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Haha, Dave, it's almost like you're taunting us and reminding us to be careful what we wish for. Because who wants to talk about those flicks? Except for Bond, that is. I'll see the two cartoons, too. But I think the most intersting discussions will be about Twilight, which seems to have the widest range of potential outcomes, from surprise hit to flaming wreckage so incendiary no one can get close to it.

This is like the second w/e in a row that I didn't get out to see a movie. Am I missing something??? Nothing was going to get me out during Texas - Texas Tech (best game of the season, anyone?) but man, I can't remember a time I've felt so ho hum about the upcoming release slate this late into the fall.

TWILIGHT = 55 FRIDAY, 125 WEEKEND.

NO doubt.

And I saw the new Spirit trailer before "W." last week. What, is that dude's "superpower" that he "bangs hot chicks"? I used to think that movie looked pretty lame but now I think it's going to OWN, since it appears to be just a roll-call of hot squack.

Oh, yeah, and Elizabeth Banks = B O N E R.

Lex, the only thing worse than a broken record is one playing high-pitched obnoxious squeals, FOREVER.

Please never use the word 'squack' again. That's more offensive than 9/11.

The Spirit - The first teaser-trailer I thought was brilliant. EVERY other ad relating to this movie has been a train-wreck disaster. This looks god awful.

Triple Option, missed the game, but I'd agree with you on I've got zero excitement on many of the upcoming releases this year. I'm just hoping to see most of this stuff for free.

Purely gossip: a friend of mine works at Universal, and at one of their work retreats he saw footage from upcoming '09 films (select scenes, trailers etc.) The one that brought the house down was BRUNO. According to my friend, the two clips they showed brought roars of laughter and the crowd, these are suits mostly, were floored.

Hopscotch, why do you bother coming here if you can't muster up any excitement for any of the upcoming films. There are quite a few movies in the next two months that a film lover should be quaking in anticipation for.

Has anyone tried to watch the two Starship Troopers sequels? The partner and I tried after rewatching the first one. Turned the second one off after 20 minutes and then we fell asleep during the third. From the brief bits that we saw they were clearly the worst kind of direct-to-DVD sequels.

Triple Option, it's not just like that in Texas. Releases have been so quiet here in Australia that Burn After Reading just spent it's THIRD weekend at #1 at the box office. Surely that's a first for a Coen Brothers movie.

I really wanna go see Man on Wire though.

Kamikaze...

I assume the production values are way worse, but are they on par with the RoboCop sequels in terms of COMPLETELY missing everything that was subversive and funny and ironic and political about Verhoeven's original?

Though "RoboCop 2" is in such spectacularly awful taste all its own, it's kind of a minor masterpiece of provocation and unpleasantness, even if it's 180 degrees removed from the original.

I watched Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation and it connected well to the spirit of the original (having the same writer helps) while otherwise being your standard hotties vs. monsters direct-to-video stuff.

Man on Wire is excellent.

Your sanity is showing, Lex. Good comment.

I saw a matinee of Robocop 2 on acid, after being up tripping all night. My friend and I thought it was hilarious, until they dumped Robo in pieces outside the police station. Then we started screaming.

I would love to have been able to watch the transition between those two moods. "Ha ha ha...heh...hey...AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

You pretty much got it.

Point of Clarification, Kamikaze, I'm in LA but it was a nationally televised game. I'm thinking Utah could be the team that gets screwed out of a BCS game this year. I think Texas may have the best shot to end up in the Big 12 title game against Mizzou. Maybe TT beats OSU and OU, but could be tough.

Right now I'd rather SEC winner vs Big 12 winner than anything else. Penn St wins out, they prolly should, in theory, play for the title but I think they'll be a one-loss team who'll get bent over on this. I'm sure they'll be plenty of whiners from USC saying it should be them.

Was RoboCop II the one where the dude I think fell in acid and got splattered by the speeding car? That was a great F/X. I think I saw #2 and commenting to my friends that was more violent than a Dirty Harry movie and I pretty young at the time.

The guy melts in toxic waste in the first Robocop. Robocop II features a brain surgically yanked out of a head with the eyeballs still attached.

ROBO 2 really has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

I'd offer it up as one of the last really insane over-the-top '80s action movies (released in 1990) before the P.C. movement and even basic human common sense took over...but not in a good way; Isn't the main villain a little kid who goes around drugging and shooting people? It's chock full of stuff like that (violent suicide played for laughs, little league kids pulverizing citizens with baseball bats, hookers stomping people's skulls in with their high heels, a nerdy African-American politican whose offensive depiction would've drawn complaints in the Jolson era....)

I wanna say at the time it was considered kind of a bland, mainstreamish monster-movie follow-up to Verhoeven's dark and witty original... In retrospect, it's the rare big dumb action movie that makes even a misanthrope like me bristle.

Robocop 2 is suddenly at the top of my Netflix queue.

I saw it in 1990 - when I was 14 - and I remember one scene scaring the booboo out of me. I don't remember a single detail of the scene, though.

I'm ashamed to admit that I have seen both Starship Troopers sequels. The funniest thing about Hero of the Federation is that the only thing that makes the "Hero" a hero is the fact that he was the only one who didn't sleep with the blonde. Number 3 is beyond terrible. I saw Caper Van Dien do an interview where he said that the main thing that made him want to come back was the script. Priceless.

Robocop 2 is shit. I remember being really disturbed as a kid when they dismembered Robocop. I felt really dirty after that scene. Although is hard to totally hate a movie that gives us this gem of a line: "No more nuke for you bitch."

Robocop 2 has its moments: Frank Miller stole his own line out of Dark Knight Returns with "Isn't this a school night?" And the brain with the eyeballs, and the old dude yelling "Behave yourselves!"

But seriously, Robocop 2 is freaking Godard next to Robocop 3. It's about Robocop vs... urban planners? And he fights them with a fucking jetpack?

I'm surprised with how intense Robocop 2 was yet how immensely forgettable. I don't remember a single thing about it save how awkward the final battle looked. Sure, ED-209's special effects haven't aged well, but at least in the first movie, it served more of a purpose than a big, dumb final showdown. Plus, the original walked the tightrope of harsh satire quite well, while what I remember from my experience of 2 is it jumps straight off of its own free will.

Robocop 3, though, unintentional comedic GOLD!

"TWILIGHT = 55 FRIDAY, 125 WEEKEND.

NO doubt."

Is that in millions? Where on earth is the audience for that outcome? It's the kind of movie that I could be easily swayed to see, but I'm getting "semi-lightweight" vibes off of every frame I've glimpsed so far. Not that Twilight looks like a bad movie, per se. It just doesn't look $125 million weekend great.

I have not seen any Robocop sequels, but I do like Verhoeven's original (deja vu there). But, yeah, the production values on the Starship Trooper movies are terrible (all at night so as to eliminate the need for all those pesky "visual effects" and the like) but it's just so cheap-looking and while the bad acting in the original was humourous (Denise Richards for Best Supporting Actress 1997, please - one of the funniest performances I've ever seen no doubt) in the sequels it was just kinda depressing.

Of course my partner and I woke up around the one hour mark of 3 and had no idea what was going on. We did a quick scan of the movie and couldn't even find the Casper van Dien nude scene. UNIMPRESSED!

Richards was fine and all, but DIZZY FLORES 4 LIFE.

TOTAL hotness and awesomeness. Dumbass Johnny Rico should've been all over that from the jump and left Carmen Ibanez to MULDOON.

(Does Patrick Muldoon still work, or did he legally change his name to BILLY BURKE and go on to appear on 24 and every Greg Hoblit movie? Separated at birth, those two.)

The Robocop sequels were written by Frank Miller. If that does not make you freak out about The Spirit. Well, consider yourself lucky.

Also Camel: everytime I see a poster for Australia. I have this thought in my head; "I know of an Australian whose really looking forward to that movie. Yep. Australian."

Maybe this is just my jeff-described cat vision where I see things no one else does, or where I make random visual associations... But do the trailers for AUSTRALIA look an awful lot like PEARL HARBOR?

(I'm one of the few who likes PH, so at least for me, that's not necessarily a bad thing or an insult.)

Like, yeah, there's the explicit Eastwood homage with Jackman, and the aboriginal kid, and the Luhrmann-looking backdrops...

But all that plane action, safari hats, nurses running around on the ground while aerial action goes on in the sky above, the overall scope and setting of the whole thing... there are at least ten shots in the Australia trailers where if you showed me those individual frames, I'd wager good money it was from Bay's movie.

And yes, I'm talking about the actual theatrical trailers, not the early fan-made ones that actually DID incorporate PH footage along with Kidman/Jackman stuff.

It genuinely looks like a Bay movie in those spots.

The final battle in ROBOCOP 2 was up to that time, one of the greatest genre fight scenes ever IMHO. It's a fun, cool, epic action set piece.

Saw Changeling tonight. Overall I thought it was good, although it did feel a tad long. I though Angelina did a great job I thought - especially compared to her work in Wanted.
Still, can't help but think that Gran Torino is gonna kick this movie's ass.

GRAN TORINO is gonna kick EVERYTHING's ass.

It's either gonna be an affectionate, M$B-style mini-classic Oscar grab... OR (and, yes, I am hoping for this!) an ass-kicking, hilarious Clint-as-mean-old-bastard gem where he's delivering one salty, too-old-for-this-shit line after another. Maybe I'm the only Clint fan around hoping this errs more on the side of Dead Pool, Rookie and Pink Cadillac, but goddamn would it OWN to have Eastwood return to something along those lines, only with a hint of Unforgiven/Mystic River thematic maturity.

Basically, just saying I hope it's not TOO lacquered and prestige... I want it to be a little disreputable and silly.

It's funny because I was scanning through Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II for footage this weekend and thinking to myself "these movies are the apotheosis of garbage" so that's the difference between Lex and myself. BUT I will say that Australia looks like it does have something in common with the atrocious Pearl Harbor. I'm fully expecting it to be a terrible movie at this point.

Reeeeally? I'm not the biggest Luhrmann fan, but those Australia trailers ARE kinda awesome. At the very least, impressive in scope and romanticism and a cool flashback to old shit they don't really make anymore.

But would've been more awesome with ANNA PAQUIN so WOLVERNIE could finally BONE the hotness that is ROGUE, YEP YEP.

I AM HORNY.

I'm not a Luhrmann fan, not after the fifth time I watched Moulin Rouge and decided it was, indeed, pretty hollow.

"I AM HORNY."

And therefore why should I pay any attention to you whatsoever?

Eh, ROMEO + JULIET is kinda awesome, in a 1996 nostalgia GARBAGE OWNS/CARDIGANS CHICK WAS THE HOTNESS kinda way. DiCaprio's floppy hair was the dreamiest. FUCK I wish it was 1996 again and I could go back to OWNING in the REAL.

And didn't PAUL SORVINO and BRIAN DENNEHY figure in somehow? THAT OWWWWWWNS. For the BILLIONTH time, let me make the point that ACTING is the key to being a GOD COME TO EARTH, because you can be PAUL SORVINO and still ROLL in a hip-hop popcult movie with THE DANES in 1996, or be BEAU AWESOME BRIDGES IN 2008, still sharing screen time with MARK GOD WAHLBERG and MILA HOTNESS KUNIS.

I HAVE A CIALIS LEVEL BOOOOONER FOR ELIZABETH BANKS after seeing ZACH AND MIRI this weekend. HOLY SHIT is she AWWEESOME. I might even go see that weak-ass ROLL MODELS shit to see her, especially if SHE SITS ON A BED WITH HER FEET UP BEHIND HER LIKE IN ZACK AND MIMI WHATEVER, that shit had me hard as GREEN ICE for like sixteen hours. E-BANKS 4 EVA, FUCK she OWWWWWWWWWWWWNS.

LEX = GENIUS MISSING HIS FAT-GUY MOMENT. GET ME A SAG CARD MARTIN S.

"LA FOURS."

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.

MALLRATS = BEST MOVIE EVER.

Does KEVIN SMITH read this blog? He should cast me. That guy fucking OWNS.

I've seen MALLRATS 756 times.

Watching the GRAN TORINO trailer (and the brilliant poster) makes me wanna wish there was a new 'Dirty Harry' flick.

Someone should write a sequel with a Harry Callahan as a grizzled right-wing, Darryl Gates type Police Commisioner dealing with race riots, corruption, throw in some young hotshot vigilantes a la MAGNUM FORCE and presto, you could have a real decent potboiler there.

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