There, I said it.

And unlike how I didn’t see The Lion King when it was re-released last summer in 3D, I went and saw Beauty and the Beast in 3D.  And it was worth it.  And I’m probably going to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 3D because of it.  And I’ll explain why.  (And stop using “and” to begin sentences…)

Beautiful and the Beastly

Beauty in the Beast is twenty-one years old.  It can legally drink, and that’s crazy.

While watching it, at least for the first few minutes, I felt an odd mixture of two reactions:

1. That increasingly familiar optical adjustment to 3D images
2. And geez, cell animation sure can be sloppy

I noticed a few occurrences in the movie that seemed strange by today’s “family standards”…

• They showed Gaston kill a duck.
• They showed not one – but two – men in their boxers.
• The village girls had quite the buxom bosoms.

Have I been trained to be that politically correct?

Another thing I realized in re-watching the first animated film to ever be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (when there were only five nominations) was that they showed blood (when Gaston stabbed The Beast).  Pixar’s Up would be the next film to be nominated for Best Picture, and that too had some bloodshed (when Carl hit a construction worker in the head).

(SIDENOTE: Toy Story 3 is the third film to be nominated for Best Picture.  No bloodshed, but do toy guts count?)

So onto why I would bother seeing The Phantom Menace in 3D…

It was the prequel I liked best.

There, I said it.

Which came first?  The diva or the diet?

It’s pretty weird that Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, and Janet Jackson all happen to be in ads for Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and NutriSystem respectively.  I wonder which one inspired the remainder of the campaigns (Coinkydonk), or did they all happen to happen at the same time (Coinkydink)?

(SIDENOTE: It’s no Coinkydink that Mariah’s is the most annoying commercial of all time.)

BUT WAIT!  These musical divas aren’t the only ones chiming in.

You also have Charles Barkley (for Weight Watchers) and Terry Bradshaw (for NutriSystem):

The only riddle that remains:

When will this athlete do ads for Jenny Craig?

That's called a (calorie) burn, Tom Brady.

Anyboobs, the point of the monkeyFLASHmonkeyBACK is to pretend what I might have written about in a blog before I had a blog (or as in this case, pre-blog, pre-TripleDoubleU).  I just realized what I’m about to share after watching Lethal Weapon 5 for the second time.  What’s Lethal Weapon 5, you might ask?  It was a video the gang made on an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and like I said… I watched this episode twice and just noticed this… but I’m pretending I did it back when Part 4 was released in 1998.

The Lethal Weapon series was always a fun one.  It was also a series based on opposing forces.

They were too young for this shit.

You had Roger Murtaugh:

• a stable family man
• a bit up in his years
• had a nice home
• a good cop that followed the rules
• happened to be black

Then you had Martin Riggs:

• an unstable man (suicidal) that lost his family (his wife)
• in the prime of his life
• lived in a trailer on the beach
• a good cop that didn’t follow the rules
• happened to be white

As the series progressed from the first, both men grew, and their stories paralleled each other, culminating in the dual pregnancies of the fourth film (Murtaugh’s gonna be a grandpa; Riggs a first-time dad).

I always considered myself a huge fan of the series.  In fact, when I saw part three at the theater, I convinced myself that if I had to leave after the first fifteen minutes, I was thoroughly entertained enough to justify the price of my admission.  (Which would have been a “cat”-astrophe.)

But having just noticed such a simple writer’s slight-of-hand, I’ve embarrassed myself.  In creating these two iconic characters, screenwriter Shane Black picked every mismatch possible, as I listed above.  How did I miss this?

Their initials.

...nobody knows anything about this except for five people I know.

So instead, I’ll focus on other TV shows that made the leap to the big screen with the original cast (or at least most of it) in tact.  This is not about the remakes.  Here are some TV Shows That Tried To Find New Life In Film.  Some did; some didn’t.  Awesome Battle, begin!

WE’RE GONNA STICK WITH THIS MOVIE THING FOR AWHILE

These were the TV shows that had either finished their run (Star Trek: The Original Series), were about to finish their run (The Muppets Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation), or barely had a run at all (the short-lived Naked Gun), but went on to produce more motion pictures than thought possible.  These are the successes.  These are the ones that the cinema kept alive… even up to now.

The Muppet Show - Star Trek: TOS & TNG - Naked Gun

WE’RE GONNA GO BACK TO TV A LITTLE WHILE LONGER

It’s weird that this group mostly consists of cartoons.  These are the TV shows that decided to release a movie to capitalize on the boob tube success, and in many ways, they did.

• Transformers: The Movie was released in 1986 to reboot the toy line and cartoon series, and how did it do that?  It killed most of the original cast.  It’s officially time to throw out Optimus Prime to buy Rodimus Prime.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America extended the show one more season, but it must have also entered it into the nostalgia lexicon.  It returned to MTV with a new season late last year.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut came out somewhere around season 3 or 4.  The show just finished its fifteenth season.  Oh, my god!  They didn’t kill this show!
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters should have killed ATHF, but it didn’t.  I saw this at the show.  It was horrible!  This happened in 2007.  The show is still on the air.
• The X-Files: Fight the Future got me to watch the season before the film was to be released.  I wasn’t a fan of the show prior to that, but I knew a fair amount of its mythology.  (I’d only watch it here and there for the random, spooky episodes.)  The show went on for four more years.  Somehow.  The revelations in the movie were boring.  And I think they changed all the mysteries anyway.  Long story short, I stopped watching the show; others didn’t.

Transformers - Beavis and Butt-Head - South Park - The X-Files - Aqua Teen Hunger Force

WE’RE JUST LUCKY TO HAVE ONE MOVIE

These shows probably shouldn’t have had movies, but because of the fans, they did.

Kids in the Hall begat Brain Candy; Twin Peaks begat Fire Walk With Me; Firefly begat Serenity; Strangers with Candy begat Strangers with Candy; and for some reason… when no one was asking, The X-Files begat I Want to Believe.  They were trying to pull an ol’ Star Trek: TOS on us.  You’ll have to do better than pedo-priest and severed heads, Chris Carter.  Mulder needs his Khan.

Kids in the Hall - Twin Peaks - Firefly - Strangers with Candy - The X-Files

WE’RE NOT GOING TO COUNT THESE

Any film based on Saturday Night Live skits is not up for discussion at this time.

And I didn’t include Monty Python because they’re British.

Now, I know that Kids in the Hall are Canadian, and I added them up above.  And they, too, were produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels.  But they’re already in the Photoshopped image, so nyah.

The HeartMark™ is trademarked?!

Trends.

They’re always stupid.  Pet rocks, sequenced gloves, pogs… and now this.  The inescapable heart hand gesture.  It’s everywhere.

Aeroswift™

But would you believe some lady “claims” to have the trademark on it?

This lady looks like she makes many "claims"...

She even licenses it out allegedly (although it just looks like she just made a list of places she’s seen it used and retroactively authorized it).

(SIDENOTE: Did she donate the gesture to Show Your Hearts?  It could be a tax write-off.)

My hope is that it actually is trademarked, and that she’s making bank on its pervasiveness.

I mean, what she claims is not impossible.  She could figured it out during a round of This is the church and this is the steeple gone bad.  I haven’t seen it in use until recent years, and it seems like a simple gesture to devise.

But was she the one who told Taylor Swift about it?  Because Swift claims she invented it, and her fans claim that Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, et. al. stole it from her.

All that matters is did this woman really trademark what she calls The HeartMark™?  Because I have an idea of my own:

My trademark... Deez Nuts™.

Flashing Lights, Grids, and Guns = Science Fiction

Millennium (1989)

This is the first of the films in which characters about to die are sucked from their impending doom and thrust into a surreal reality, or surreality™.  As you can see from the poster above, this one involves a plane.  Well, two planes.  And they’re about to crash into each other.  But all the passengers are already dead.  Because they were see the first sentence. It’s not the greatest film in the world, but if you enjoy Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson looking like this…

...then this pic's for you. Well, not this picture. I mean the motion picture. But I guess you could have this pic, too.

Freejack (1992)

The second film featuring a surreality™ doesn’t give away as much in the poster, other than its odd cast.  You might think the flick has to do something with virtual reality, which is strictly The Lawnmower Man’s territory (no it’s not), when in fact it deals with a man (Emilio Estevez) being pulled into the future before his race car crashes.  The reason why?  Sir Anthony Hopkins wants his body.  Seriously.  Estevez escapes and becomes a Freejack (aha!), and is chased by Mick Jagger looking like this:

He's got the goons like Jagger.

Gantz (2011)

If you enjoy subtitles and odd sci-fi action spread out over two movies, then these Japanese films are for you.  I haven’t seen the sequel yet (Gantz: Perfect Answer), so I don’t have any answers, perfect or otherwise, as to what the Gantz is.  Well, it’s a dude inside a giant black ball that pulls the almost deceased into a surreality™ where they dress up in rubber power suits and set out to kill a vast array of strange aliens.  Here’s a taste:

Natsuna Watanabe is easy on the Gantz.

Her latest is a Channing Tatum film. A Channing Tatum film.

The Vow may be based on a true story, but it’s like a story we’ve heard before.  (But doesn’t this happen all the time in Hollywood?)

Take the end game of The Notebook:

She’s an elderly Alzheimer’s patient, and the whole movie is her husband telling their life story, which was also based on a true story (oops, I forget to put SPOILER ALERT!)

And mix it with this flick:

And you get The Vow:

Channing Tatum plays the husband to Rachel McAdams’ amnesic wife, and he doesn’t know how to act… just like in real-life.

See - it is a true story!

The Boring

So, as is par for the course on this website, I got to thinking… how many movies are named after colors much more exciting sounding than The Grey?  Let’s see by checking out A Handful Of… “Color”-ful Movies.

• RED

RED... featuring some ORANGE.

I could have went with some other titles like Red Dawn, Red Riding Hood, Red State, the current film Red Tails, or the French film Rouge, but I chose this one, which is actually an acronym for Retired and Extremely Dangerous.  But my point is proven so far… RED sounds so much better than The Grey.

• A Clockwork Orange

I prefer my clockworks to be green.

I’ve never seen this Stanley Kubrick classic, but as a student of film (not that great of one if I haven’t seen A Clockwork Orange), I am familiar with enough of it to know this was a better choice than Orange County to go against The Grey.

• Yellowbeard

You have to take this poster's word that he has a yellow beard.

Yellow is a tough sell for movie titles, so this is the best I’ve got.  I could have chosen Yellow Submarine or the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), but come on… Yellowbeard is about pirates!  Sure, it was made before pirates were (are?) cool, so The Grey can walk the plank!  Aaargh!

• Green Lantern

Sometimes green means stop.

Green Lantern was a tough pick, especially against such examples of “greenness” as Green Zone, The Green Hornet, The Green Mile, and Green Street Hooligans.  Maybe I should have picked Green Street Hooligans.  The Grey is only slightly less better than Green Lantern…

• Deep Blue Sea

Hey! Look out for that

Samuel L. Jackson makes a lot of things automatically better, and since he wasn’t in The Blue Lagoon, Blue Velvet, Blue Valentine, the French film Bleu, or the Swedish film I Am Curious (Blue), Deep Blue Sea blows The Grey out of the water.

• The Color Purple

Again, my favorite color for clockworks.

Okay… so The Color Purple wasn’t my first choice to battle The Grey, but Purple Rain or The Purple Rose of Cairo don’t sound like they’d fare much better.  Purple might be the color of kings, but when it comes to movies, it’s a notch better than grey.

Now if Liam Neeson’s latest was called The Gray, it’d be a completely different story…

She played on my softball team, and she brought some an amazing talent.  She had a fantastic bat that warranted unlimited homers over the fence.

Precious Fielder

Which worked out immensely well, seeing as how she had great difficulty running.  We tried her at first, and we tried her in right field.  But it just wasn’t working.

So then it occurred to us – deep, deep centerfield.  It worked like a dream.  She was a dream.  It was… a dream.

I think she's even wearing high heels. You go girl.