I received word recently that Hollywoodland has greenlighted a feature film version of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (that's Rossum's Universal Robots, for you nerds who have not yet earned your degree in nerdery).  Capek was a hardcore serious Czech writer who was totally depressing, and his work does not translate well into "Hollywood Blockbuster," so my initial reaction (hope?) is that the film version will be sober, serious, and just as cerebral as the play was. For the uninitiated, Capek is credited with coining the term "Robot," and R.U.R. is one of the first "cyborgs take over humanity" stories.  It was densely philosophical, and I'm just praying to god that they don't do to it what they did to I, Robot. The good news?  The apparent director, James Kerwin, is a small-fry artsy fartsy type, whose most recent work is described by random people at Wikipedia as "sci-fi noir," which sounds just about perfect for R.U.R. to me. So, no guarantees, but we might have a pretty good adaptation in the works.

Can you believe that friggin' Bea Arthur died? She was only eighty-six years young! I am as torn up about this as I have ever been about any event in history. Do I love The Golden Girls? Will I be watching every single episode of The Golden Girls to honor her memory? The answer to both of those questions is a big-time yes. One time she was on Futurama! And she's in History of the World, Part One (she says a swear!). Bea Arthur was a freaking comic genius, and I don't see much purpose in continuing to live in a Bea Arthurless world. For some Melted Reel Bea Arthur action, you can read about her appearance in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

[rating: 2.5] If anybody tells me he likes Fantasia more than I do, I will tell him he is a goddamned liar. Thus, I’ve always wanted to see Make Mine Music, which (along with Melody Time) is sort of the common man’s Fantasia, but I’d never had the chance to before now. Instead of classical music, this picture features regular songs and takes a less serious approach. Originally released with ten segments, it now has only nine. The missing piece, “The Martins and the Coys,” was cut, depending on who you believe, either because of comical gunplay or because of a portrayal of southerners that made The Beverly Hillbillies look like the height of cultural sensitivity. I’ve never seen that segment, so I don’t know, but given that there are guns elsewhere in the feature, I’m inclined to side with the latter theory. As for the rest of the sequences… BLUE BAYOU Well, it certainly is blue. Everything on the screen except two birds and the moon is colored just as blue as can be. Whatever else you say about this segment, you can’t deny the honesty of the title. In that case, what else can you say? Not much. It’s short, but it’s ...

Long ago when we wrote about the fact that J.K. Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, a commenter pointed out the extremely salient point that the letters in Albus Dumbledore can be rearranged to spell "Male bods rule, bud." This, we can all agree, is wonderful. But what dirty, kinky, sexy secrets are hidden in the names of some other characters from the Harry Potter universe? Wonder no longer! Consider Neville Longbottom, who could be said to be "levelling on bottom." One might also suggest that he gets drunk and has gay sex with numerous partners, given the evidence of "Blotto? Long live men!" It's also possible he has a breast milk fetish, given "bottling melon love." Do you remember the character Malcolm Baddock? Neither do I, but perhaps you can find this Hogwarts student at a shopping mall cruising for dudes. He has, after all, a "cock-mad mall bod." Perhaps only Sirius Black is as explicit in his desires. He boldly announces "I lick, rub ass." Hetty Bayliss will have none of this, however. "I let thy ass by," she proudly proclaims. Then there is Humphrey Belcher, is likely in a relationship with a dude named Herbert, given his fondness for "Herb-hump lechery." Stay away from ...

[rating: 3.5] I’d never seen Sabotage before this morning and I didn’t really know anything about the flick other than that Alfred Hitchcock directed it, but what more do you need? Any Hitchcock movie’s gonna be good and stands a better-than-average chance of being a masterpiece. Sabotage isn’t a masterpiece like Rear Window or North By Northwest, but still it’s damned good. My familiarity with much of the Hitchcock canon (Note: Anyone who creates a Circus of the Stars style show where famous directors are fired out of cannons has my full support) actually caused me to mislead myself as the movie began. Mr. Verloc (Oskar Homolka) is skulking about as he returns home on the darkened London streets. Those streets are dark because all the power has been knocked out in a somewhat ill-conceived act of (get ready!) sabotage. When Verloc’s wife (Sylvia Sidney) questions him as to his whereabouts, he claims he’s been sleeping in bed all night. Soon Ted (John Loder), an undercover detective posing as a vegetable merchant, is nosing about, convinced that Verloc is the saboteur. In spite of all this, I was sure that Verloc, whatever else he may have been hiding, was innocent in the ...

I'm sick and tired of this horseshit story J.K. Rowling tells. I don't mean the story of Harry Potter, though I'm pretty sick of that, too. Rather, the thing that has my blood boiling is the rags-to-riches story she tells—and her admirers repeat—about the circumstances surrounding the writing of her first Harry Potter tome. You've doubtless heard the anecdote in one interview or cover story or another. She was a single mother struggling so hard to make ends meet that she was on public assistance, and it was only the runaway success of her book that pulled her out of a life of indigence. Except for the fact that it happened in England, it's the up-by-your-bootstraps American dream, right? Not exactly. The essentials of the story are basically accurate, but they're presented in a false light, and that's what makes this so deliberately devious. Rowling was on the dole, and the success of her novel did catapult her into massive wealth. But it's not quite so straightforward as that. See, she had a paying job as a teacher, but she decided that wasn't what she wanted to do; she wanted to be a writer. So she quit her job and went on ...

[rating: 0.5] Halloween H20—despite having a premise that immediately sends up red flags—turned out to be a pretty awesome movie. In fact, it is easily the best of the Halloween sequels. Sure, it discarded the continuity established in movies 4, 5 and 6, but the promise that was shown by the pretty good Halloween 4 was squandered by 5 and 6 anyway so I wasn’t too sad about that. Things came full circle, Laurie Strode became the hunter rather than the hunted and she got genuine revenge on her psychotic, bemasked brother. And it ended in such a way that it would have been a truly satisfying conclusion to the entire series. Then along came Halloween: Resurrection and fucked all that up in a big, bad way. From the very beginning, you know the movie is gonna be a bad one. The definitive end of Michael Meyers we’d seen in the previous movie was discarded and made into a big misunderstanding. Though the title suggests that Meyers might be resurrected, nothing so grand is needed; instead we’re told that he never even died and really Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had mistakenly killed some other dude. It’s the kind of poorly executed ...

[rating: 4] The fact of the matter is I like the average old movie a lot more than I like the average new movie. I’ll take the silent comedies of Chaplin and Keaton over any Judd Apatow picture, Frankenstein and Dracula over The Blair Witch Project and Saw, and Humphrey Bogart over any ten actors you can name today. That’s not to say I don’t still like movies that are coming out today (although above I managed to pick examples of things I don’t like at all, because I’m curmudgeonly), but Hollywood’s Golden Age—and the late sixties / early seventies Renaissance, sure—is where my heart truly lies. And in that heart I have a special affinity for the pre-Code gangster, crime and “message” pictures Warner Bros. put out. There’s just something indefinably powerful about the movies from this period, when moviemakers were first developing skill and artistry, and 1932’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a shining example. The film tells the story of James Allen (Paul Muni, who you might know from Scarface—the excellent Howard Hawks movie, that is, and not the absurdly overrated Brian De Palma version), a man wrongfully convicted of robbing a diner. He’s sent ...

[Rating: 4] Remember the old days before we knew that Clint Eastwood was really a pretty good actor, before we cared that he was really a pretty good director, when Sergio Leone would say that he “has only two facial expressions: one with the hat, and one without it?” Remember when that quote was the whole reason we liked him? When we loved him for his badassery without caring about anything else? Magnum Force, the second of five movies about Harry Callahan, lies squarely within that wonderful era. Eastwood plays Inspector Callahan, the character he first brought to the screen in Dirty Harry. The man himself is much the same in this picture as in the first—he enforces the law the way he wants to, he makes sure his every remark is wry, and he walks around secure in the knowledge that he is the absolute king of toughness. Thankfully this sequel didn’t try to bring any humanizing touches to the character; we in the audience don’t care about the weaknesses and flaws that make him like us, we want him to be better than us, almost superhuman in his capabilities and in his assurance that he’s on the right side of ...