Todays bit of stupid is from Fox and MTV:

MTV readies 'Rocky Horror' redux

Yes, let that sink in....Fox and MTV want to redo the Rocky Horror Picture Show....

Again, a very mixed bag movie wise like the last one. Not even close to being as good as the Incredibles, Iron Man, or Sin City, but the performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker was more than worth the price of admission….and really, that is the ONLY reason to see this movie IMHO since I found myself looking for my remote to FF though large swaths of this movie. It is nearly 3 hours long, but it felt like 4….which is never a good sign as far as I am concerned. Which is say the opposite of say the LotR movies where I was wanting more at the end of those and the felt like maybe an hour had gone and not the three hours that had actually happened.

Spoilerific reviewage below the fold:

So many things wrong in this movie that the only saving grace are the above mentioned Joker, Two Face and Gordon….So I think I’ll start with the things that annoyed me first and work my way to the bits that I liked.

Again, Chicago is not Gotham, and they even got rid of the spiffy monorails and Wayne Tower from the first movie and instead used the IBM Tower as the Wayne Tower.

Ho hum, a cop car chase through Lower Wacker Drive….which was done better and more entertainingly in the Blues Brothers.

Rachel Dawes: See, at first I had thought that Katie Holmes complete inability to act in the first movie was the reason there was no real spark or sense of “Love” beyond childhood friendship in the first movie. But, since I know that Maggie Gyllenhaal has done damn fine work I am left to conclude that Christopher Nolan lacks the ability to direct woman and/or film something that makes you feel that there is ANY kind of emotion between two characters besides hate. So, basically the Rachel Dawes character was just a 1.5 movie long Red Shirt gig with zero pay off when she dies. She is just a plot device and nothing more, the typical Kill the girlfriend/female character Trope, which is tiresome in the Comics, and even more so in the movies. This is even more annoying after the soulless “Death” of Gordon, which you know is faked. In both cases you never get any feeling of loss, no funeral…just a sad panda Bruce Wayne not eating his breakfast….how…craptacular.

Ummm, this one could just be me, but I kept expecting Nestor Carbonell to announce that he was “Batmanuel”…it would have moved the non Heath Ledger parts of the movie up a notch or two. =P

Bat Man as James Bond…sigh…perhaps if the Justice League were around…plus he can breathe in space!

The two Ferry Boats: This was the point in the movie where I almost tossed my empty bag of pop corn at the screen. It was Jar-Jar Banks worthy in its annoyance and illogicalness. So, why are the prisoners on shackled? No clue. Why is the bomb trigger opened in the room full of Prisoners? No idea. Why didn’t they rush and over power the few guards and blow up the other boat? No clue. A god damned Magic Negro…….it is 2007 people, can we PLEASE quietly bury this trope? Pretty please? It’s as annoying as the Girl Friend will end up dead Trope for no reason that we witnessed with Rachel Dawes earlier.

And finally, that neither boat blew up the other was beyond reason…it was anger inducing for so many reasons. First off the parental urge to protect your young, and yet no parent stood up and grabbed the trigger. Second, to take time to take a vote? WTF? Are you insane? Lastly, as has been proven many times, in both the Stanford and the Milgram experiments, people will gladly follow orders and kill folks, mistreat their fellow humans, and do what it takes to survive when given an option/freewill to do so, or ordered to do so. So, this scene has to be the stupidest single thing I have seen since Titanic.

A better way to have filmed that scene would have been to film it from the perspective of only one boat, the non prisoner boat, and in a 12 Angry Men kinda scene where their trigger is broken in the ensuing fight to get the control….and they have to sit there in a sense of doom as the clock ticks off the time to the top of the hour….or the Scooby-Doo ending…either would have been better then how that scene played out.

So what was good about the movie you ask?

Heath Ledger. The Joker as pure Chaos. The Joker as pure Super-Sanity. Living in the moment, no past, no future, only the now. A person with no true personality, making things up as he goes along because they are not real until he tells someone else, and then the next day, all is new again and things can be done as necessary to survive. In gamer speak, the ultimate portrayal of Chaotic Neutral not seen since A Clockwork Orange. Every scene with the Joker is a little gift, and I am hoping that there is an Edit the Star Wars Episode 1 where Jar-Jar Binks was edited out….but for Dark Knight the edit would be to get rid of all the non Joker bits.

Also, I will say they are doing a great job of not killing the Baddies like the previous series stupidly did. The Joker lives (sadly, not in RL :( ), Harvey Dent’s death is Faked, the Scarecrow is out there being a madman…and no one really saw Ra’s Al Ghul die…so…all good, with the Joker ending up in Arkham I suspect. Now if only they can get someone to play the Joker as well in another movie….and add in Harly Quinn in sort of a non sucidal Sid and Nancy kind of way…..good times.

Rating: C overall, Heath Ledger gets an A++, Gary Oldman gets a B.

Dave was kind enough to loan me his copy of the Movie, so I finally decided to watch it Friday night in anticipation of seeing Dark Knight over the weekend (Review to follow).

So, for the most part the movie is a mixed bag, some things were good, or at least an interesting “Do Over” on the origin. Some things were “Meh” as in they neither added nor detracted from the movie, and then there were a few “uglies” that made me grumbly.

The redoing of the Origin to have Ra’s Al Ghul as Batman’s mentor was “Meh”. It didn’t really add much to the movie, other than give Liam Neeson a chance to play Qui-Gon Jin again (I half expected Hayden Christensen to show up and whine and glower at the other two). On the other hand making Alfred a father figure to Bruce Wayne and having a mysterious background was a great idea and really helped make that relationship viable and work. Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes was a waste (I will tackle this in the review of Dark Knight) and you never really got the feeling that these two cared for each other more than just being friends…heck, I think it was the worst depicted relationship in the film. Gary Oldman was incredible as Sgt. Gordon, in fact, I didn’t even know it was Oldman until the credits rolled….he was that good.

The new Bat-Mobile was stupid…the only thing that I found entertaining was watching it function as a machine, and how much effort must have gone into learning how to drive the thing on actual city streets without hitting buildings.

Ugly wise, the one thing that annoyed me throughout was that Gotham was now Chicago and not mythical New York City, and no effort was taken to not make it seem so. The License Plates on the cars were all Illinois Plates, the cop cars were all very much Chicago cop cars and so on.

The plot, such as it was, was well done enough to hold my interest. The origin, while different, was put together well enough to be engaging, but in the end it fell apart for me since the League of Shadows did not seem to be all that Evil, and more like the Watchmen, with an Watchman-esque plan to save billions by killing a million. So at this point the movie fell apart for me and I was rooting for Qui-Gon Jin to win and Defeat Anakin….erm….Batman.

Rating: C+ overall with a solid E for Effort.

DVD wise, I am completely baffled that a DVD, of an action movie no less, would released without any Bonus Features.

And I hope that this dispels, once and for all, any notion that Katie Couric is a Liberal.

11. You're the only one who doesn't complain when your office is moved to the basement. (1)

10. You're the only one more excited about The Watchmen trailer before The Dark Knight than the actual movie. (2)

9. You're the only one capable of accurately quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (3)

8. Nobody accesses the music collection you have shared over the network. (4)

7. There's always plenty of Red Bull in the vending machine. (5)

6. On "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day" yours is the only one that's robotic.

5. Trivia competitions are always you against the rest of the company. (6)

4. The messages you leave in binary in the bathroom stalls go widely unnoticed.

3. The office slut has slept with everyone except you.

2. After looking at your T-Shirt, everyone asks which sports player has the number 42.

1. No one recognizes your Bender costume at the office Halloween party.

(1) We are being moved to the basement actually.
(2) Excited is an understatment.
(3) Sadly true.
(4) Well one person accessed it and found it tom be "Odd, not a lot of things I have heard before, but good."
(5) Well no....but I wish it were Bing!
(6) Local rules in regards the Trivial Pursuit are that I have to follow the rules and everyone else gets a piece for answering a question correctly.

Via BBSpot