Don't Mess With Saoirse's Baby Blues!

The teaser trailer for The Host, another dread Stephenie Meyers (Twilight) adaptation...

It begins by visually equating a possible apocalyptic danger to the earth with blue eyes and it ends with a series of eyes, all computer or contact enhanced toward possessed creepiness.

If you ask me it's entirely regrettable to fuck with Saoirse Ronan's unforgettable blues because they need no computer enhancement to spook and thrill.

I saw him. I saw him with my own eyes."

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Ladyhawke"

Time for Season 3 of Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Wednesday evenings.

from left to right: Goliath, Navarre (Rutger Hauer) and Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer's stunt double)

I thought we'd kick off this season with a personal favorite from the 80s. I use the word favorite emphatically because in many ways, Ladyhawke (1985) is a movie with a confusing relationship to objective quality. It's both great and bad, the score arguing that it's a feature that absolutely should not exist outside of 1985 while the mythic story fights for timelessness. The sound (Oscar-nominated) has wonderful details, maximizing the earthly details of fluttering wings, wolf howls and horse hooves while also embracing the transcendently romantic voices (Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer) but it's marred by jarring score cues that take you out of the action and weird post-production "comedy" vocal work from extras. It feels, at least for its first half, like it's a movie with several authors and endless studio interference from people who didn't believe in a romantic fantasy epic in a time long before fairy tales were hot commodities and sword and sorcery epics were the furthest thing from bankable. So, would you laugh at me if I claimed I thought it was thisclose to being a classic? People are always reediting the Star Wars prequels to try to make them into the movies they should have been but the fantasy with the easiest fix to nudge it from punchline to greatness is Ladyhawke.

The one area where Ladyhawke can lay legitimate claim to greatness without lengthy conditional explanations is in the cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro (most famous for Apocalypse Now and various Warren Beatty epics). Many films throughout history have used sunsets and sunrises for their sheer beauty but Ladyhawke's reliance on light is more than vanity; it's storytelling.

Pfeiffer's beauty and Hauer's pain after the jump

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John Carter Vs... ?

In tribute to my friend JA who always gives good lulz with "which is hotter"... a few loincloth-offs (hmmm) between John Carter (reviewed) and his screen ancestors. You decide.

Criss-cross sci-fantasy menswear

poll by twiigs.com

 
excuse my typo there. Sean Connery. I'd fix it but then the poll would reset to zero. We can't have that and you know what I meant.

Emergency gun-manning in the desert whilst wearing only reddish loinclothes and boots!

poll by twiigs.com

Face paint and/or face blood* is a must have when calling your troops to war!

poll by twiigs.com

 *They bleed blue on Barsoom, bitches.

Review: "JOHN CARTER"

This review was originally published in my film column at Towleroad.

Let's begin with a man and his dog. First, the dog. Woola is an unsightly creature but oddly endearing. He's the size of a pony but he looks more like a lizard or a toad albeit one with six visible legs and hundreds of sharp teeth. He reads all dog though -- a mutant pug. His assignment and then devotion is to guard the human prisoner John Carter (Taylor Kitsch).

John Carter of Virginia has been magically transported to Barsoom (aka Mars)  and the green martians who discover him don't know what to make of him though they love his mad jumping skill. Mars' gravity makes John Carter the Earthling a superman, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. When John Carter tries to escape his prison early in the film, he finds it impossible to elude Woola whose multiple legs carry him across the Martian desert in super sonic zig-zag fashion, clouds of dust trailing behind him like a Road Runner cartoon. The adorable mutant pug always appears wherever bouncy John Carter is about to land. Neither man nor beast are moving in a circular fashion but they're not getting anywhere. Eventually they'll be right back where they started.

Points of origin are important. Home, and our journeys to and from it, are at the heart of John Carter's multi-limbed adventure.

MORE...

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25th Anniversary: George Clooney's Big Screen Debut

Twenty five years ago one of the world's few bonafide movie stars and one of this year's Best Actor frontrunners made his silver screen debut. Internet sources disagree on the exact date -- probably due to the film being a no-budget indie with an erratic release schedule -- but the earliest is January 9th. The point is this: We've now reached a quarter century of Clooney on the big screen!

If you investigate a trail of blood in a horror movie, you deserve to die.

Like many stars before and after him, George Clooney's first movie role was in a cheapo horror flick. His was named Return to Horror High (1987). Though Clooney is dispatched in the first fifteen minutes (first victim is an honor in horror casts, yes?) he was a big enough "name" in a field of (mostly) nobodies to get second billing.

He'd already had two short-lived series regular gigs on television, most famously a recurring role on The Facts of Life. In 1984 he starred in a sitcom called E/R which is hilarious in retrospect (the gig not the show) since it was about emergency room doctors in Chicago. Ten years later with ER, a very different show about the exact same thing, he'd become a major star. It'd be nice to state something triumphant like 'Return to Horror High was the first and last time he'd ever have to accept second billing!' but it wouldn't be true. In between there was lots of flailing around... in roles and screens big and small.

A prophetic moment after the jump.

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