These reviews made us smurfin smurf all over our smurfs.

Airdate: 8 - 5 - 13
So we got bored and watched Smurfs 2. I'm not proud of it. The Boom Operator's not proud.

We also somehow got to talking about Meteor Man, soft-core porn franchises

We heard music from:

Death Becomes Her, 1994 - Alan Silvestri
Emmanuelle - Nico Fidenco
Oblivion, 2013 - M83

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Pacific Rim-jobs and interesting outcomes.

This weekend a fat asshole was found not guilty for murdering the unarmed teenager he murdered. We, on the other hand, saw a live-action anime where monsters fought robots. The Japanese girl from Babel and a reanimated Heath Ledger pilot an Eva...sorry...a Macross...sorry, a Jaeger and battle some monsters, an honest-to-god anime made non-animated. I'm starting to lose some of the geek hero-worship for Guillermo del Toro. The man can do sets and effects like a boss, but his writing can be infantile and nerdy in the worst ways.

We heard music from the following:

Back to the Future, 1985 - Alan Silvestri
Men in Black III, 2012 - Danny Elfman
Godzilla films - various
The Mysterious Island, 1961 - Bernard Herrmann

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After the 4th, the only dud was Lone Ranger.

After a Fourth of July filled with explosions and hot dogs, sometimes simultaneously, we basked in the collective schadenfreude of the Lone Ranger remake's dismal performance at the box office and used the occasion to reflect on the state of the blockbuster today and Johnny Depp's decline from Dead Man to Tonto-tarded.

I reviewed the horror anthology VHS 2...which had almost no VHS in it. While the "films" framed in the story were found on a VHS tape, they were very explicitly shown to be made with digital cameras. I thought this kinda whizzed away the whole nostalgic focus (if not the point) of the original, which, while not groundbreaking, had an interesting framing device. That being said, a couple of the films in this sequel were probably better than anything in the original, it just didn't have a convincing meta.

We heard music from the following:

Kill Them All and Come Back Alone, 1968 - Francesco de Masi
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003 - Klaus Bedelt
Dead Man, 1995 - Neil Young

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To the Wiener

Episode Air Date: 7 - 1 -13
Jim Kelly died. A Raccoons live-action film starring Will Forte, Amanda Peet, and Dash Mihok was greenlit. The Boom Operator dished on his film experience on Greater.

To the Wonder: I'm a fan of Malick's, but this is still one I could only sparsely admire, and purely from an intellectual standpoint rather than an emotional one. The writing was fine, but the prancing and oblique cuddling really took me out of it after a while. I'm not sure. On paper this was no different than previous films, which I've pretty universally admired. Maybe I'm just finally tired of this wide-angle schtick and Malick's lonesome search for meaning in the openness of the American West. Bah.

Tonight we heard music from:

Enter the Dragon, 1973 - Lalo Schifrin
Black Belt Jones, 1974 - Dennis Coffey
Tree of Life, 2011 - Alexandre Desplat
The Thin Red Line, 1998 - Hans Zimmer

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Episode 6 - 29 -13

An absolute bukkake of reviews highlight this gem of a show. We tackled many movies and many subjects that we'd missed while the Boom Operator was working on a film.

Here are the capsule reviews:

Monsters University: Dogshit. Besmirches the reputation of the cute original and obvious, cynical evidence of Disney's mandate to pump Pixar franchises for sequels.

Hatchet III: Amusing gore-nado slasher from a self-aware franchise.

World War Z:

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone:

 Now You See Me:

Stoker: A pretty great, self-consciously twisted ode to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, but with way more incest. Park Chan Wook's twisted storytelling went well with this standard (not an insult) suspense-thriller script by Wentworth Miller.

 Before Midnight: This was a pretty good one, the third in an ongoing project between Linklater and Delpi and Hawke to free-jazz the characters they created 20-years ago (!) and their sometimes turbulent relationship. This is good, casual film-making that frames conversions over incidents and dynamic over introspection, something Linklater does well (and should stick to).

We barely had time for music:

The Omega Man, 1971 - John Granier