles did that a million times better than this movie did.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

*sob sob*

Screw you, Fox.

I just read that Iron Sky is coming soon, a movie about Nazis who have been hiding on the moon, waiting for their chance to return. And I blogged before about Dead Snow, which releases next month — and is about zombie Nazis in the Alps.

Here’s the teaser for Iron Sky:

And here’s the trailer for Dead Snow:

So, here’s a poll:

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