SIDENOTE: I should mention that I’m lazy.  So I looked up some of my favorites on the ol’ YouTube.  Enjoy.  Or don’t.  Fuck you.

• Liam Lynch’s United States of Whatever

• Sex Pistols’ Who Killed Bambi?

• Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized

• Damien Carter’s Hangin’ Out With My Family

It’s bad when Wolverine is the best of the three.

But on the other hand, he is Canadian, and they have that certain William Shatner resilience.  So perhaps he can forget John Carter in his shadow, and leave Battleship behind him:

(Sorry, that’s lame… but so are these movies!)

These came out of Hollywood when P.C. just meant Pacific Coast…

• THE TOY (1982)

For those of you unaware of the premise: a rich white guy rents an adult black man to be his son’s friend for a week.  I loved it as a kid, but in hind sight, how did it ever get made?  Who ever tricked Richard Pryor, Jackie Gleason, and director Richard Donner to get involved should get some kind of metal.  But then again, it was the 80′s.  Cocaine was probably somehow involved.

• SOUL MAN (1986)

White Actor! C. Thomas Howell plays a student that takes tanning pills to get dark enough skin to appear black.  Your first instinct might be to ask “Huh?” but here’s the answer to why: so he can get a scholarship to Harvard specifically intended for African-American students.  Now you can ask the “Huh?”

• WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S (1989)

This is the tamest of the three, but it’s seemingly the least credible.  How could Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy lug such a flexible deceased Bernie around all weekend without rigor mortis setting in?

In the process of doing so, he got a little carried away with lens flares.  That’s when light spreads from its source… here’s a collection of shots from the film:

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear BluBlockers.

So yeah, I thought it was a J.J. Abrams thing, but it might be Actor! Chris Pine’s thing:

Here he is in Star Trek…

…and here he is on the DVD cover for This Means War.

Any questions?

• Black Dog / White Dog

One wags, while the other swayze.

Black Dog is an action picture about an ex-con being tricked into smuggling illegal arms. White Dog is a movie starring Kristy McNichol around her ABC School Specialdays, and oh yeah – it’s about a racist dog.

• Think Like a Man / What Women Want

The themes of the films form some kind of mental Mobius strip. Better yet – Ouroboros… the snake that eats its own tail.

Despite nobody having a clue about either sex (sorry Steve Harvey – not all men operate on such basic levels, and sorry to all involved with What Women Want – women never know what they want), these films might as well be science fiction instead of comedies.

SIDENOTE: Speaking of comedies, want a good laugh?  Cameron Diaz is making a sequel called What Men Want.

• Act I: Food.
• Act II: Sex.
• Act III: Sleep.

Finis.

• Battleship / Clue: The Movie

I miss the days B4 B9 shit like this was made.

Sure, both are based on board games, but whereas Clue: The Movie was clever, Battleship is sunk by getting handed scrap footage from Transformers 3.

• Chernobyl Diaries / Princess Diaries

And somewhere in the middle sits The Nanny Diaries.

This one’s just dumb.  Moving on…

• Leonard Part 6

Prequels, anyone?

Bill Cosby, you weren’t fooling anyone.  Nor making them laugh.  Not even getting a smile, really…

Keep your sights on the bulls-eye…

First, Katniss has her way with the bow and arrow in The Hunger Games, then Hawkeye shows up as a master archer in The Avengers, and finally Princess Merida goes all Robin Hood in Brave.  Kinda weird, right?  Like Hollywood’s prepping us for Armageddon by developing a fondness for rudimentary varieties of arsenal.

But like I said, I unfortunately was late to the (hunger) game catching that one, so howzabout this Coinkydink or Coinkydonk… the flying vessels the Chitauri use in The Avengers are similar to the flying disks in Masters of the Universe movie:

Sorta…?

What about the Chitauri Leviathan, then?  It looked comparable to those Decepticon ships in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, right?

Yeah, this one’s a bit better… let’s go for one more COC!

Remember how it looked for Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit?

Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Jr.

Do you think they got their idea’s from 1997′s Star Kid?

Spot on, I’d say.

Anygurgiwantsmunchiesandcrunchies, they share one other similarity: a fascination with dead dogs (not really).

SIDENOTE: A Coinkydonk , too?  Why is this an Awful Battle?  Read on.

In 1984, the last thing Burton made for Disney was a short film called Frankenweenie.  This lead to him getting fired.

As for Bluth, All Dogs Go to Heaven ended his short streak of hits.  Even though it developed spin-offs, it was mostly a flop following the highly successful An American Tail and The Land Before Time films.   (RIP Judith Barsi)

Now that Disney and Burton made money peace over the stop-action Nightmare Before Christmas and live-action Alice in Wonderland films, he’s flipping the script on his newest film:

Why does it seem even creepier animated than the original which was live-action?!

Wasn’t this sticker enough?!?!

Perhaps the alternate isn’t much better:

(Get it?  Dylan Dog?  Dead of Night?)

Good thing presidents don’t have sequels!

1988 has come and gone.  So has a great year at the movies.

Not only did the best action film ever get released (by the way, it’s Die Hard), but there was a return to animation being mixed with live action in the incredible Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Time will only tell if they’ll make any more movies that mix real actors and cartoons (doubt it), and who could possibly make another action film about one guy taking on an entire group of baddies in such a believable manner (no one)?  But what I really want to write about are this year’s “big” comedies.

There’s a reason I put big in quotes - Big is one of the fantastic comedies that came out this year.  Beetlejuice and Naked Gun were good clean-ish fun, and I wasn’t supposed to see the unclean-ish Coming to America, but I did.

For me, the stand-out was Twins and you might be inclined to think these are the reasons why:

1. It was truly good clean fun (and funny).
2. Kelly Preston is beautiful.
3. Arnie and Danny have comedic chemistry.

In jest truth, it was the film’s on-the-nose soundtrack.  Aside from The Spinners’ Brother to Brother (playable down below), you had this gem by Little Richard and Phillip Bailey:

It's a coincidence all three of these films are about drugs.

They all appeared in a dream!  (Thank glob it wasn’t… well, just thank glob it was what follows.)

I was in some mall, in the outskirts of the food court near Game Stop.  I was vaguely aware it was Easter Sunday for some reason, and I found a couple other people who seemed to be waiting for something.  So asked them if they were there to play soccer like I was, and they were, so I joined them.

Not too long after, Paul Rudd showed up.  He double-checked if we were the group, and once we answered, he kept his face buried in his cell phone.

James Franco arrived next.  He wasn’t that interested in mingling either, otherwise I would have asked for him to autograph something for my mother (she loved him on General Hospital.)

The last to make it was Ewen McGregor, and he was the most social, despite keeping his sunglasses on.  I don’t remember much else besides this except for the thought that I awakened with:

On the soccer field, would I call him Ew for short?  That sounds too much like “you”…

Perhaps he’d answer to Mac?