July 23, 2008 --- VAN NUYS, Calif. --- The cover art for Digital Playground’s epic sequel “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” is now available, as well as juicy facts concerning the budget, the special effects, and the raw, passionate sex. The original “Pirates” made history as the most expensive adult film ever produced, but it is left in the shadow of “Pirates II” and its 10 times larger budget. The extra cost can be partly attributed to the over 600 astounding special effects. . . .
Sasha Grey describes the special atmosphere that surrounded the production. She says, “There was always sexual energy on set. My sex scene with Evan Stone and BellaDonna was amazing! We all wanted to [have sex]; we were all horny. It was what pornography should be—flawless and unforgiving in every sense!" . . .
Digital Playground’s newest signed contract girl is Riley Steele and “Pirates II” contains her first filmed sex scene ever. Riley says, “What a fabulous film to start my career with. The original ‘Pirates’ was partly responsible for my decision to enter the industry. As if just being in the film wasn’t enough, what was supposed to be my first boy/girl scene turned out to be so much more."
Here is something I immediately noticed last night upon viewing the film. Nolan has brilliantly inverted the world of Batman's past. Take, for example, the climatic scene where Batman and Gotham police try to save both Rachel and Harvey Dent. The situation neatly parallels the predicament that Batman faces in Batman Forever (a terrible film). In that film, the Riddler has captured both Robin and Batman's lady love. Batman/Bruce Wayne must choose which one he will save: his love, who represents Bruce, or Robin, who represents Batman. In the end he saves them both in a classic bit of heroism by diving down a seemingly never-ending shaft, scooping up both just in time, and explicitly proclaiming that he is both Batman and Bruce Wayne.
The Dark Knight turns that situation on its head. There is no option for Batman to save both Rachel (Bruce's love) and Harvey (Batman's sense of duty). From the first, he must choose ("Rachel" he tells Gordon, as he jumps on the Bat pod to save the day) and then when he does he is deceived by the Joker. He thinks he is going to save Rachel, but it turns out the Joker has reversed addresses on him.
But Rachel and Harvey die as a result. Rachel is, of course, killed in the explosion. Harvey is brutally scarred (emotionally and physically) even though Batman helps him escape. Harvey Dent as anyone knew him is now dead, with Two-Face taking his place.
This is probably over-thinking it. But I found this to be a neat parallel to Batman Forever. It shows Nolan's Batman does not reside in the same world as previous incarnations. He can't "save" the day in a classical sense. He is forced to make one impossible decision after another and even then he can still lose everything.
When "Batman Begins" came out, many of us praised it as a crime drama that happened to feature a guy in a bat costume. But that praise was partially in comparison to the Schumacher nipple-disco that had come before.
Yes, in "Begins" Bruce Wayne fights gangsters and police corruption (and choppy action editing). But he was also dealing with ninjas and an ancient secret society and Liam Neeson with two names and a Van Dyke beard and the thespian skills of glassy-eyed Katie Holmes as a little girl trick-or-treating in an assistant-DA costume. Also, there was that CGI elevated train and the CGI hallucinations and the sonar-guided bats and that dopey conspiracy involving corporate malfeasance, poisoned water, and a gun that microwaved that water into steam (unless that water happened to reside in a human body). You could almost feel Nolan fighting for his gritty urban Batman against a riptide of studio notes.
"The Dark Knight" has none of that.
It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."
Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"
During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public’s lack of imagination. If they don’t know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don’t they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What’s wrong with them?
The reason the sports analogy fails is because when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 - but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game.
I can picture it, unfortunately. Those ratty, rundown rooms in which he lived. The pistol he kept in gleeful defiance of the city's gun laws. The prickly brilliance with which he thought himself down into a narrower and narrower trap. The cosseted ill-health and the limp. The endless self-conceit that confirmed even his despair as a great and cosmic thing: an arrogance against the universe, a point of deadly pride. "Here in old age," he grandly announced when I saw him at lunch this spring, "I've finally decided that being a genius is enough for any man, and I'm just going to have to live with it."
He couldn't, of course, because it's not enough: The mad brightness of his arrogance burned against a background blacker than the grave. But the truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn't do with words.
Which, Katzenberg assured me, is a story that's been told from the beginning of time. And he told me I should get this book by Ted Kopell and Joseph Campbell called Hero of a Thousand Journeys or Something. Actually, he offered, because he liked me so much in our first meeting, to have his people send me a copy. To help me write his movie.
And I said "oh, that sounds great," because I had been coached for that meeting by the directors and producers, and one of the rules was that if Jeffrey said anything about story structure or Joseph Campbell, I was supposed to pretend I'd never heard of him.
Not kidding. Not exaggerating. Except for the Ted Kopell part.
Sources said Michelle, who works in Dubai for magazines firm ITP Publishing, launched an angry four-letter tirade after her second romp was halted.
She is alleged to have called the cop a f****** Muslim **** and tried to hit him with her high-heeled shoe before being restrained.
Juan Johnson is a police officer whose off-duty act of kindness to a stranger in distress landed him in the middle of a drug bust in which he was repeatedly kicked in the groin by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal.
But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
I remember working on Disney licensed comics in the mid 1990s. A writer submitted a springboard about a story in which Dopey temporarily becomes smart. And the story was rejected by the Disney rep because, in her words, "Dopey is sacred here." You can't f**k with Dopey. The Dopey concept is pure.
Batman doesn't drink fucking milk. That's bullshit. Milk is for emo douchebag ponces, like Spiderman. Batman drinks the blood of criminals. And then he washes it down with bourbon.
Look, before you start with the chorus of “That movie wasn’t for you” remember this: I enjoy a good chick flick. But this wasn’t good; not by any stretch of the imagination. This was a dick and fart joke movie for women. Make no mistake, the humor in this is as crass and base as anything the boys’ movies have to offer. Someone shits themselves. There’s a close up of some forty-year-old pubic hair poking out of both sides of a swimsuit. A four year old utters the word SEX to the amusement and shock of all present in the room. A Dog repeatedly humps pillows. Sound familiar? I spent a goodly portion of this film wondering when the Farrelly Brothers had decided to cut their balls off and develop a fondness for Prada.
Two and a half god damned hours. . . .
But I just couldn’t get over how much this shared in common with BRATZ: the Movie. Montage after montage after montage with each and every problem finding a solution by the fabulously dressed four getting together, squee-ing in a pitch that will deafen dogs and neuter most of the males in the audience, and realizing that friendship will get you through any bout of rampant self-absorption. Oh, so this is what happens when you leave Bratz dolls in the sun too long. I’m not gonna get on the consumerism trip. Not here. Not with the crowd that will drop a grand on a mint condition Revenge of the Jedi poster and consider it an investment in the future. A COOL investment in the future. Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the fuck am I to judge? But Christ in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?
I think I know why he's bothering to keep the NYT gig. For one, it's steady, pays incredibly well, requires (as he's shown repeatedly these last few years) minimal time and thought, and offers notable ancillary perks. Two, he's undoubtedly mindful of what happened when Pauline Kael, who thought she knew better than everyone how to make a good movie and what was wrong with bad movies, took an indefinite leave of absence from the New Yorker and went to work at Paramount in development. It was, history records, a colossal failure. Someone who has spent his/her entire adult life criticizing the work of others without having the balls to enter the arena himself will find the going hard, if not impossible. A little voice will keep whispering in his ear, telling him how the Frank Riches of the world will see this particular work, and that will be paralyzing. Then, too, the other above-the-line people will likely find him insufferable as he only criticizes the work in front of him and offers nothing useful. Sadly, though, like Kael, when this is all over and he leaves "to go back to my first love, newspapering," he will have learned no humility. Or grace.
Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.
Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.
The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on “Project Runway” and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks. I didn’t write about him often, but when I did, I’d quote his best jokes or tell stories about vacationing with his family.
Christina Aguilera gave an interview in the latest issue of Us Weekly in which she revealed that her hooters are a whopping size E-cup. Now I've seen the photos of old Funbags Molloy recently, and hearing those puppies are a size "E" shouldn't surprise me--yet strangely it does, in the same way you'd look at a Aston Martin and know it's expensive but still be taken aback at the price tag.
As many have already said, Ford actually feels like he gives a shit again and turns in a great performance as the tired, old Archeologist turned war hero turned tenured professor always ready for another jaunt. Everyone else pulls their weight and does a great job despite their character’s general lack of depth. If there’s anyone here who has a thankless job, it is Shia who – coupled with Lucas’s “Oh I haven’t told Steve or Harrison yet but I might as well tell the press” bullshit – is having a ton of weight dumped on his shoulders. He’s fucking great in this, and much like many of his other projects proves once again to be one of the very best things about it. But he’s no Indiana Jones. That’s not his destiny. He’s an incredibly talented kid who is just one of us. And when I say one of us, I don’t mean one of the AICN crew. I mean one of US. You and me. Dork. Geek. Filmlover. Just another kid looking for a time machine.
And when you’re a 21-year-old kid asked by George Lucas and Steven fucking Spielberg to be in an Indiana Jones movie – you fucking do it. And when they say “Here kid, hold his hat for a second and look longingly off camera as if to intimate a possible sequel” – you fucking do it. But, man. Is he ever going to get eviscerated for fucking doing it.
For years, Iron Man's lesson was just that simple: Stark's keen technological mind represented the secret of American vitality; Iron Man's contribution to the nation's defense was an obligation that his gifts bestowed. America, under this Cold War logic, is powerful because America is inquisitive because America is free because America is good. Doesn't America have the right to defend itself? And shouldn't America use its endowment to the benefit of mankind? If so, doesn't that mean that when Wong-Chu comes to take over a South Vietnamese village, America would be irresponsible not to vanquish him with a souped-up transistor? In that vein, Iron Man's adversaries were fiends like the Red Barbarian, a Soviet general and spymaster who lived up to his nickname by bludgeoning his doltish subordinates with a ham hock.
But before long, the lessons of Vietnam sunk in on the comics juggernaut. Perhaps the idea that all the United States had to do was build bigger gadgets of disaster to use on a complicated world was hopelessly flawed. Perhaps Iron Man was symptomatic of the rot. Perhaps, by holding up a mirror to U.S. policies, Iron Man could become a vehicle for cleansing the country of its Cold War hang-ups. Marvel set to work reworking the character and its themes.
A problem confronted the company, though. Iron Man is a superhero. Cold-War product or not, Marvel couldn't very well turn him into a villain. Writers in the 1970s and 1980s solved the problem in two creative ways. First, the comic adopted the New Left's structural critique of Vietnam -- the war was the inevitable product of a systemic belief in unrestricted capitalism, American exceptionalism, and racism -- by making Stark Industries an enemy of poor Tony Stark, who had unleashed malevolent forces he couldn't control. Thus Iron Man's nemesis became a black-mirror version of himself: the ruthless metal juggernaut (another metal-suit weapon) subtly named Iron Monger, controlled by rival defense-industry bloodsucker Obadiah Stane. More cleverly, Stark's best friend Jim Rhodes became a second Iron Man -- but one sent into a paranoid frenzy of destruction by the armor's inability to interface properly with his brain. Rhodes's secret identity? War Machine.
Richardson’s title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0).
On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).
Just goes to show, there are only 10 types of people that understand binary. Those who do, and those who don't.
At the end of the day, the first tier of costumed crime fighters is limited to just three members -- Superman, Spiderman, and Batman -- truly ubiquitous figures who any American could recognize even if they don't know anything about them.
Iron Man belongs firmly to a second-tier of major comic book characters who'd be instantly familiar to anyone who was, at any time in his or (less likely) her life a reader of superhero books.
Where a lot of folks surprised about the success of the Iron Man film seem to me to have gone wrong is just in underestimating how big the audience for the second-tier is.
