Sorry

Sorry it's been three months. I have never-ending internet issues, but I won't tell you that they are the fault of my landlord and Verizon FIOS.

More blogging coming soon.

Congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks

The Chicago Blackhawks won game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final in overtime last night, beating the Philadelphia Flyers at home, 4-3. This win clinched the Blackhawk's first Cup since 1961.

Patrick Kane scored the game winner. The best part was watching everyone look around, wondering if the game was actually over.



Aww, man. No more hockey until mid-October.

Shia LaBeouf is Kind of Dumb

Most people go to Cannes to watch new films, meet celebrities, and avoid American authorities, but Shia LaBeouf goes to get attention.

I don't mind that, but the guy went and very publicly bashed his last two blockbuster films. The writers and directors weren't there to defend their works, and LaBeouf betrayed his total lack of class by insulting movies he fully promoted when he was paid to.

One of them was his second Transformers film, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. He admitted that it wasn't any good; it's a good thing Shia is here to tell us these things. "It became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie," he said, referring to the first film's characters and heart. This missing, enigmatic anchor of the movie could also very well be the script.

Then he bashed in the head of a once-sacred cow. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in that series, was an embarrassment, and LaBeouf classily put some of the blame on his performance. The rest of it, according to him, fell on director Steven Spielberg. "When you drop the ball you drop the ball," LaBeouf said of Spielberg. I hated that LaBeouf, the most overrated actor currently in Hollywood, was in the movie, but his acting had nothing to do with its failure. The film had weak special effects, laughable characters, and the tone of a Wayans brothers comedy. As I've been known to say, Nathan Drake has taken the fedora right off Indy's head as America's adventurer. If Spielberg makes Indy 5, he has to win back people's respect.

Naughty Dog 2 / Steven Spielberg 0.

LaBeouf is toast without Megan Fox to make his acting look good in the next Transformers film, anyway. Maybe Michael Bay can put Fox in the film by creating her entirely out of CG... And he can ditch all of those pesky sets and locations and just shoot it all on blue screen.

Hey Shia, you're a moron. Those films were both painful, but that's why we read scripts before we accept the $15 million to do a picture.

Transformers, Rest In Peace

As everyone who cares already knows, Transformers 3 is filming and will be released next year.

The main problem with this, other than the fact that the first two films sucked and that Michael Bay keeps wavering back and forth on the subject of 3D, is that Megan Fox won't be in it.

Fox never got along with director Bay, and now it's cost Bay the only thing going for his hyperbolic franchise. You suck, Mike.

Bay has replaced Fox with a Victoria's Secret model. I'm not paying to watch this in theaters. Her name is Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, if anybody cares.

If Time Warner Cable was a Girl, I'd Stick My Tongue Down Her Throat

So I know both of you who read this have been bumming about my hiatus from blogging. It wasn't my fault. Time Warner Cable did it.

Their modem at my house went bad, and they took over two weeks to replace it. So the title of this post is, indeed, sarcastic because I'm not actually excited to have something back that my roomate and I have been paying for all along.

They'd better not charge us for those long, hard, Youtube-less weeks.

ValkyrieSDF1

Obi Wanna Rap?

At least something good came of my wasting countless hours surfing Youtube...

Movie Review: Samuel Bayer's A Nightmare on Elm Street

Lacking the personality of any original, 1980's, slasher film, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street will be forgotten as nonchalantly as it was conceived. Failing to truly scare or titillate, as any film in the genre must in order to make up for its own inherent lack of credibility, the greatest appeal this new Nightmare can claim is its nostalgic ties to Wes Craven's 1984 original, albeit with better film stock.

The plot is very similar to the original story. Teens in a quiet, suburb-heavy American town begin dying, but no one can explain why. First, Dean (Kellan Lutz) kills himself in public, but not before telling his sort-of girlfriend, Kris (the lovely and hard-to-track-down-in-real-life Katie Cassidy), that his nightmares have been a problem. Kris soon starts to dream about the same man Dean did, Freddy (Jackie Earle Haley), and she discovers that other teens in town are having the same dreams. But when Freddy kills them in their dreams, they die in real life, though Freddy leaves no physical evidence other than gallons of blood. Soon, their friends dropping at a slower rate than one would expect from a 2010 horror film, Nancy (Rooney Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner) realize they have to stay awake long enough to figure out how to defeat Freddy on his own turf, or else they're next. Freddy's origin, and link to his victims, is revealed through the investigation.

There's very little I can add to all of the mainstream reviews for Nightmare. No, there is nothing original enough here to warrant a remake, much less the label "reimagining." Yes, some of the special effects are distractingly bad, though the production values, in general, dwarf those of the original, as they have in all three major, spiritless remakes (this one, plus Rob Zombie's Halloween and Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th).

And, much like those other films, the major downfall of A Nightmare on Elm Street is its lack of imagination. The kills, which are conventionally the orgasmic payoff at the end of minutes upon minutes of teen misbehavior and asking-for-it decadence, are generally plain and forgettable. Perplexingly, the gorgeous young students of this film are the only slasher teens ever to have no interest in partying, having sex, or abusing substances, making one wonder why director Samuel Bayer bothers killing them off at all. They do, however, bathe while nude.

Haley, whom I absolutely love, is cardboard as Freddy Krueger, whose iconic status will continue to be defined by Robert Englund's painfully stupid, pun-dropping incarnation in the original films. The rest of the cast does a fine job looking pretty and acting scared, though the lighting by Jeff Cutter (Orphan) is probably the loveliest thing in this movie, besides Cassidy.

People in their mid-twenties and up will probably keep going to see this movie because of its iconic name. When younger audiences come to realize that the film doesn't even do its job as a slasher, they'll stop going and forget it the way the kids of Elm Street need to forget Freddy.