BREAKING BAD is the best thing on the Glowing Tube, by far — that’s the consensus of all kinds of critics and smart peoples on this rock circling the sun. The thing has its own subreddit, just like Batman and catsstandingup — that’s how big it is.
Who could’ve predicted the actor who played Hal on Malcolm in the Middle would transform into this amazing character, Walter White?
And this mashup here, of Walter White singing the old Sinatra — well, it doesn’t get any better than this.
I tip my hat to actor Bryan Cranston and the whole BREAKING BAD team. Amazing work on an amazing series.
This man named Vadzim Khudabets edits movie trailers for a living. So he took 99 movies trailers and stitched them all together into this masterpiece of summer movie awesomesauce.
Summer means big, dumb summer movies, typically involving (a) cops and convicts shooting each other and making things explode, (b) cartoons from the ’80s being turned into $253 million wastes of good CGI and (c) members of AARP like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone trying to prove they can still hang with the young Jason Stathams of the world.
However: There are some big, dumb summer movies that rise above the mediocre pack of Michael Bay wannabes and G.I. Joe retreads.
PACIFIC RIM is a beautiful B-movie. It’s not gonna win a single Oscar and it doesn’t try for that. What it aims for is simple, pure entertainment, and it does that job well.
Here’s the trailer.
The director of PACIFIC RIM is Guillermo del Toro, who directed HELLBOY and THE HOBBIT — basically, the man can direct anything he wants. He’s a movie-making muffin of stud who did PAN’S LABYRINTH, which is literary, beautiful and one of the most unique movies you’ll ever see.
PACIFIC RIM works because it goes big without getting ridiculous, and entertains without trying too hard. It’s the rare kind of movie where you leave the theater and wouldn’t mind seeing the thing again tomorrow, or even today. There’s so much to see and marvel at, and it’s a testament to Guillermo del Toro skill at storytelling.
So go see the thing. I bet you it’s two hour shorter and five times as entertaining as any random Michael Bay explosion-fest.
Bonus clips below. Enjoy.
An epic supercut of Godzilla smashing things.
Featurette about the monsters in PACIFIC RIM
Featurette about the humans and their giant robots
Hollywood will waste $3 million on six different screenwriters to screw up a script for a $238 million CGI explosion-fest like TRANSFORMERS 16: OPTIMUS PRIME RESCUES MEGAN FOX FROM THE NURSING HOME.
I can sit through something like that — if you pay me — and it won’t move me one bit.
But here’s 3 minutes of film, something that didn’t cost a dime to produce, that will make you laugh and weep and maybe even stop to think about life for a second.
Also: I love Tim’s tagline for his restaurant. “Where breakfast, lunch and hugs are served.”
There are fanboys who quibble with director J.J. Abrams for making a fun summer movie instead of a serious Star Trek film, as if we’re talking about Shakespeare here instead of Klingons and Khan and photon torpedoes.
These grumpy critics complain about too much action and “fun” and not enough hard science and long conversations about dilithium crystals or whatever.
I say, get over yourselves.
I also say this: J.J. Abrams and his writers are clearly having fun, and it shows. It showed in the first STAR TREK and it shows in STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS.
As a speaker, or an actor, you want to feel the emotion you want the audience to feel. When you watch a Christopher Nolan film, whether it’s about Batman or Guy Pearce not being able to remember who killed his wife, the feeling is quite different: serious and somber and haunted.
Emotions matter. Audiences want to feel something, and in the summer — when Hollywood isn’t trying to win Oscars with Serious Films with Very Serious Actors looking Seriously Sad while they wear period costumes from the 1940s or 1840s — people sitting in those theater seats are paying good money to have fun.
So if you want a slow, somber STAR TREK film about science and all that, fire up STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE and wake me up when it’s over, because that thing should be sold as a sleep aid.
We’re here to dissect STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS and say why it works, as a story. It works wonderfully because J.J. Abrams and his writers care about setups and payoffs, reversals and revelations, Easter Eggs and echoes.
I want to talk about the setups and payoffs, because they’re fundamental, and J.J. Abrams and his people get them right.
Warning: this thing is chock full of spoilers. Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie.
Setups and payoffs
If you care anything about storytelling, hey, the setups and payoffs in this film are gorgeous.
Everything ties into everything else. There are no orphaned payoffs, no setups that lead nowhere.
In fact, most setups pay off at least three different times.
Two key examples:
The first time we see Benedict Cumberpatch as Khan, he’s (1) offering to heal a Starfleet officer’s daughter, and he does it with a sample of his own blood. That blood later (2) resurrects a tribble after Bones injects it with some of those same blood cells and (3) brings back to life a certain somebody who (4) saves the Enterprise and crew by entering a radioactive chamber to restart the warp core and such, which echoes (5) some other famous scene in STAR TREK II: CORINTHIAN LEATHER DOES NOT REALLY EXIST, BUT RICARDO MONTALBAN IS STILL AWESOME.
The 72 long-range photon torpedoes loaded onto the Enterprise are an even better setup that pays off at least 10 times.
Ready? Khan escaping to a Klingon planet causes (1) Admiral Marcus to give Kirk the experimental, long-range torpdoes, which (2) make Scotty resign because he’s not allowed to scan the experimental torpedoes, meaning they might take the Enterprise out of warp and blow them up, while (3) the torpedoes let Carol Marcus sneak aboard the Enterprise as a science officer in the first place leading to (4) the revelation that Carol is the daughter of Admiral Marcus, (5) Scotty resigning makes him loose on Earth and free to go investigate what evil thing Admiral Marcus is building out at sector 24-11-whatever, (6) Sulu’s threat about surrender or get torpedoed makes Khan surrender because (7) the torpedoes contain his frozen crew of fellow super-humans, which causes him to (8) team up with Kirk to sneak aboard the ship of Admiral Marcus who’s busy shooting holes in the Enterprise until (9) Carol bargains with her father not to destroy the Enterprise because she’s on it, so he simply beams her aboard his scary dreadnaught until (10) Khan takes it over and demands that Spock lower the shields on the Enterprise so he can beam this torpedoes and crew over, which Spock does since (10) he and Bones already removed the frozen crew and set those 72 torpedoes to explode.
I’m probably forgetting three other payoffs from that one setup involving the best MacGuffin in my memory.
Most films or novels have trouble making their lone plot device make any kind of story sense. J.J. Abrams and his writers don’t have any trouble at all. They tie every major plot point together, and every character, with one thing. Brilliant.
Bonus clip: Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in their best scene.
First of all, J.J. Abrams should direct everything.
Not just STAR TREK and the new STAR WARS: EPISODE XVIII-whatever, but every film for one entire year. You’ll say, “That’s not possible — J.J. can’t direct every film made during a calendar year.”
Sure he can. We can clone ourselves an army of J. J. Abrams, or download his brain into that Big Blue supercomputer thing IBM built just to beat Ken Jennings in a game of Jeopardy. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.
And here’s a brilliant take on how the first new STAR WARS film should go. Now that Disney owns Marvel and Star Wars, I hope studio executives take notes.
So I posted about the Old Spock vs. New Spock ad by Audi, one of the funniest things in forever, and the one thing that surprisingly cracked everybody up is Leonard Nimoy singing some song about hobbits in his car.
Even funnier: that little throwaway bit is a crazy inside joke referring to an actual song Nimoy sang. How deep does the rabbit hole go? There’s an insane music video, with backup dancers wearing Spock ears, or hobbit ears. IT IS EPIC.
Lyrics to The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins
In the middle of the earth in the land of the Shire
lives a brave little hobbit whom we all admire.
With his long wooden pipe,
fuzzy, woolly toes,
he lives in a hobbit-hole and everybody knows him
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
He’s only three feet tall
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
The bravest little hobbit of them all
Now hobbits are peace-lovin’ folks you know
They don’t like to hurry and they take things slow
They don’t like to travel away from home
They just want to eat and be left alone
But one day Bilbo was asked to go
on a big adventure to the caves below,
to help some dwarves get back their gold
that was stolen by a dragon in the days of old.
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
He’s only three feet tall
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
The bravest little hobbit of them all
Well, he fought with the goblins
He battled a troll!!
He riddled with Gollum!!!
A magic ring he stole!!!
He was chased by wolves,
Lost in the forest,
Escaped in a barrel from the elf-king’s halls!!!!!!!
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
The bravest little hobbit of them all
Now he’s back in his home in the land of the Shire,
that brave little hobbit whom we all admire,
just sittin’ on a treasure of silver and gold
puffin’ on his pipe in his hobbit-hole.
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
He’s only three feet tall
Bilbo (Bilbo)
Bilbo Baggins
The bravest little hobbit of them all
Our first documentary — which I rented on the NetFlix and watched TWICE — answers the questions all of us have asked, at one time or another: What happened to the 13-year-old dudes who were really, really into Dungeons and Dragons? I’m not talking a little into it. I mean really, really serious about it, as in they’d go pro if there was such a thing.
The documentary DARKON answers those questions. And no, they don’t hang out in mom’s basement dressed up like warriors and wizards and elves while rolling dice on a table for ten hours a day. That’s silly. They dress up like warriors and wizards and elves for entire weekends and bash each other with foam swords.
And this is serious business. The swords may be foam, but the armor is real, and the politics are all kinds of crazy.
So: watch this trailer, then watch the whole thing.
This documentary is less deeply epic than DARKON and far more comic. You will snort coffee from your nose, or bourbon, or a Capri Sun juice box, if that’s what mom packed.
A former actress from STAR TREK: I FORGET WHICH SERIES (she’s blonde, and left the show, then came back as an evil Romulun twin or whatever) goes forth and interviews all sorts of Star Trek fans. She’s also got interviews with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, but those won’t stick to your mind as much as the dentist whose entire office is decked out like the bridge of the Enterprise or the gang of Klingons ordering food from Taco Bell while speaking Klingon.
The Red Pen of Doom 