Going to be a quick post today as there is seriously not much to recommend this week in theaters or on DVD. Babylon A.D. is my pick for theatrical new release of the week, primarily due to my blatant sci-fi fanboy nature as well as to see if the claims by director Mathieu Kassovitz that the film was ruined by the studio are true.

DVD releases are especially slim pickings this week, leading me to choosing another relatively obscure and hard to find release in Cannibal. Cannibal is based on the true story of Armin Meiwes, a man who placed an ad on the Internet requesting someone who would allow him to eat them. Remarkably, someone responded to the ad and allowed themselves to be eaten. I must I have a bit of morbid curiosity over such a tale, though I have no idea how I am going to track down this film as I can’t even find an official site for the film, let alone a trailer. Evidently the hunt is on.

As always trailers are after the break! (more…)

I can understand why you might not head over to Film Junk for enlightenment. Sure they run a great site and have the best film related podcast on the Internerd, so I understand that you might not realize they have a slumbering giant just beginning to awaken in Cantankerous. With only three episodes produced to date Cantankerous is a podcast still trying to discover just what it will cover, but what it has delved into is outstanding.

The duo behind Cantankerous is Jay Cheel, the sardonic film snob who just might be suffering from Munchausen syndrome, and Reed Farrington, the Star Trek uber-nerd who engages completism at warp factor 9. Apart they are capable of entertaining you, but together they form an intoxicating mix that will thrill and mystify you with each passing episode.

And while Jay typically dominates most of Film Junk’s podcast, it is Reed that makes Cantankerous destination radio. In episode one you discover his Kermit the Frog impression that only works when no one else is around, or marvel at his learning of the space shuttle Columbia disaster four years after it occurred.

But that would be outdone in episode two when Reed admits that his life is incomplete because he has never suffered from food poisoning. He then follows this up with a lecture on his disappointment at how people are not attempting to become more intelligent and uses his love of the film Soylent Green, which he views as a piece of high brow science fiction that will challenge people, as the basis for his argument.

But both episodes pale in comparison to the third, where we learn that the last hardcover book Reed purchased was the Joan Collins biography simply because she talks about her experiences guest starring on Star Trek. From there we learn about how Reed becomes confused at why white actors shouldn’t play other races in films, his short lived attempt at making his own cooking show entitled Cooking with Gerry, and Reed’s frustration with Dawson’s Creek inconsistent use of theme songs on the various DVD sets. But the true apex of the show is when we learn of Reed’s ongoing attempts to archive the Internet by using a video camera to tape it.

That Cantankerous continues to top its own style of unbridled brilliance in every show, drawing the listener ever closer to understanding the complex world Reed Farrington lives in, it quickly becomes evident that this podcast offers up the possibility of a window into a fantasy world that you never would have dreamed existed.

So go on, what are you waiting for?

I was a bit of a bookworm growing up. Oh sure I played outside and excelled at sports and was an all around active lad who spent hours outside on any average day, but I loved me some books. You see, I was the kind of 8 year old boy who found the idea of reading an Encyclopedia to be just as exciting and fun as watching your average Transformers episode. But since we didn’t have cable I spent far more time reading then I did watching the heroic Autobots defeating the evil Decepticons.

It didn’t take me long to discover I loved science, all shapes and sizes of science. I started reading books on homemade experiments one could try. I took computer classes and self-taught myself BASIC so I could write my own computer games. I used my microscope and a neighbors stagnant pond as an excuse to introduce myself to the wonderful universe populated with paramecium and amoebas. My mother even tells a tale of my exploits during a family vacation to The Smithsonian. It seems I happened to explain to my older sister why a Blue Whale was also a baleen whale. I was six years old at the time of this incident.

(more…)

Well I’ve had my fun the past few weeks watching more well known films, so now it is time to get back to brass tachyons and rummage up some harder to find films. This week’s film is one of the first ecological doomsday films evah made. Though rather then focusing on the science fiction aspect of the plot, it chooses to follow the newspaper men covering the story. Sounds like The Day the Earth Caught Fire is positively dripping with excitement, no?

Part of the reason why I started this site was not only to search out smaller and unknown art films, but to watch some fairly unknown crappy films as well. With my recent run of slightly high-brow fair I felt it was time to change pace a bit and given in to my most base instincts. That usually means terrible science fiction films.

So next weeks review will focus on Starcrash, the 1979 Italian space epic starring Christopher Plummer. Yes, that Christopher Plummer.  It also co-stars David Hasselhoff. Yup, The Hoff pre-drunken home videos, pre-naked photo shoots drapped in puppies, and pre-Knight Rider.

But is it from a time when he Hoff was pre-awesome? Only time will tell.