It’s Christmas time once again. Hoo doggy. Now for something completely unrelated.

Next year will see not one, not two, not even three, but even more revivals of forgotten videogame franchises. I mean, a new Lufia could make a degree of sense. But we’re also getting a new Joe & Mac, a new Clay Fighter, and even an HD remix of Toki of all things. Retro revivals are the hip new thing it seems, especially when you’re a company that no longer exists (or might as well not exist), like Data East and Interplay.

Resources are being spent to make a prettier version of that. Seriously.

Now, I will suggest several series that would be unlikely (and completely unwanted) revivals:

Fighter’s Destiny
DD Crew
Captain Skyhawk
Kabuki Quantum fighter
Aero the Acro-Bat
Buck Bumble
Bible Adventures

I don’t really care about these types of things. I mean, a good game is always good (except when it isn’t…time can be a real bitch on one’s accomplishments), so it’s not like they’d improve anything but making another one. That’s why I don’t join in on the hysteria surrounding the fact that Nintendo hasn’t made a new Star Fox or F-Zero for the Wii. While new ones would likely be good, I don’t really care if they make another one; that is, unless they have a good idea for one, one that would either a new take on the series, or is just fun overall. That’s when a sequel really works out.

Remakes are another matter. If there’s an original idea in an older game that can be expanded upon, sure, go for it. While Kid Icarus is the poster boy of games that people ask incessantly and irrationally to be continued, the setting and some of the concepts within it could make for a good modern game (or at least have a different take on Greek myths, a surprisingly sparsely explored background for games, than God of War). But that’s if they can think of a way to make those ideas work, or any good ideas worth adding. If it’s just to keep whiny gamers content, then forget it.

Horror movie innovator, Brad Fuller, has taken to his blog to update us on the going ons with the upcoming A Nightmare on Elm Street remake. The movie hits theaters April 30, 2010.
Its time to clear some things up.
1:10pm, December 21, 2009
While many of you are enjoying a Christmas break I am working everyday on Elm Street. I have read all the rumors and want to make sure that you have the facts. We are doing a couple of days of reshooting Elm Street. People seem to be making a big deal about that fact. Elm Street is our 8th film and we’ve had reshoots for every film. As I have stated here many times, I try to read everything and I pay attention. The fans input has always been so valuable to me, and Elm Street is no exception. I don’t want to get specific about what we are shooting, but suffice to say we heard you. After you’ve seen the film we can discuss what was reshot. I will say this though- nothing beats seeing Jackie back as Freddy- he works so hard to perfect his portrayal and leaves nothing to chance.

Uh, Brad we love Jackie, it’s you guys vision that usually sucks. And on the Friday 2 front Fuller had this to say.

Let’s talk Friday 13th. We have busted our ass to get that movie going! The script is great- dare I say, better than the first. Shannon and Swift have outdone themselves. We are working with New Line to get that movie going. I had hoped to be able to tell you that we started prepping the movie, but that isn’t the case. We are hoping that New Line decides get us started early next year.

Actually this is delightful news, especially since the first Friday was excoriating, it could only get better from there. Wait…Halloween 2 screws that idea, so never mind.

And BloodyDisgusting shared some lovely parting shots with us. Enjoy!

At the premiere of Avatar, director Bryan Singer told a reporter:

I just yesterday signed a deal to do an X-Men: First Class Origins picture, which is kind of cool. I’m very excited.

Fans of the series will be glad to have Singer back in the director’s chair, but many remain skeptical about the prequel concept for this film.  Still … Singer … X-men … should be fun.

Source.

Hardcore Wii gamers tired of Wiimote shenanigans have a good reason to look forward to the new year, if the first No More Heroes installment is any indication. Ubisoft, Grasshopper Manufacture, and Rising Star Games have marked a North American release date for a sequel and the lucky day is set to be on January 26, 2010.

Is Slyvia coming back? Visit http://nomoreheroesgame.us.ubi.com

Looking at the Nintendo Wii’s best selling game of all time, it’s not difficult to draw conclusions about where the success of the Wii is coming from. As of October 2009, Nintendo’s own Wii Sports took the top spot with more than 50 million units sold. This kind of success with the casual gaming audience has created a lock on Wiimote centered games for the console, leaving many “old school” gamers behind.

When No More Heroes hit the stores in 2007, it finally fulfilled the need for an action title that more experienced players were hoping for in the console. No More Heroes was unconventional, funny, violent, thrilling and bizarre; it contained crude but sharp dialogue and was an intelligent satire that pushed the lead, a happy-go-lucky jobless man living in poverty, against wave after wave of hierarchical boss encounters. The combat system was intense and robust, the game play was erratic and wild – this was not a game a casual gamer would in any way want to touch.

It’s almost been a year since No More Heroes was released in North America, and fans of the title have been rallying for a sequel. If No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle lives up to its predecessor, it looks like their wait is finally over.

Have we got another juicy trailer for you. Today’s helping is the first bonafide trailer since Comic-Con for “Iron Man 2″ (2010), which reunites RDJ, Gwyneth Paltrow, ‘SamJack’ with more powerhouse talent, including: Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johanson, and Mickey Rourke. Jon Favreau is also back directing.

The trailer is up exclusively on uggh, Apple’s website, and you’ll need Quicktime to view it. But it shows bits of the much-hyped War Machine Iron Man team-up, as well as Rourke’s “Crimson Dynamo” in action. But while there are a lot of awesome moments, one can’t help but notice parallels to the 90’s “Batman and Robin” and 2007’s “Spiderman 3″.

Will Iron Man 2 be the new decade’s first comic book sequel dud? Here’s hoping not.

In our latest installment of Aught Lang Syne, NPI is going to look at the best and worst trends in our culture from this decade. John S will tackle movies and TV, while Tim will explain sports and, of course, fashion.

TELEVISION

The Best Trend in Television: The Demise of Laugh Tracks

The slow, steady, not-yet-completed demise of the laugh track is probably the best overall trend of the decade in television. In the 1990s and the early part of the Aughts, nearly every big, successful sitcom was accompanied by a laugh track: Seinfeld, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Will & Grace, Becker, The King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc. Currently, though, most new sitcoms air without laugh tracks. Even among existing shows, the comedies that are critically praised tend to be canned laughless. The entirety of NBC’s Thursday night lineup—the traditional home of the most popular sitcoms—is laugh track-free. ABC comedies Modern Family, Scrubs, and Cougar Town are also not accompanied by disembodied laughter. None of HBO’s comedies—Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, Extras—have laugh tracks, either.

There are, of course, some holdouts: FOX’s only two non-animated comedies—Brothers and ‘Til Death—do have laugh tracks, but neither has much of an audience. CBS, though, has five sitcoms with laugh tracks (Gary Unmarried, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Accidentally on Purpose, and How I Met Your Mother), and all have some degree of success. In general, though, the trend is certainly waning.

The arguments against the laugh track are obvious. If they aren’t to you, then go read Chuck Klosterman’s essay “‘Ha Ha,’ He Said, ‘Ha Ha.’,” from his latest book, in which he calls the laugh track what it is: The sound of dead people laughing. More important, though, is that the trend away from laugh tracks is part of the trend away from traditional, multi-camera sitcoms, and towards the more original, innovative ways of filming comedy. This isn’t to say that all traditional sitcoms are bad—How I Met Your Mother, for example, is a good show—but that the trend away from laugh tracks represents the breaking of the sitcom mold. The new, original sitcoms that we’ve seen this decade—Curb, Arrested Development, The Office—simply would not work with canned laughter.

The Worst Trend in Television: The Demise of Opening Credits

Where have all the credit sequences gone? I’m not entirely sure who to blame for this one, but it seems that every new drama that airs on TV foregoes a traditional credit sequences for a simple title card. I believe it was 24 who dumped them first, but Lost, Heroes, FlashForward, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and The Mentalist are all current network dramas that have ditched any extended opening sequence.

Now, I get why they do it; it saves time. It made sense for 24 to ditch credits (although they did have a brief “Jack Bauer Voiceover Introduction” during the first season), since each hour of the show covered an hour of “real time.” Each episode had to squeeze as much action into to the allotted time as possible.

What’s so dispiriting, though, is how quickly this trend caught on. Every show realized it could gain slightly more time by eliminating credits. It almost became a way for shows to signal that they had a big story to tell*—it seems that the only shows on TV with credits now are sitcoms and procedurals.

*Correlated with this trend is the trend of doing “previously on” before every episode; this used to be reserved for special two-part episodes, before serialization became the norm. This trend is neither good nor bad.

So what’s so bad about this trend? Well, for one, it now means that the credits extend into the actual show, often pretty much until the first commercial break. Even more upsetting, though, is that opening credits are now a lost art. It was ten years ago, now, that The Sopranos premiered, with an utterly transfixing opening. This credit sequence is over 90 seconds long, but I almost never skip through it on the DVD or DVR. Even intros that aren’t as blindingly cool as The Sopranos’ can be integral to setting the tone of the show. Dexter’s theme, for example, is a playful blend of the mundane and the macabre, just like the show itself.

This trend is also related to network television’s trend of scheduling shows to end at 10:07 or 9:03, instead of the hour; in the current television climate, networks need to squeeze in as much advertising time as possible. Only shows on basic or premium cable can really afford credits now. Luckily, though, the best trend of the next decade is probably going to be the end of networks altogether.

MOVIES

The Best Trend in Movies: The Superfluity of Theaters

We’ll cover this more in-depth later in the month, but it really hasn’t been such a great decade for movies. More important than any creative or artistic trend, then, has been the trend in how people watch movies in the Aughts, namely that movie theaters are now entirely superfluous.

Now, I don’t want to dismiss the sanctity of the theater experience, or importance of your local movie theater to your childhood: Some movies ought to be watched in big groups, with big screens. And having a personal attachment to a local theater is fine.

But come on. First of all, it seems like 95% of all theaters now are owned by Loews—not exactly a local flavor. More importantly, though, no movie theaters, even huge multiplexes, can hold every movie. In the past then, movie distributors have essentially controlled what movies people see, particularly in the more remote parts of the country, which may only have one or two local screens.

By the end of the Aughts, though, pretty much anyone can watch pretty much any movie, more or less as soon as it comes out. The proliferation of Netflix and other online rental companies, as well as the ease with which films can be downloaded, both legally and illegally (not that NPI condones piracy), mean that viewers are no longer beholden to the movie theaters’ decisions on which films to show.

There is, also, the convenience factor. Home watching has a myriad of benefits in this respect: You can watch any time, you can pause at any point, you can rewind if you fall asleep, you don’t have to wear pants, you can watch in bed, etc. DVDs, DVR and OnDemand have also benefited TV, but they haven’t fundamentally altered it like they have with movies: People always watched TV at home.

Of course, movie theaters are still important—few people want to watch Live Free or Die Hard on a 13’’ computer screen. And in the coming decade, standard movie theaters may be as common as drive-thrus are now (Raise your hand if you’re reading this and you’ve ever been to a drive-thru. Or even seen one. That’s what I thought.). But right now, at the end of the decade, we have the best of both worlds. If I want to watch Home Alone 2 right now, I’m probably about six clicks away. But if I want to watch Sherlock Holmes on a big screen (you know, so I can capture the full impact of the action and explosions, the way (Sir) Arthur Conan Doyle intended), then I can go to my local Loews.

The Worst Trend in Movies: The End of Original Plots

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what would happen when movies ran out of plots. I figured that there were only a finite number of stories to tell, and eventually people would just have to stop making movies.

Of course, I was a kid, so I didn’t think about sequels, remakes, and parodies. Sequels, of course, aren’t new, and arguably the greatest movie of all time was a sequel. What’s really been different during the Aughts has been the proliferation of franchises. It seems like every blockbuster is made with the potential of a sequel in mind. Superhero franchises abounded during the decade, but there were also sequels to Transformers, Charlie’s Angels, Shrek (two), Saw (five), Final Destination (three), Bad Boys, The Matrix (two), Pirates of the Caribbean (two), Pitch Black, Austin Powers, Mission: Impossible, etc. And that’s not even counting the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Twilight franchises—since those were based on books—even though those were really one story spread over several films.

It’s not that sequels are inherently bad (I, for one, cannot wait until Paul Blart 2), but that the fact that films are now planned with sequels affects their plots: Oh wait, we can’t wrap up all those loose ends; we’ve gotta save some stuff in case this movie does well at the box office. And the fact that franchises are now how studios make most of their money means that they look for things they can franchise when they release blockbusters. A popular book series? A new toy craze? A Disney ride? You can bet you’ll see some movies based on it.

Sequels themselves wouldn’t be that bad, but they have been accompanied by remakes of old TV shows and old movies—some of which weren’t particularly good or memorable the first time around. When Hollywood does decide to remake something memorable, they generally find a way to alienate its most loyal fans or at least leave people wondering what the point was. Like sequels, remakes are not inherently bad, but more often than not, they are a symptom of a lack of creativity, and not a new look at an old idea.

Hollywood even seems to be making jokes about its own lack of ideas: Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie, and Meet the Spartans were all released this decade as “spoofs” of tired genres, only to become a tired genre itself. The first two probably qualify as legitimate, if not exactly groundbreaking, satires, but the last five are more like a loose thread of pop culture cags and catchphrases. These movies, from the depraved minds of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, are to humor what Hitler was to the Jews. Josh Levin of Slate probably put it the best in his review of Meet the Spartans:

This was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a “movie” and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization’s decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.

Somehow, these movies, combined with their affiliated sequels of course, have combined for revenues of $1.24 billion (that’s right, billion) during the Aughts. For movies in the Aughts, a lack of ideas often translates to success.

SPORTS

Best Trend in Sports: The Widespread Acceptance of Instant Replay

I suppose it’s the skeptic in me that made picking out a “best trend in sports” a lot harder than picking out a worst; we tend to overlook the things that slowly improve the way we experience life, and in this case, sports.

I really wanted to go with the introduction of the first-down line, but that happened in 1998.* My second choice—the adoption of instant replay in the NFL—occurred before the 1999 season. So we’ve got to go with a bit of a cop-out here and focus on the acceptance of instant replay in the sporting world.

*Can you imagine watching a football game these days without the first-down line AND the Fox Box? The field would look so bare!

Remember when replay was adopted in the NFL? Remember how it was against popular opinion? Remember how when officials ruled that Vinny Testaverde had gotten the ball across the goal line when it was just his helmet, most people were like, “Well, sucks to be a Seahawks fan”?* Remember how most people harrumphed at the idea of reinstituting the late-80s version of replay, how they said that it would just slow down the game and that human error was an important part of sports and that the world was unfair so you should just deal with it? How ridiculous does that all sound now?

*A truth, of course, especially in 1999, but an irrelevant one.

A decade later, the tenor of the debate has shifted dramatically. Now, we argue about how Major League Baseball and FIFA, in their respective neglect toward instant replay, have done their fans a disservice. Far from crying about time delays, we’re debating how to eliminate umpires altogether.

This is how well the Instant Replay Experiment has worked in the NFL. And not to sound too much like a technophile, but this is a very good thing. The people who believe that human error is an important thing in sports should familiarize themselves with the term “necessary evil.” Human error is never a good thing.

—We can’t really condemn Tiger Woods, honey. I mean, every marriage needs a little human error.

—Malpractice suit? Come on, Bill, it was just a little human error—part of medicine, that’s all.

—You know, I felt that way about the recession, too, Abe, but then I realized that Wall Street just had some human error. It happens.

Instant replay doesn’t eliminate human error from sports, but it limits it. And that might be the best thing that’s happened in sports this last decade.

Worst Trend in Sports: Monochrome Uniforms

Now, this is the section where I’m encouraged, if even obliged, to get a little preachy. And I can go so many different ways here: I can attack steroid usage, but that was really a product of earlier times. I can talk about officiating scandal in the NBA, but that’s not really a “trend,” is it? I can go on about how football players are dying from football-related trauma, but that, too, has been happening for decades.

So I’m gonna go with an issue that really strikes at the heart of how I enjoy my American football. I’m gonna go with monochrome uniforms.

I don’t think I should have to defend why monochrome uniforms are a travesty to the aesthetically inclined. I acknowledge that my attention to uniforms is unusual—especially for a male who also cares deeply about the intricacies of sports—but seriously, how can it not infuriate you to see professional football teams don monochrome monstrosities week in and week out? Football is the one sport—again, we’re not counting hockey or soccer here*—where teams can easily integrate multiple colors into a coherent uniform. Perhaps it’s just tradition, but sporting a jersey and pants of complementary but not matching colors works a hell of a lot better on the football field than it does on the baseball diamond or, God help us, the basketball court.

*Less for athletic purposes than for uniform ones. Hockey uniforms are so strangely configured—shorts, really?—as to be irrelevant in uniform discussion. Soccer uniforms place more focus on ads than on team, which, in my book, is enough for soccer to be expelled from “sporthood.”

Most people consider the birth of monochrome uniforms to be 2002, when the Seattle Seahawks, upon moving from the AFC to the NFC, ditched their traditional royal blue and kelly green color scheme for one of navy and “storm” blue, completing the transformation with blue helmets, blue jerseys, blue pants, and blue socks. The Seahawks were indeed the first team in the modern NFL to make a monochrome look the norm; they’ve probably worn their blue jerseys with white pants, but I can’t find any evidence of it on Google.

But I’m going to go further back and, somewhat unfairly, blame the Denver Broncos. In 1997, the Broncos introduced their now famous “Modern” uniforms:* a new, more aggressive logo with a navy jersey, white pants, and thick orange stripe—more like a very slight parabola—along the side. The Broncos themselves did not take the monochrome route until fairly recently, and they still only do it occasionally. But Denver’s template was imitated ad nauseam throughout college football, often by teams with lighter accent colors, such as yellow or silver, that didn’t stand out on white pants, thus leading to a monochrome look at schools such as California, West Virginia, Boise State,** and Washington State. The Denver Broncos thus unwittingly introduced the concept of the monochrome, and the Seattle Seahawks cemented it in professional football.

*This is how they are identified on Madden video games.

**Boise State does not have the “lighter accent color” problem the other schools on this list do. I postulate that the Broncos went monochrome to completely blend into their smurf turf. I’m not kidding.

In the last seven years, over half of the NFL’s teams have sported a monochrome look at least once, and several have done it frequently. The Buffalo Bills also went monochrome in 2002 and have sported the NFL’s worst uniforms ever since. Both the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Baltimore Ravens—younger franchises that had appeared to carve out a distinct niche with more feminine colors—went all-black, as did the New Orleans Saints.* The Arizona Cardinals, Atlanta Falcons, and Minnesota Vikings all updated their uniforms this decade to more stylish, stripe-infused looks that generally work well, except when they go monochrome. The two teams that should be paying homage to the best uniforms in NFL history—the Tennessee Titans and Houston Texans—are the only two in the league** that have gone monochrome with two different colors, which is especially upsetting since their “normal” uniforms look so much better. Of course, this is a bit of a theme here: Teams with respectable uniforms need to slum for a week or two in the Whitechapel of ugly monochromes. The Rams—whose navy and gold update at the beginning of the decade made for perhaps the best look in football—decided to screw contrast (before bizarrely deciding to wear white pants all the time for the last two years, which in my opinion is almost as bad). The Eagles and Patriots have each dabbled in monochrome, although thankfully only once apiece; the Jets have done it more than they’d like to admit.

*Note how all of these uniforms are worsened even more by the dreaded “leotard effect,” wherein a team’s socks match the color of their pants, making it difficult to tell where the pants end and the socks begin. Since the Jaguars and Ravens have black helmets, as well, their all-black uniforms look especially hideous.

**It’s possible the Dolphins have worn all-orange in addition to all-teal. I seem to remember this happening, but can’t find any proof online, which is probably a good thing.

The nadirs of the Monochrome Movement came when two of the league’s most traditional franchises—and two of its best dressed—each jumped the monochrome shark: the Redskins have done it twice in the last two years, and the Bears took the bait in 2002 and again in 2006.

Pretty much the only teams to resist going monochrome are the ones that can’t because they don’t wear primary colored pants (the Steelers wear yellow pants, the Bucs pewter, etc.). Or maybe these teams are the last ones with a sense of propriety. And that’s why I’m prouder than ever to root for the Giants, who have never lived up to their nickname of “Big Blue” on the field.

FASHION

Best Fashion Trend: Stylish Glasses*

*Throughout this section, “stylish” generally means “black, relatively thick-rimmed.”

Look, I wanted to write about the worst fashion trend, so I had to come up with a best one, too. And I know I’m not qualified to write about fashion: I like T-shirts, jeans, and track jackets. And I don’t even wear glasses.

But there was a time when people who needed glasses were resigned to the fact that they were going to look terrible. Remember She’s All That and how Rachel Leigh Cook was ugly and unwanted and all, and then Freddie Prinze, Jr. took off her glasses and we realized, Wait, Rachel Leigh Cook is actually attractive? That’s how we used to feel about glasses.

And that’s not true anymore. Now, you take a girl (or guy, but I’m gonna stick with girl for my purposes) that looks good without glasses, add stylish glasses, and she looks even better. Why? Because glasses still connote intelligence along with the added element of attainability, which means that attractive girl just transformed into an intelligent attractive girl that’s back in your league.

Who doesn’t love a librarian?

Worst Trend in Fashion: Everything That’s Happened with Hats

And I mean everything.

You have to understand where I’m coming from here: When I was a kid who went to a Catholic school where hats were strongly prohibited,* I couldn’t wait until I got older and started doing things socially—you know, having one of those social lives—so I’d have an outlet for all the hat-wearing I wanted to do.

*Even on dress down days you had to pay extra to wear a hat.**

**Are “dress down days” known nationally? Do kids who went to public school understand the concept? If not, here goes: On a roughly monthly basis, we were allowed to pay money to wear regular clothing. That money went to charity. Forgetting when it was a “dress down day” was a humiliating oversight that lingered for days—the athletic analogue would be airballing a free throw.

But by the time I reached that point in life, nobody wore hats like they used to. I’m not talking about wearing hats backwards, which is fine even if having a forehead like a billboard prevents me from indulging in the movement, or sideways, which nobody ever really thought was cool. I’m talking about two particular changes in how hats were worn. The first is that people no longer pulled hats down so that the apex of the brim was roughly parallel to the ground. Instead, you quit about halfway through putting a hat on, and just left the brim pointing upward on about a 45-degree angle. Everyone I knew at college did this when they wore a hat. But this prevents the hat from performing at least two of its three main functions, which are 1. to block the sun; 2. to block rain; 3. to look cool. In my book, it violates all three.

The second trend is that the people who did pull their brims down to the roughly parallel to the ground area no longer curved the brim at all. They kept it flat, as evidenced by Joba Chamberlain. This not only looks ridiculous—as evidenced by Joba Chamberlain—but it’s very uncomfortable. Flattening the brim applies extra pressure to the front of the head.

And then, this whole style was aggravated by the fact that it became trendy to leave the New Era sticker on top of the brim. Now, for the life of me, I can’t understand who’s looking for that in a hat. The only way I can conceptualize the genesis of this trend is that someone bought a new hat, forgot to take the sticker off, wore it to some social occasion, had his faux pas pointed out by friends hoping to mock him, and then shrugged it off by explaining it was all on purpose—which I admit is a far smarter way to handle the situation than I could have instinctively come up with.*

*And I know this because one day, I bought a new pair of jeans, forgot to take the size sticker off, wore them to school on a dress down day, and had my faux pas pointed out by a friend who used it to mock me for like a week.

There’s no rational reason for leaving the sticker on the hat, just like there’s no rational reason to leave the sticker that repeats over and over again your waist size and length on your jeans. It’s  mindful conformity to an arbitrary standard of what is cool right now that makes no statement whatsoever about fashion, culture, or society. And it’s moronic.

All I want is to wear a hat like a normal human being. But first, I need normal human beings to start wearing a hat like I do.

The Second-Best and Second-Worst Trend in Fashion: The Rise of the Ironic/Culturally Allusive T-shirt

I love wearing T-shirts that I find funny, but there are few things that upset me more than someone else wearing a T-shirt that I know they think is funny but which actually isn’t funny.

MISCELLANEOUS

Worst Miscellaneous Trend: The Decline of American Gum

There was a time when someone asking me if I wanted a piece of gum could make my day. Gum—yet another prohibited substance of a Catholic schoolboy’s upbringing—was a way of tasting a candy-like substance without all of the negative health benefits of actually digesting candy. And even as I matured from Fruit Stripe and Bubble Tape to Big League Chew and Bubble Yum to Bubblicious and finally Doublemint, I enjoyed gum for both its taste and its being an outlet for my nervous energy. It does, after all, taste better than a toothpick.

Over the course of the Aughts, though, the quality of gum in this country plummeted. Traditional brands like Doublemint and Juicyfruit and Big Red were no longer good enough; gum had to do something else besides taste good and be an outlet for nervous energy. It had to give you alarmingly fresh breath or whiten your teeth or, according to most gum advertising campaigns, have some sort of sex appeal. This has led to gum like Dentyne Ice and Orbit and Trident White and Stride and Eclipse and 5; in other words, this has led to gum that appears to care much more about nifty packaging* than how it actually tastes; in fewer words, this has led to gum that sucks. Have you ever had a piece of Orbit and enjoyed the experience? For how long? Five seconds? The best thing about Orbit is that it loses its flavor almost immediately; the worst thing is that it has an aftertaste with more endurance than Messalina.

*Seriously, Cobalt? Cobalt is an element! It’s on the periodic table. How can it be a flavor of gum? And a good one at that?**

**Other flavors of 5 include Elixir, Solstice, Zing, Flare, and Rain. 5’s policy on nomenclature is apparently to use common nouns, basic interjections or meteorological events.

Doublemint? That’s a gum you could take some pride in. You know what flavor Doublemint comes in? It doesn’t even name one. It doesn’t care if it doesn’t whiten my teeth or only freshens my breath a moderate amount or rips out my molar fillings; it only cares about tasting good for more than 15 seconds.

What is the glaringly bright movie poster for?

Why the second Sex and the City movie, of course. I feel as though I have blinded by gay magic and how this promotional poster has ignored the fact there are three other characters in the movie. Ugh. Why am I even investing my concern and time on things like this movie?

I’m going to watch Friday Night Lights; Lyla Garrity is back in Dillon.

Death of Auto-Tune; Death of Kellz; Death of Jay-Z; Death of Competiton?

Words uttered by none other than Brooklyn’s Fabolous, the rapper is fresh off his album Loso’s Way and in the process of delivering a sequel to his DJ Drama assisted mixtape There Is No Competition.

Slated for a release date on Christmas, the subtitle of the tape will be The Funeral Service.  As many fans know, album-Fab and mixtape-Fab are two entirely different entities as the rapper takes off the kiddie gloves to deliver knockouts in the mixtape circuit.

The rapper spoke with MTV to deliver his own anticipation for the upcoming tape.

“Everything on there is just what I’ve been working on since the album.  Even when your album comes in July, I probably finished it in like April or May.  Everything musically has been building up in me since then.  Sometimes I get it out on R&B features or other stuff that you put out, but I hadn’t put out a mixtape in awhile so I had that backed up in me so I had a chance to release.  People are really gonna love it.”

Loso also added that this time around he intends to go to a darker place in order to bury and rappers that feel that they are competitors.

“There Is No Competition is kinda me saying that there’s nobody that can compete with me.  This tape is called the death of competition so that’s why it’s called the Funeral Service so everything is kind of themed around that and it’s kind of dark.”

Along with the mixtape, he also stated that he intends to create a sequel with Loso’s Way 2 which he hopes to release around the summer like the first album.

I’ve never read any of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series.  But the 12th book is coming out soon, and it is titled, “The Gathering Storm.”  Seriously?  That’s the name for the twelfth book?  If the storm isn’t coming until the twelfth, or perhaps the thirteenth book, what has been going on all this time?  “The Gathering Storm” is what you name the 2nd book in your trilogy.  Hell, Winston Churchill’s six volume, 4,700-page history of World War II starts with “Volume 1: The Gathering Storm.”

Robert Jordan and his co-author(s) better spend six books sorting out that storm, if they’ve made their readers wait this long for it to gather.

Well, this post is a little late, but what can I say? The ’season’ is upon the best of us- it’s even upon this blog! Way to go with the snow. Clearly global cooling has taken hold here at Pop! Goes the Planet.

Time for the next tardy installment in the most epic blog series of the decade!

Onward!

8.) Remakes, Reimaginings and Sequels

Hollywood came up with some great stuff in the Noughties, but it certainly wasn’t all about the new and the innovative. Remember that great cult film, or trilogy, or series of films, or cartoons you loved in the 60s/70s/80s? Well in the Noughties they were BACK in blockbuster form.

Comic books were never safe in the Noughties as the likes of Batman, Spiderman and Watchmen were reimagined, sometimes once all over again, for the big screen. Sometimes the results were great: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight was acclaimed even though it tread over territory much of us were fine with in the first place. Sometimes the restful corpse was brought back to life, and then beaten to a bloody pulp much to all of our dismay: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, or the Starwars Prequels, anyone?

In the Noughties, it’s a given that a successful film automatically becomes a franchise. Merchandise is not enough, and we were often stuck with the sequels soon after too. Kiddie film franchises were notorious for this: Ice Age, Toy Story… and then there were the horror films… 48 milliseconds later we’re up to Saw XII and suffering through the Return of the Living Awful Evil Dead.

Worse, we had spoofish abominations such as Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie… ugh!

Will the tenties bring a little originality, or more of the same?

7.) Global Warming

As I write this, an iceberg the size of Sydney Harbour is headed straight for my small Western Australian city. When I was a kid, our teacher April Fooled us into believing a truck was going to drive straight past our primary school with an iceberg on the back, on it’s way to top up the emtpy dam outside the town. I feel like my 8 year old self is going to finally get her giant iceberg that she waited to plaintively for back in ‘93, and it’s going to crash straight into my local.

But icebergs- aren’t they great? They’re pretty great, especially when they’re not melting and stuff, which means I get to keep my neck above water. Australia is a pretty low lying landmass you know. In theNaughties, icebergs gripped our imagination. And it was all thanks to Al Gore, and his documentary flagship for environmental consciousness during this decade: An Inconvenient Truth.

Al Gore was The Dude. His film showed us that we were doomed, and he was prepared to jump on board a cherry picker and wow the crowd with his powerpoints that went outside the projector space to prove it. Consequently, global warming, or it’s new, somehow more accepted monicker ‘climate change’ colours much of the media in the Naughties.

We kinda went off our diet of disaster movies that we so loved to dine on in the Nineties, probably partially due to the events of September 11, making the sight of national monuments crumbling to dust, being smashed by aliens or giant lizards or smothered by tidal waves slightly less palatable to audiences and movie bosses for a while. In the late Naughties though, we were ready for just a little bit more, and climate change was thoughtfully addressed with moving acting and relevant simulations in the poignant disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

Now, ‘green’ is no longer a dirty word, it’s now a word that spawns half-hearted, guilty apathy- and today, unfortunately, a lot of bewilderment. We all know this is something we should be paying attention too, but we don’t really know why. As we all keep half an eye on the latest climate change summit where our Dear Leaders will agree on not much of anything, we can all look forward to an uncertain future and maybe a couple more disaster films.

While the Jane Austen sequel industry abounds with numerous books inspired by Pride and Prejudice, regretfully there are very few sequels to Austen’s first published novel Sense and Sensibility. Why? Possibly because some readers have been disappointed with half of Austen’s unsatisfactory ending for her two heroines. While the two Dashwood sisters do marry: staid and stoic Elinor to Edward Ferrars and impulsive and free-spirited Marianne to Col. Brandon, the second pairings future happiness seemed doubtful. How could a young lady with Marianne’s intense passionate depth be happy with anyone other than her Byronic first love Mr. Willoughby – even after he threw her over for an heiress? Nagging questions arise. Did she settle when she married the Colonel? Would she be tempted into extramarital affairs and runaway with her lover? Possibly, leaving an intriguing premise for continuing the story. 

All these concerns are addressed in Willoughby’s Return: A Tale of Almost Irresistible Temptation a new sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Jane Odiwe. How, or if they will be resolved to our satisfaction is now a possibility.   

Three years after her marriage to Colonel Brandon, Marianne is the mistress of Delaford Park and the mother of a young son James. She has everything that a young married woman could desire: wealth, position, an heir and a loving husband, but her insecurities, jealousy and impetuous nature rob her of complete happiness. Resentful that her husband is frequently called away to attend his ward Eliza Williams and her infant daughter, Marianne “feels” that he cares for his other family more than his own. Their ties to the Brandon’s are strong and painful; Eliza being the daughter of Brandon’s first love who died tragically, and Eliza’s young child Lizzie the illegitimate daughter of John Willoughby the rogue who also threw over Marianne’s affections for an heiress five years prior. In addition, there is that imposing portrait of Eliza’s mother hanging in the Hall staring down at her. Every time Marianne passes it she sees the similarities of their appearances and doubts more and more if Brandon married her because he loved her, of if she is replacing the woman that he loved and lost years ago. When the charming rogue John Willoughby reappears in her life proclaiming he has never stopped loving her, the pain of their failed romance is renewed gradually replaced by conflicting emotions and the temptation to be with him again. 

We are reintroduced to many of the characters from the original novel: Elinor Ferrars and her husband Edward, Mrs. Jennings, the Middleton’s, Lucy Ferrars and importantly Elinor and Marianne’s younger sister Margaret Dashwood who has her own romance in the course of the novel that may equal Marianne’s dilemma in emotion and drama. It could not be a Jane Austen sequel without talk of beaus, gowns and a glamorous Ball, so imagine everything most “profligate and shocking” in the way of young couples dancing and sitting down together! Margaret Dashwood supplies the shocking (to the horror of the neighborhood biddies) in her behavior by dancing more than three times in one night with one partner, Henry Lawrence, the charming and bold nephew of Col Brandon. Like Willoughby, Henry appears to be a good catch: attractive, well connected, an heir to a fortune and too irresistible. He wastes no time in pursuing Margaret’s affections. There is a surprise twist to their relationship that I will not reveal, but readers might recognize similarities to another Austen heroine. 

Odiwe has captured Marianne’s spirit superbly. Romantic, impulsive and let’s face it, high maintenance! At times I really wanted to give her a firm dressing down and felt the same of Austen’s younger Marianne, so I knew that Odiwe had connected their characteristics seamlessly. Marianne may be five years older, but she’s still Marianne the drama queen and that makes for great entertainment! Interestingly, the two men in her life, Brandon and Willoughby, had fewer scenes than expected but caused many reactions to fuel the narrative serving their purpose. This was a nice mirror to women’s fate in Regency times. Men have all the power, women all the presence. 

This is Odiwe’s second Austen sequel, and like Lydia Bennet’s Story she has chosen a character in Marianne Brandon that is ruled by impulse and emotion making for surprise and tension – all good elements to an engaging story that she delivers with confidence and aplomb. Developing younger sister Margaret Dashwood brought youth, vivacity and a bit of rebellion against social dictums to the story. Her romance with Henry Lawrence was an excellent choice as she shared the narrative equally with Marianne and balanced the story. Odiwe’s research and passion for the Regency era shine, especially in her descriptions of the country fair and fashions. It is rewarding to see her develop her own style evocative of Austen but totally modern in its sensibility. There were a few missteps with cadence and vernacular, but I am splitting hairs, and few will notice. Of course we are never in much doubt that it will all end happily, but unlike Jane Austen’s tale, the final transformation of the heroine’s troubling want of caution and choice of spouse will not prompt debate two hundred years later. 

A light and enjoyable read, Willoughby’s Return is a charming tale that sweeps you back into Austen’s mannered world of a young girl searching for love and a married woman realizing it. 

4 out of 5 Regency Stars 

Willoughby’s Return: A Tale of Almost Irresistible Temptation, by Jane Odiwe
Sourcebooks Landmark, Naperville, IL (2009)
Trade paperback (345) pages
ISBN: 978-1402222672

Additional reviews 

• Jane Austen Today
• A Bibliophile’s Bookshelf
• Savvy Verse & Wit
• The Book Worm

Bioware has released pictures of the Mass Effect 2 Collector’s Edition in all its glory, and there was something we didn’t expect scattered amongst the pieces: two discs.  That’s right, Bioware has confirmed that Mass Effect 2 will be told over the span of two separate discs, because, to quote the official statement, “You just can’t fit that much awesomeness on one disc.”

Get more information here.

Night at the Museum was a fun movie. I didn’t didn’t look for consistency in how things were animated, I just enjoyed the experience. I was really looking forward to Night at the Museum 2 when it came out. I enjoyed it and rented it when it came out on DVD, but I didn’t find it as enjoyable as the original.

In Night at the Museum 2, the magical Egyptian tablet that brings the exhibits in the New York Museum of History to life at night is being shipped to the Smithsonian along with many of the exhibits. Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is now an entrepreneur who hasn’t spent all that much time in the museum lately. Then he receives an emergency call from Jed (Owen Wilson) that there’s a problem at the Smithsonian. So Larry heads to Washington, D.C. to help out his friends.

The tablet has brought the exhibits in the Smithsonian to life and not all of them are friendly. A pharaoh (Hank Azaria) wants to tablet to take release some mythical demons on the world, but Larry and his friends, old and new, set out to stop him. Besides Pocohontas, Dexter the Monkey, Genghis Khan and Jed the cowboy, Larry is joined by some new friends including General Custer and Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams).

The special effects are great, but the movie seems like it is pretty much following the formula of the orginal. Still, it’s a movie worthy of adding to your collection, especially if you

The DVD extras include commentaries, a making-of featurette, deleted scenes and an alternate ending.

Over at Empire Online the movie mag’s site (the newest issue of the magazine itself features an iron clad Robert Downy Jr. from Iron Man 2 on the cover; not that I’m a fanboy or anything, the only interesting aspect of Iron Man is that it’s title character is an alcoholic) features a whole slew of movie poster mash-ups.  Everything from Hip-Hop to Board Games to Bible mash-ups with famous movie posters.  It’s excellent to browse through while killing time in a cubicle.  These entries come from the movie poster/Sesame Street mashups.  Enjoy!

-Sonny

Again with the 3D, again with the happy dance. I love, love 3D and since Zombieland was awesome, this should be great. Can you believe I’m happy about a sequel? Yup, I’m happy about a sequel.

Tell Woody to get gap teeth ready because here it comes. Variety reports, Sony is in the process of inking deals to bring back the “Zombieland” team for a second installment, but this time the bloody comedy is poised to unspool in 3D.

Sony has closed deals with Polone and helmer Ruben Fleischer to return for a sequel to the original, which cost $24 million and has earned $85.2 million worldwide to date (“Zombieland” has only opened in a few territories overseas). The Culver City studio is currently in talks with stars Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg to reprise their roles as a pair of post-apocalyptic survivors. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are working on the sequel’s screenplay.

Source: Variety

I use the term sequel loosely, as I’m referring to books that are stand-alone but have recurring characters. Or those books whose secondary characters become the primary characters in another book. You don’t actually miss out on too much by reading them out of order, though there are times when things happen and a period of disorientation occurs. For example, when I read Patricia Cornwell’s books, I did not initially pay attention to the order and read one where the man she loved was presumed dead, but was actually alive and hiding in a form of self-inflicted exile (it’s been a while since I read them, so I can’t remember the details). I knew the character from earlier books, but all the romance had been skipped because I had missed those particular books. But the story itself wasn’t lost on me. I was able to catch on fairly quickly and I still enjoyed the book.

In the world of romance, though, I try to read the books in order. I’m not sure why that is, but I’m almost obsessive about it. I search the internet for lists, especially if they’re not listed in series order on the author’s website (some authors just list them alphabetically, or by order of publication).

I like the series books better.  I love the new characters, but I get giddy when one of my favorite authors publishes a book with related characters from a book I already loved. That is not to say that I think all characters need to have their own books; some secondary characters just wouldn’t work as primaries. The more I thought about this, though, the more I realized that I write what I love to read. I don’t plan it that way, it just comes out. For example, I prefer dialogue to a lot of narrative, and thus have found a lot of places in Gemini that need more detail in terms of setting, clothing, physical descriptions…

Another way I write what I like in other books is that I started writing Gemini and the secondary characters began to demand they have their own books. Libra is Thomas and Anne’s story, and they conveniently insulted a vengeful character in Gemini, which sets up their story well. Sagittarius will be the third book, but I’m still ironing out the details of that one. All I know so far is that it will be Andrew’s story with an Italian Contessa.

I’ve just realized that I have yet to get to my point with this post. My initial thought was: do you enjoy the sequels or do you prefer books to be completely new and original?

27 x 40 Movie Poster only $19.99

Countess Dracula is a 1971 Hammer horror film based on the legends surrounding the “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Báthory. It is in many ways atypical of Hammer’s canon, but can be considered related to that studio’s Karnstein Trilogy attempting to broaden Hammer’s output from Dracula and Frankenstein sequels.

The film was produced by Alexander Paal and directed by Peter Sasdy, Hungarian émigrés working in England. The original music score was composed by Harry Robertson.

Buy this Title on DVD!

Ingrid Pitt reprised her role as Countess Elizabeth on the 1998 Cradle of Filth album, Cruelty and the Beast.

Trivia:

• Ingrid Pitt’s voice was dubbed. Supposedly, she was so furious at director Peter Sasdy that she vowed never to speak to him again.
• Countess Dracula was based on Hungarian Countess Erzsebet (our modern day “Elizabeth”) Bathory who lived from 1560 to 1614. Countess Bathory was allegedly responsible for the deaths of approximately 600 virgin girls, all of which involved torture and gruesome methods of killing. Her atrocities are mostly speculation. She is credited for influencing our modern day concept of Dracula as an entity depending on human blood for youth and vitality.

Buy This Soundtrack!

• The picture that appears behind the opening credits is an 1896 painting by Hungarian artist Istvan Csok. It shows the real Countess Bathory enjoying the torture of some young women by her servants. In an inner courtyard of one of her castles, the naked girls are being drenched with water and allowed to freeze to death in the snow.
• Ingrid Pitt replaced Diana Rigg who turned the role down.
• Although cuts were requested by the BBFC (and the film remains listed as cut on their website) the edits were never made following an appeal by Hammer to chief censor Stephen Murphy.

Ingrid Pitt

It’s inevitable for me to talk about this movie, especially when it turns the world upside down and makes it really, really hard for normal people to go to the movies with peace and calm. New Moon has just proved me that not all the sequels can be good and that when something was bad from the very first beginning, it will only get worse with time. So, when parody things come up to light, I can’t stop laughing at them, not only because they reflect something true, but also because this saga’s plot it’s too predictable, and you can basically fit it in any other kind of context and it is still the same.

ItsJustSomeRandomGuy published in he’s channel another parody video with Marvel and DC toys, and what a better idea than the Twilight saga? Here, we meet Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who falls in love with a strange phsyco and realizes she’s in love with him, although she knows he can kill her. Predictable??? You see it!

Thanks to the creator for this, you are my God! Hahaha.

At least this will be forgotten soon, like High School Musical’s fever…

ItsJustSomeRandomGuy’s Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/ItsJustSomeRandomGuy

Wholesomeness of Disney

Graph by: erin.bffl via Graph Jam Builder

I confess!  I’m a series fan.  Once I fall in love with characters I usually stick with them until the end.  Here are some of the books I’m really looking forward to:

KISS OF DEATH by Rachel Caine (May 4, 2010)

MONSTERS OF MEN by Patrick Ness (May 3, 2010)

PASSING STRANGE by Daniel Waters (May ?, 2010)

SPIRIT BOUND by Richelle Mead (May 18, 2010)

RADIANT SHADOWS by Melissa Marr (April 20, 2010)

WIRED by Robin Wasserman (September 14, 2010)

Oh My Goodness!  May is going to be a great month.

I realize all my favorite series fit into the science fiction/fantasy genres.  So, fill me in on what is coming out in your favorite series, whether it be sci-fi/fantasy or not.   Attempt to broaden my horizon.

My word, I sure am getting a lot of mileage out of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, a movie that always gets a bad rap (not least from me!). But it’s an entertaining entry in the slasher saga nonetheless—in an inept, groan-inducing sort of way.

Yo, dude! Ever hear of knocking?

What passes for a story is riddled with idiotic elements, including a grotesque backwoods mother and her semi-retarded son, an apathetic drifter who’s the most useless red herring ever committed to celluloid, and some seriously lackadaisical counselors. The major gripe for most fans, though, is undoubtedly the lack of Jason. After suffering the fabled “machete slide” at the end of part four, the real deal spends part five in his grave while an impersonator does the dirty work. (Actually, the misinformed mayor remarks that Jason was cremated, but six subsequent sequels would indicate that he’s a tad misinformed.) If you ask me, however, the fraudulent fruitcake is the least of part five’s problems.

If you're not the real Jason, please raise your hand.

Jason is an icon. His hockey mask is one of the most potent images in horror history. Even wet blankets who wouldn’t be caught dead actually watching a Friday flick, instantly recognize the mask. It’s narrative shorthand for death, carnage and epic fail camping trips. Add grubby coveralls and a bloody machete to the equation, and you’ve got an indelible presence to match that of Lugosi’s Dracula or Karloff’s Monster. Of course, only a moron would argue that Jason’s bloodbaths could ever hold a candle to the Universal classics, but there’s something to be said for his level of pop culture notoriety. When you consider that six men have so far played the masked, adult Jason, you begin to realize the potency of the imagery—with the right accoutrements and body language, any big guy can be Jason Voorhees, homicidal mama’s boy.

A mask in the mud.

From People magazine, by way of Fangoria #69 (1987):

“When I put on Jason’s clothes, I felt strange, like I had lived other lives. How I got the part is beyond me, because I really did not belong in Jason’s shoes. I am absolutely not a scary person.

– Richard Wieand

See? Even the actor who played the phony, despite his reservations, could feel the power of the costume. So what if the real Jason was taking a dirt nap? SPOILER WARNING: Vengeful paramedic Roy dispatches his victims in the spirit of the genuine article, and that’s good enough for me. I even like the new, unscathed mask with the blue diamonds—as you may remember, Jason’s mask has red diamonds and a slit above the left temple.

Impostor Jason, I salute you!

* Bill Simmon has links on how to argue with your relatives about climate change over Thanksgiving. (If you have a smartphone, just queue up How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic and wait.) As I wrote over at Bill’s place, Matt Taibi’s recent piece on Sarah Palin—describing how she uses her endless interpersonal conflicts to generate political capital that is totally independent of anything so mundane as “ideas” or “positions”—really opened my eyes on how this Climategate nonsense is doing its work. Climategate shifts the field of debate from statistics and facts, which only a small minority are qualified to discuss, to the field of interpersonal relations and “bad behavior,” on which we can all have an opinion. It’s being pushed as a “huge scandal” precisely because it remakes climate change into a moral question about how smart people sometimes turn out to be arrogant jerks. That this moral question is totally irrelevant to the facts isn’t a bug, it’s the whole point.

* Also on the climate front: Obama will go to Copenhagen to commit to 17% under 2005, California introduces its cap and trade plan, and (via Alex G.) rich nations are not following through on promised climate change funds for developing nations. Surprise surprise.

* Elsewhere on the arguing-with-relatives front: Steve Benen has your charts that show the stimulus worked.

* BLDGBLOG goes inside Yucca Mountain.

* Another second-hand report on a recent Žižek talk, this one on ecology. There’s even more ecologically informed theory at Australian Humanities Review.

* History’s first entry in the things-that-make-me-kind-of-like-Bill-O’Reilly file.

* One of America’s most loathsome politicians may be about to stage a comeback.

* Stephen King may write a sequel to The Shining. Cynical-C says this must be stopped; maybe I’m getting soft, but it sounds to me like it actually could be decent.

* And, via How the University Works, UC Davis student activists have extracted limited concessions from the administration. The crisis, of course, remains ongoing.