Happy Halloween

Pajiba has a list of their Favorite Craptastic Horror Films. It's pretty great.

The Lagging Edge

Have you heard of PCRetro? They sell old and obsolete computers--for less! How do they do it? Volume.

This isn't a joke, mind you. Have you been wishing you could find the old G4 Mac Mini? They've got 'em, for only $499.

How about an old Compaq Deskpro Pentium 3? It's yours for only $39.95! Hurry, while supplies last.

All Hail the Internet

This will make no sense unless you grew up in the Philadelphia area between 1980 and 1983. But if you did, it turns out that there's a StarStuff fan site.

And also a MySpace page.

And also a Youtube gallery.

The Interweb may be lousy for all sorts of reasons, but it make indulging in childhood nostalgia deliciously easy.

PS 3 Wins?

GameDaily constructs what is probably the strongest case to be made for Sony's PS3 prospects. I still don't find it all that convincing.

Bonus: Here's the new PS3 ad. Watch it and tell me if it makes any sense to you. Maybe the problem is that I'm not Japanese.



Extra-Bonus: By comparison, check out this fantastic early Dreamcast ad for Sega's NFL 2K:

Trailer City

What are the two biggest surprises about Smokin' Aces?

(1) That this thing is not directed by Tarantino, and

(2) How much Ben Affleck looks like Freddie Mercury. Why did we never see that before?

Superman Soars!

Alert Gally Readers will recall that WB prexy Alan Horn said last summer that unless Superman Returns topped $200M domestically, there would be no sequel. We now have proof that where there's a will, there's a way:

Last weekend, on its 117th day of release, Superman Returns cracked the $200M mark.

Today, after 121 days in theaters, Superman Returns is sporting a titanic $200,028,903 in domestic box office.

Just how much corporate will did it take to accomplish this feat? For the last few weeks, Superman Returns has been playing in about 300 theaters and averaging--get this:

Between $16 and $277 per theater!

You don't see corporate commitment like that every day.

A Film by Emilio Estevez

The set up to the joke is pretty great: Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, David Krumholtz, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, and Elijah Wood walk into a bar . . .


But the punchline seems so lame that it's kind of depressing.

The Departed: Best Picture?

I've been meaning to say something about The Departed for a while now, but I kept putting it off until I could see. I still haven't seen it, but that isn't going to stop me from pointing out its impressive box office run.

The Departed opened to relatively little fanfare--it got good reviews, but the ad push preceeded the release by only about two weeks. Certainly, it's the lowest-profile Scorsese picture in a very, very long time; probably since The Color of Money (if you discount the artsy Kundun). Consequently, it opened to a relatively modest $26M. (Although that's a career-best for Scorsese.)

But if you look at the numbers since then, Departed is showing fantastic legs, with weekend declines of 29.2 percent and 29.3 percent. It's already got $80M in the bank domestically and I suspect it will chug along to at least the $100M mark--and that's before it gets a nomination for Best Picture.

Again--I haven't seen the movie yet--but just from the externalities, The Departed has all the makings of a BP nominee: an artistically ambitious, but popular, movie that succeeds over long period of time and is directed by a revered figure who's been overlooked by the Academy. A movie with that pedigree is a lock for a nomination, even if it stinks.

Keep watching the daily grosses for The Departed. It's been the #1 movie nearly every weekday since its release. That's a sign that, even three weeks out, it's prepared to keep running.

Game Theory

Ever wonder what the top-rated game system launch titles are? Sure you did.

Note the supremacy of Dreamcast. Damn you, Sony.

This video (thanks to Galley friend P.L.) has apparently been making the rounds. Laugh all you want, but I always knew those ballerinas were filthy.

To all my homeys in lockdown at the Firm:

This Kirkland & Ellis recruitment video is priceless. Sample: "I fill my day as much as possible, I go home, I have dinner with my family. And then I go work again, as necessary." Remember, this isn't a warning, it's the sales pitch.

Bonus: Check out the podcast pitches at Anonymous Law Firm.

Trailer City, 2

Turns out Casino Royale isn't a remake of Casino Royale, it's a remake of From Russia, with Love.

Trailer City

So sure, I'll see anything with Emma Thompson. But a movie with Emma Thompson, Buster Bluth, and Edna Mode?

Game on.

The Poetry of the Macho Man

"I've been in the Danger Zone east of the Pacific Ocean, west of London, England, south of Mars, and north of Hell."



That's a shout-out to all my homeys. You know who you are.

Feel free to nominate your favorite Randy Savage moments.

MNF

From Galley Brother B.J.:

mmentators kept talking about whether Parcells could put Bledsoe back in. I was dieing to see Parcells go over to Bledsoe to tell him to go back in, only to have Bledsoe laugh at Parcells (or hit him with the Stone Cold Stunner) flip off the crowd and walk off the field.

Romo had a chance to become my favorite non-Eagle player in the league. He hit a wide open (as in no one within 10 yards wide open) Owens in the hands on 4th down halfway through the 4th quarter, and Owens dropped it. If Romo would have bitched Owens out on the sideline, he’d have become a superstar in my book.

The Giants pretty much won the NFC East last night.

Kornheiser needs to get dropped from MNF. Not because he’s a bad color analyst (which he is), but because every piece of his I’ve read or appearance of him on PTI I’ve seen since he started MNF has consisted of him bitching about doing MNF. Either he’s groaning about holding back on being snarky and making empty promises to change next week or he’s complaining about how he doesn’t have time to follow anything else because he spends all of his time on a bus looking at football stats.

Wii Nugget of the Day

From IGN:

Microsoft debuted Xbox 360 with a miniscule amount of systems. Sony is set to do the same with PlayStation 3. But Wii will kickoff in America on November 19 backed by a whopping one million units and a steady flow of more shipments. By the end of the year, approximately four million Wiis will be available around the globe and the chances are extremely strong that they'll all go sold. Nintendo has delivered a lowball estimate of six million Wiis available by March 2007, but insider reports suggest that as many as 12 million pieces of hardware could be available by that time period.

PS3 Shortages, continued

Sony to ship 2 million PS3 units by close of 2006.

Or maybe not. Says Sony's Jack Tretton, "The honest answer is it's more of a target."

But the 6 million units by March 2007 is still written in stone! (For now.)

Fly, Eagles, Fly (Part II)

Gally Brother B.J. does not agree with my sunny assessment of the Birds:

We have very different views on the Eagles.

They're driving me insane this week because aside from the game against Dallas, they haven't played any full games. They'll play for a half or a quarter and dominate the other team (2nd half vs. Green Bay; 1st half vs. NYG; 1st half vs. SF; 3rd quarter vs. NO; 4th quarter vs. Tampa Bay; 2nd and 4th quarters against Houston), but the rest of the game they're awful and they practically try to give away the game (the 4th quarter collapse vs. NYG; the near collapse vs. SF; losing in the 1st half to Green Bay). You watch one of their games and you end up spending part of it thinking they're Super Bowl contenders and the rest of the game expecting them to go 4-12. That fucks with your head.

The Eagles final drive at the end of the second quarter was brutal to watch because with 1st and goal at the 5 with 10 seconds left, you knew the Eagles weren't going to score. (Andy Reid why are you calling anything other than a fade to the back corner? And Donovan, what the fuck are you thinking throwing to someone on the 2 with 3 defenders right by him--and not seeing the guy who looked pretty fucking open 7 yards behind that receiver in the end zone?)

Speaking of McNabb, I hate to do this, 'cause he and Westbrook are almost the entire offense (and the offense is the entire team), but the loss goes almost entirely on his shoulders. In addition to the above mentioned meltdown at the end of the 2nd quarter, Radio Active Man threw two pick 6's. The rest of the blame goes on Fallout Boy for not taking a knee on the 1, or waiting at the goal line and not crossing until a Tampa defender got within 5 yards on the Eagles' last offensive play. Because if you're a real Eagles fan, you knew the defense would give up a last-second field goal

I can't blame the defense for the loss. Despite getting zero pressure on Gradkoski (on Tampa's final play before the field goal, he had enough time to trip over himself, get up, and still make a read or two), unless you count the sack where they were called for a 15-yard facemask, they only gave up 9 points. They only gave up about 20 yards on Tampa's final "drive" and they forced a shaky kicker to make a 62 yard field goal with the game on the line.

(Fun fact: Tampa's kicker was 0 for 3 on field goal attempts of 40 or more yards going into the game, but 2 for 2, including the 62 yarder, yesterday. In the span of 6 days, Arizona loses a game because its kicker, who set a bunch of records last year, misses a 40 yarder and the Eagles lose because a kicker makes a 62 yarder.)

"Deuce"

Not Bigelow. Galley Favorite Angela Lansbury is returning to the White Way in, of all things, a play about tennis. Sign me up.

Fly, Eagles, Fly

The good news is that the Eagles just killed the Bucs by the numbers. I mean, outgaining them 506 yards to 196 yards? 22 first downs to 14 first downs? 7.7 yards per rush to 3.7 yards per rush? 8.3 yards per pass to 3.0 yards per pass? That's Eagles football, baby.

What's that, you say? The final score? Sure, the Eagles may have lost the game and some people may get bogged down with that sort of linear thinking, but there's a deeper way to look at yesterday's debacle:

The Eagles are, as I've been saying to anyone who would listen, a bad team. This is a 6- or 7-win squad. If they finished 8-8, it would be a real achievement. The first six games were fool's gold. Here's the combined record of the teams the Eagles have beaten: 9-14.

Go ahead and look at the schedule. Find the wins remaining on the board. Tennessee? Remember, they'll be playing the Vince Young Titans, not the team that started the season winless. Washington? Mabye the home game. Jacksonville? Maybe. Those are the three best chances for victories. Everything else looks like a stretch.

So why was yesterday not terrible? Because if you look at the Eagles as a 6-10 team, not a 4-2 team, then you can find the positives. You can be happy about the comeback and about how great McNabb looked in the second half. When bad teams lose flukey games, there are positives to be found. You shouldn't have expected them to win in the first place.

P.S.: I'm not hating on the Birds. Actually, I think that this team is eminently lovable. They're fun to watch and they have great characters. And, like a cancer patient in remission after chemo, you can't help but rooting for them. And hope that by next year, they'll be back to 100%.