Sony releases the full trailer for Spiderman 2. The Doc Ock v. Spidey stuff looks swell (if a bit CGI-ish), but it seems we’re going to have to wade through inordinate amounts of Peter Parker angst to get to the good stuff. By the way, this trailer does seem to give away most of the plot, if that’s a problem for you.
Month: April 2004
Marital Malfunction.
Also online today is the trailer for The Stepford Wives, and, hoo boy, this film looks terrible. It’s going to be a toss-up between this one and I, Robot for the worst android invasion film of the summer.
Two-Front War.
I haven’t spoken much about it here, but obviously the situation in Iraq is getting much, much worse. I think it’s now safe to assume that our war president‘s June 30 pullout date is an election-year fantasy. Who the hell’s running this half-assed outfit? You’d think that after getting us involved in this unnecessary sideshow of a war, Bush and the neocons would at least have the decency to execute it properly. But, no, they’re still prattling on about a peaceful transfer of power and hoping we ignore the unmistakable signs of an incipient civil war, and all the while the US casualties mount. What’s the plan? (War prez link via Medley.)
Love (and Vote With) Thy Neighbor.
Goodbye, ethnic enclaves. Hello, partisan provinces. Delving deeper into the red state/blue state meme, Slate‘s Tim Noah discovers that the partisan divide now extends to red and blue counties. Apparently, “geographic segregation by major-party affiliation at the county level [has] increased by 47 percent” since 1976.
Chow Yun Samus.
John Woo on Metroid? Now there’s a film that really never needs to see the light of day. What’s next? Tony Scott’s Excitebike? Oliver Stone’s Kid Icarus?
Fantastic Story.
According to Latino Review, Barbershop‘s Tim Story will be directing The Fantastic Four in place of Bring it On‘s Peyton Reed. Interesting…I haven’t seen any of his movies, so I can’t really comment on the pick. Also, current casting rumors have Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm/The Thing (I like it) and Tim Robbins as Dr. Doom.(Hmmm…he’d make a better Reed Richards.)
Gotta Serve Somebody.
“As I went out one morning to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s,
I spied the fairest damsel that ever did walk in a new unlined demi with lace…” The times they are a-changin’, ’cause apparently Bob Dylan is now hawking Victoria’s Secret. Ah well, as the guy notes in this article, I’d rather have Dylan selling lingerie than the new BMW or something. In fact, this may even be a step up for the big fella after Masked and Anonymous.
Husky Do.
Congrats to Connecticut, who dismantled Georgia Tech relatively easily last night. (I put UConn in the Final, but, alas, I had ’em losing to Kentucky. So, with Ok. State, I only pulled two of the Final Four this year.) Now, on to more important matters…only five games left for the seventh-seed Knickerbockers…
The Boy in the Bubble.
“There was always something of the boy in the bubble about George W. Bush, cosseted from the vicissitudes of life, from Vietnam to business failure, by his famous name….Now we’re told the military is preparing an “overwhelming” retaliation to the carnage in Falluja. You can hear the clammy blast from the past: We’re going to destroy that village to save it.” Maureen Dowd ruminates on recent events in Iraq…and the Bush administration’s failure to recognize their gravity.
Gene Machine.
“The vortex of the late nineteen sixties swallowed up not only Eugene McCarthy. It consumed a whole generation of liberal politicians and radical thinkers and culture heroes, from John Lindsay and Marshall McLuhan to Tom Hayden and Buckminster Fuller — a long list of ‘an idea whose time has come’ types whose time abruptly ran out. The survivors wandered, as McCarthy did, through the decades that followed, caricatures of their former world-historical selves, like old heavyweight champions working as greeters in casinos. You could say that these people failed; but what would success have looked like?” A bit too glib as always, Louis Menand examines Eugene McCarthy (by way of the new biography by Dominic Sandbrook.) I’m not sure if McCarthy is really a very good exemplar of “postwar liberalism,” but this sounds like an interesting read nonetheless. (Via Follow Me Here)