Around the Internets: 04/28/08

- The release of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay inspires a list of "10 Sequels That Are Better Than the Original." [GreenCine] Speaking of superior sequels, a few of them are among the "18 Pretty Great Summer Blockbusters Not Directed By Steven Spielberg." [A.V. Club] Both the GreenCine and A.V. Club articles praise Terminator 2. Really? I still think the original Terminator is superior. It doesn't have Edward Furlong's grating performance (it's 1991, and the kid's still quoting lyrics from Tone Loc's "Wild Thing"?) and the hackneyed "a robot learns to understand human emotions" subplot, which is handled better on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, thanks mostly to an actor who's more nuanced than Schwarzenegger (Summer Glau).

- Sean T. Collins' "11 Most Awful Songs from Geek Movie Soundtracks" include Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" from Batman Forever, Margot Kidder's "Can You Read My Mind?" from Superman: The Movie and Puff Daddy's mangling of "Kashmir" for the 1998 Godzilla album (Puffy must have had a photo of Jimmy Page with a sheep, which could only explain Page's guest appearance). Where's R. Kelly's sappy "Gotham City" from Batman & Robin? That song made Bill Finger do a Batspin in his grave. [Topless Robot]

- I just discovered this. A brilliant mash-up of the Hillary Clinton campaign and one of my favorite movies, Alexander Payne's Election:

Around the Internets: 04/18/08

- CNN's Richard Quest had meth in his pocket. Which explains a lot. Here's an amusing Daily Show spoof of the CNN "reporter" who looks like the love child of Harry Bentley from The Jeffersons and Matthew Lesko.

- Mike Jones, Shaq, Marky Mark, Fred Durst and my favorite rap group, the Chicago Bears, are among "the 25 Worst Rappers of All Time."

- Former Cheers writer and popular blogger Ken Levine recommends Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, which I think is a more entertaining movie about Superman than Superman Returns.

- I'll wait for Forgetting Sarah Marshall on DVD--that's the format where Judd Apatow-produced movies are best appreciated because of the awesome extras--even though I got a kick out of Billy Baldwin's spoof of David Caruso's acting in the clips on NBC's site for Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime, the CSI: Miami-style fake procedural featured in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

- After Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos bungled the Obama/Clinton debate in Philly, the first thing I thought was: "What would Jon say?"

Around the Internets: 03/20/08

- A prequel to the original Trainspotting novel is in the works, while the long-planned prequel to Battlestar Galactica has finally been greenlit. Haven't Irvine Welsh and Ronald D. Moore heard Patton Oswalt's brilliant bit in which the comedian/script doctor breaks down what's wrong with prequels like the last three Star Wars movies and imagines an encounter with George Lucas during the time he wrote them ("Well hey, you say you're a Star Wars fan. Do you like Darth Vader? In the first movie, you get to see him as a little kid... and then he gets taken away from his mom and he's very sad...")?

- Composers like Hans Zimmer, Anne Dudley and La Vie en Rose's Christopher Gunning complain that present-day film scores are too bland-sounding in an article for London's The Times. Zimmer asks, "Where is the next Jerry Goldsmith?" Uh, Hans, his name is Michael Giacchino. Zimmer adds, "So many scores sound like nobody really thought about them." Yeah, the likes of Jon Brion, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat and Terence Blanchard put very little thought into what they write.

- Awesome! Someone's finally posted "The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike," one of two recently banned episodes of The Boondocks. "Hunger Strike" resurrects one of the old strip's most memorable threads, Huey's gripes with BET's offensive programming.

Word on the street is BET threatened legal action against The Boondocks' distributor, Sony Pictures Television, and Adult Swim if the latter aired the two BET-bashing eps. I guess BET's henchmen didn't act fast enough to stop Canada's Teletoon channel and its Adult Swim-like Detour block from premiering "Hunger Strike" last Sunday (the other BET-bashing ep, "The Ruckus Reality Show," is set to air on Detour this Sunday).

"Hunger Strike" is one of the funniest eps of The Boondocks' second season, despite the series' continuing uncertainty over how to make Huey as dynamic a character as he was in the strip (Huey's intellectual nature played better in the strip than on the animated series, whereas the not-as-cerebral Riley thrives in the animated format--his eps are more fun to watch than the Huey-centric ones).

Huey's stand against BET is overshadowed by the hijinks of Rev. Rollo Goodlove. Cee-Lo does his second Boondocks guest shot as the self-serving Goodlove, and he gets to sing "Go-Go Gadget Gospel" from his first Gnarls Barkley album, during a musical sequence that goes on a bit longer than it should. Scrubs' Donald Faison, who voiced another character in an earlier Boondocks ep, provides the sped-up voice of "Weggie Rudlin," who proposes a BET "ho-ward show" to honor the best video hos. Weggie is the series' jab at its former executive producer, current BET president Reginald Hudlin, whose name still shows up in the Boondocks credits due to contractual obligations. The Boondocks writers also throw in some amusing in-jokes about past BET personalities like Sherry Carter and Tavis Smiley (who voices himself) that will probably sail over white viewers' heads.

The ep's best lines come from the Dr. Evil-like CEO of BET ("You've fired everyone that could read? I love it!") and Uncle Ruckus ("BET forever!! BET boombaya!!") I love how Star Wars fan Aaron McGruder asked 9th Wonder, the series composer, to model Ruckus' theme music after John Williams' tuba theme for Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi.

- I would cringe while listening to many of the train wreck questions fanboys and fangirls would toss at the celebrity speakers during panel discussions at the 2007 WonderCon and the '07 San Diego Comic-Con, so I love this Mark Evanier complaint about the attention whores who abuse the open mic at panels:

One time, I was interviewing Ray Bradbury. The first guy at the mike — who'd been poised there since before Ray and I arrived on stage — just wanted to say how much Ray's work had inspired his own, beginning efforts and he wanted to read aloud a passage from one of those stories to demonstrate this. If I hadn't stopped him, he'd have turned the rest of the hour into a books-on-tape recital.

- Poplicks.com says Obama's stunning speech about race was effective, but they wish he could have done more with it.

- Comics 101 remembers Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens, who passed away March 10. The secret of how the Rocketeer managed to fly around without burning his ass off dies with Stevens.

Around the Internets: 09/04/07

- G4's Attack of the Show pokes fun at Miss Teen South Carolina's concern for us U.S. Americans and our map shortage by inviting viewers to send their own maps to the Maps for Us site to help South Africa, the U.S., the Iraq and the Asian countries.

- Former Cheers writer Ken Levine and his readers rant about lousy movie theater behavior. My solutions to this never-ending problem of annoying theatergoers: either go during a matinee showing on a weekday afternoon (barely anybody shows up) or wait for the movie to come out on Netflix. Simple as that. As one commenter on Levine's blog says, "Thank goodness for Netflix."



- "The Batmobile: What a Pain in the Ass": The Dave's Long Box blog wonders how Batman has managed to keep a low profile all these years despite driving around in a car that attracts attention wherever it goes.