For Fans of Gaga, Orchestra, Awesome:

Here is an video that I can't stop watching/listening to of an orchestra playing Lady Gaga's "Poker Face". It's bad ass and really, really cool. That's about all I can say, take a listen:

Silly Oscars, Tricks Are For Idiots

Today there was Earth-shaking news in the world of entertainment for everyone who cares deeply about movies (It's just me? Moving on...). The Academy Awards, aka Oscars, have inexplicably decided to bump up the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten. TEN. Considering I thought last year's Oscars included two movies (out of a nominated five) that should never have been near that title, I will say in my kindest words that finding another FIVE movies to fill the new void is going to be troublesome at best.

The Academy finally caught on (only five months after announcing nominations! Not bad for them!) that people in the public were "mad as hell and [they] were not gonna take it anymore!" because "their" movies (aka blockbusters, or really just movies that might actually make you laugh a tiny bit instead of just making you sob or roll your eyes the whole way through- I'm looking at you Dances with Wolves). The Academy missed the boat last year by not nominating The Dark Knight or even WALL-E (I don't think they should have nominated WALL-E but at least it was better than The Reader) as they represented high quality movies that are arguably the respective bests of their genres who happened to appeal to a large mass of people. But instead, good ol' Harvey Weinstein and his incessant campaigning had to go on and remind voters (who are very, very old) that the Holocaust did indeed happen, was a horrible event, and they should celebrate it and Kate Winslet being the possible most nominated loser by nominating it for Best Picture, which they kindly did.

So now the Academy is trying to mea culpa it's way out of it by adding five more slots to the Best Picture lineup. I say, why stop there? If they're so eager to boost viewer membership/caring by adding movies that people will have actually heard of in large theater chains while simultaneously boosting revenue/losing credibility by letting "NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE" be on every forseeable DVD cover from now until eternity, why not let Flavor Flav host and let the ceremony be sponsored by Coca Cola? That, I can guarantee, will bring in viewers. Especially when they cut to the money shot of Martin Scorsese knockin' back a Coke and winking into the camera lens. The type of advertisement money can buy, because it did (in my imagination).

So, since there are now ten nominees I wanted to get a headstart on the competition and list my picks for the ten nominated pictures for the year 2009. I have to start this soon so I can actually watch all of them. It's hard to schedule in ten movies before the ceremony.

1. (Winner) Nine- The Musical
2. Shutter Island (Scorsese)
3. Broken Embraces (Almodovar)
4. Public Enemies
5. Where the Wild Things Are
6. Julie & Julia
7. Inglourious Basterds
8. The Hangover (my pick)
9. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay will finally be an Oscar-nommed producer!!)
10. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (sleeper hit of the fall!)

In Honor of Watching Valkyrie Tonight...

Tonight I will embark on the Tom Cruise non-German-accent opus known as Valkyrie, a movie that was doomed to fail but in fact performed moderately well considering the immense amount of bad press he received. To honor this sure to be meh occasion I give you three Tom Cruise related videos. The first is his infamous Scientology interview, where he talks about Scientology things set to the Mission: Impossible music. If you don't feel goosebumps of fear and/or nervousness you might want to check your pulse, because he is batshit crazy in this. The only comfort I feel is knowing that this was probably recorded around M:I 1 filming time, so he's had over a decade to mellow out. [Editor's Note: I looked up some of the Scientology definitions he uses to try and make sense of it all and they don't really help but here they are- KSW means Keeping Scientology Working or helping it spread, and SPs are people who do not support and are critical of Scientology]



The second video features Rebecca Romijn's spouse Jerry O'Connell, who does an incredible bed-wetting impression of Tom, but instead of talking about Scientology he talks about being an actor during the past Writers Guild struggles of 2008.

Jerry O'Connell in the parody video Tom Cruise WANTS you to see! from Jerry Minor

Finally, I've saved the best for last. A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there were such a thing as the MTV Movie Awards and they didn't totally suck. During this odd time in this netherworld, a video was made by one Ben Stiller as Tom Cruise's lifetime stunt double, Tom Crooze. The fact that Cruise almost never uses a stunt double is neither here nor there, because Crooze has helped him in all of his movies: Magnolia, M:I 2, Risky Biz and my personal favorite Cocktail. I could loop the latter and watch it for hours. To honor Tom's power and greatness, take some time to watch the below videos and please, enjoy.

Good News First...

According to this article, the ringing in your ears after watching Comedy Central might soon be lessening to a fairly significant extent. Legislation is making its way through Congress that changes the way commercials are heard. Currently commercials can be as loud as the loudest point in the program, so when Colbert yells "NOOOOOOO" at the top of his lungs, Enzyte's "male enhancement" pills can be just as loud, for no apparent reason. Since Congress is trying to pass this legislation through, the commercial makers are trying to beat them to the punch by lowering their respective volumes and hoping that if they regulate themselves then they will not have to face Congress's likely more stricter regulations. In any case, here's to mildly quieter commercials! Win win win!

Image found via Google. Yes, I picked it solely because he's wearing suspenders. Sue me.

Full Circle: The Powder Blue Review You've Been Waiting For

As I've told you twice before, Powder Blue is a little movie that could starring Jessica Biel, Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Patrick Swayze, Lisa Kudrow and Eddie Redmayne. The trailer, which can be found here, first became famous because it was just music and pictures, with no attempt to reveal a plot or, more important, words. The movie quickly became more famous because Jessica Biel plays a stripper in it. Despite the fact she's posed semi-nude before, there were rumors on the internets that she would not be nude in the film. Don't worry eager readers, she is. Not fully (no vajj) but you do see full breasts and booty (now that I've told you this happy Google hunting). I was excited for Powder Blue because I can spot a stinker from a mile away, and I was hoping to beat the rush for a front-row seat to what was sure to be a Razzie leader next year. However, since the movie was released direct-to-DVD, my hopes may be dashed. From the outset the movie seemed filled to the brim with cliches and trying desperately to copy off of better, more original movie concepts (cough *Crash* cough). It was released on DVD May 26th, and I watched it the following day.

Here are the character profiles. Please have a bucket ready for when you barf. Ray Liotta, in full tattooed glory, has just been released from prison after several decades and is searching for a new beginning, as evidenced by his pseudo-baptism in the Pacific. He knows he has a child, and begins searching for his former wife, who he learns has just recently died. Forest Whitaker, in what I have counted to be his third Crash-type of movie (The Air I Breathe, Vantage Point), is actually my pick for the worst actor of the film (worse than JB... barely). His character is introduced to the audience as a wreck of a human, as he is so depressed that he has taken his savings out of the bank and drives around looking for prostitutes and then asks him/her to shoot and kill him. Needless to say he does not have many friends, except for a friendly waitress at a diner he cries at, Lisa Kudrow, who is so oblivious to his painfully obvious condition that she just babbles at him (and gives him free pie!). One night Forest runs into Eddie Redmayne, a funeral home operator who is going deeply into debt, but even so does not take up Forest's surely legal offer.

This brings us to the star, Ms. Jessica Biel. She plays Rose-Johnny, a stripper in a club called Wild Velvet (owned by Patrick Swayze- who is doing his best visual and audio Bret Michaels) named Scarlet (poetic justice). She lives with her dog in what appears to be a hotel room, until the dog escapes (smart), and then we find out she's also addicted to coke and has a terminally ill son who can't be more than four. That's what we call the trifecta. To clarify: she's stripping for her dying son's medical payments, but she's broke and depressed so she uses coke, which makes her more depressed and broke. Aaand scene.

Through movie gods' twisted fate, Ray Liotta comes and sees Jessica perform. What looked in the trailer like she was pouring water on herself is actually wax, which adds a disgusting element to her already pathetically sad dances. He hires Jessica for a private dance after some innocent conversations, where she tries to ride him and he "just wants to talk" (she replies something so fitting I almost cheered in delight "Men don't pay me to talk". Art imitating life). To absolutely no one's surprise Jessica is Ray Liotta's daughter, and conveniently enough he's terminally ill as well. After she discovers this she tries to quit, but Patrick Swayze, while he's getting a blow jay from another dancer (natch) tells her she can't quit because "when you dance I get a rock hard boner". And throughout all this stripping-father- related drama, her son is still dying on a hospital bed with nary a mother to be found.

Because the long version is to depressing to enumerate, the short version is: Eddie Redmayne (the funeral home guy) has JB's dog, and when he returns it to her they immediately hug even though they are total strangers and fall into bed together. While this is happening her son dies and no one can reach her, though somehow Ray Liotta finds out that he has a grandson, pays for his treatment and buys her two tickets to Paris before dying, in snow (in LA!) that looks like blue rock candy crystals (thus the title... Powder Blue). Forest Whitaker and Lisa Kudrow make out in his car after that delicious free pie (known to cure all suicidal thoughts) and then we find out the reason he's so incredibly depressed is because his wife died on their wedding day, leaving the ceremony, with him in the driver's seat. He offers a transsexual fifty grand to kill him, gets robbed, finds the transsexual, retrieves the money and accidentally kills the transsexual in the process. But there's a happy ending for him as he and Kudrow hook up on Christmas, when the movie takes place (sorry, I forgot). The movie ends with Biel and Redmayne at a bus station, meeting each other for the first time since she abruptly left his house post-hookup and her son died, saying "I've got two tickets to Paris."

This movie could have been fabulously bad in that I would have enjoyed it if a few tweaks had been made. Instead, the movie's absolutely atrocious and not only makes the viewer depressed for having seen it, but also that someone was messed up enough to create these characters. 1. Forest Whitaker should not have been in this movie. I was never a fan of him winning for "Last King of Scotland", and post-win he's made many, many bad choices, including this. He overacts to an unparalleled degree of anyone I've seen in most of the film. It doesn't help that his character's so pathetic he can't even kill himself, but his acting is the nail in the coffin, so to speak. 2. More Swayze! Patrick seemed to understand quickly that this film would be a disaster, and it showed. He was clearly having fun, and the aforementioned erection line was a movie highlight. 3. More stripping, fewer depressing songs. JB at one point dances to a song by Cat Power, who I absolutely love but who would never cross my mind as a stripping songstress. She has a beautiful and mournful voice, not something that would turn on a gentleman of leisure. The director clearly knew what he was doing during the stripping sequences as there would be slow pans of JB's body, especially her butt. Basically, if the movie just focused more on JB's horrible acting and great body it would have been exponentially better. Reboot in ten years? (fingers crossed)

Images found on Google.

The Return of Movie Season

The months between February and May are usually painful for me, because this is the time when movies are not yet blockbusters and have just passed being eligible for the Oscars, so they are not "good" either. When checking over my movie tickets between those months I realized the only movie I saw was "Fast and Furious" (always fabulous), but that was shockingly it. Now that it's May and movie executives feel safe in releasing their big-budget hopefuls, I have seen 5 movies in the span of a month and feel confident in re-establishing my blogging prowess.

Now that I am "back" I will first have a blockbuster roundup of the ones I have seen (Wolverine, Star Trek & Terminator: Salvation), complete my obsession with Powder Blue (it has been fully released on DVD) and return to many of my other segments, including revealing my Crush of the Month, an actor who is About to Burst and give you some tips on DVDs to watch. So I say to you all now welcome back and happy viewing!

You're Welcome

Here's some booty-shaking greatness to get you ready for the weekend (you probably shouldn't be eating, or looking at yourself naked, or trying to pleasure yourself while watching this f.y.e.). Man, if I had dance moves this hot Colin Farrell would be begging me for it. But unfortunately, he's on his knees at this lucky lady's house. You go girl! (actually lady).