FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

'Knight Rider' Coming To Big Screen

Meanwhile, my habit of overthinking two steps ahead is giving me heart palpitations of how to manage the move, have furniture arrive before the cats, how I am going to unpack alone, get a small fridge upstairs alone, when I move out of Oakwood, what I will do without even a kitchen knife until furniture arrives, when to have Comcast over, how long Dean stays where with cats in Boston until furniture is here, etc.

And we haven't even finished the mortgage yet.

I hate moving.

The concept of failure in transmission is changing.

CD's don't skip, they stutter.

Digital TV doesn't snow, it pops and tiles and pixelates and goes black.

Mobile calls and digital radio don't fade in and out of static. They become choppy and disjointed and then drop.

15 years from now, static or snow as experienced in analog transmissions and currently seen in shows will totally date the production as being from a pre-digital era. Much SciFi will look strange. Very young kids will simply not understand it when they see it. People in shows 'faking' static to get out of a phone call or radio contact is a joke these viewers just wont get.

A remake of The Poseidon Adventure, starring Kurt Russell, and Richard Dreyfuss as a gay man whose relationship just broke up before he boarded the ship.

Rottentomatoes.com roundup of Alone In The Dark:

"The three stars [Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff, Tara Reid] have seen better days, but I'd like to think they could still do something classier and more dignified than this. Like gay porn."
-- Rob Vaux, FLIPSIDE MOVIE EMPORIUM

What would Tara Reid do in a gay porn movie?

"[Jerry] Lewis endured, sinking his own wealth (not easily renewable at that point in his career) into the filming of a property he didn't own, on the assumption that audiences who had loved him imitating retards would now want to see him escorting children to their death."

More such movies on a discussion on Plastic.

McDowell knows he is good in the film - it's easy to be good in an Altman film, he says. "You try being good in Cyborg 3."

Thanks, hlee.

Idle celebrity gossip on the radio: after breaking up with Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz is now hooking up with Matthew McConaughey. Pebbles and Ramiro were all over his naked bongo playing incident. Like that's the best gossip about hiim.

Well, at least she's consistent about the kind of guy she wants to be seen with.

I just started an comment to someone with

Well, as a survivor of a decade of soc.motss ("I've seen flamewars you people wouldn't believe. Attack-posters on fire off the fiftieth article of the twentieth branch of a thread. I watched insults of incestuous magnitude ... emanate from the dark near twelve universities. All those ... tempests will be lost ... in teapots, like 'me too!'s'... on AOL. Time ... to unsubscribe.") there are a couple of things...

A Dutchman originally delivered the lines, so this Dutchman can run with them.

(Shit. I sound disaffectoid, don't I?)

0:20 ELIZABETH TAYLOR'S CHARACTER (DELIGHTED): "Spam!"

0:36 ELIZABETH TAYLOR'S CHARACTER (UP FIRST TIME AFTER DELIVERING BABY, LOOKING AT HER BODY IN MIRROR, DISSAPOINTED): "Oh, I will never be a size ten again..."

Not to mention a dour Donna Reed and a slightly not glamorous enough Eva Gabor.

Watching The V.I.P.s.

Fluff piece. Somewhat like a disaster movie, with an amalgamation of backstories set up in an airport waiting lounge for first-class passengers in the sixties. The disaster is that plane is delayed by fog, and everyone has a reason to be ruined if they don't get to their destinations: tax problems, the big mega deal will fall through, the jealous husband will find the goodbye note and stop the escape, an impoverished matronly duchess as comic relief.

It is all pure stuntcasting: Taylor & Burton play the estranged couple with many acidic scenes, Rod Taylor the australian industrialist with Maggie Smith as the secretary, Orson Welles(!) as the movie director, Louis Jordan as the suave gigolo.

Obviously we need a remake. One in which we pretend that flying isn't a miserable experience. We must create some illusion that there are still upper classes who get it all. V.I.P. lounge for private chartered jets.

Stuntcasting again.
Estranged couple with malvolent husband: Cruise & Kidman.
Aging gigolo: Ewan McGregor or Leonardo DiCaprio
Big director & his vapid starlet floozy who ends up owning his fortune: Jack Nicholson or Patrick Stewart, Katey Holmes or Miranda Otto. Winona might need the work. It really is a minor part.
Industrialist losing it all: Hugh Jackman. Denzel Washington if he's slumming.
The dumpy loyal secretary: Cate Blanchett.
Poor drunk Duchess: Maggie Smith.