Killer fish and killer tits - who could ask for more?

Well, I could, apparently. This week I went to see Piranha 3D, and was thoroughly disappointed by the experience. How could I possibly not be completely delighted with a movie that features so much TnA and great looking gore? Well, for instance, when I go to see a movie, I usually like it to have a story that's actually sort of interesting. Interesting and relatable characters are also a big must, most of the time. And if the movie is supposed to be funny, I'd usually like it to be funny. And if a movie is supposed to be scary, I'd usually like it to be at least a little bit scary. And most importantly, if a movie is supposed to be in 3D, then it should have been shot with an actual 3D camera and not on regular gawddamn film! I really wanted to like Piranha 3D and I even turned this past week into my very own Piranha Week, which included the original 1978 version in HD, the 1981 sequel and the 1995 remake, but Alexandre Aja, a director I once had great hopes for, has once again managed to let me down. The trailers and online rumors had me expecting an exciting roller coaster ride of jiggly boobs and bloody guts, and I'd be first to admit that what little I got to see was actually pretty impressive, but most of the film is just boring, cheesy characters spouting boring, cheesy bits of dialog and doing boring, cheesy things, complete with a couple of annoying little blonde kids whose only job in the movie is to be annoying and small. I mean sure, there's some pretty sexy stuff in there, including a spectacularly choreographed underwater nude scene that made me wish I could pause the movie and zoom in on the VJ shots to the satisfied roars of the crowd in the theater, and watching hot chicks lick stuff off each other is always nice, and the gory bits were damn near unbelievable, with people getting dismembered and ripped apart in all sorts of amusing ways, but the whole time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I just paid for a premium ticket to watch a movie that is only very little more than a porno. And just like the common Bang Bus video isn't exactly the highpoint of cinematic erotica, a series of unnamed bikini babes who get briefly gutted at sea in broad daylight isn't really my idea of a good scare. And it's not like I have anything against porn, which in fact has been my one and only true friend for years now, I'm just not really used to paying for it. Which brings me to the film's greatest flaw: the only way you could get me to pay for porn and then watch it in the presence of strangers is to make it in 3D. Now, going into the theater I knew that Piranha 3D was originally shot on film and was later converted into 3D, but it was my understanding that it was shot with 3D in mind from the very beginning and that the new conversion process was supposed to be greatly superior to previous efforts such as the Clash of the Titans remake and that lame M. Night Shyamalan movie. Man, I can be so dumb sometimes. 3D conversions are evil, pure and simple. There simply isn't a real way to convert 2D images into 3D that produces convincing, semi-natural looking results, no matter how hard movie producers will try to make you think otherwise. Current 3D conversion techniques will always look fake and distorted and lazy, and if Piranha 3D is the best modern technology can offer, then I'd like to have my body frozen for another decade or two, please. The whole idea is nothing but an evil ploy to get more and more of the viewing public's hard earned cash, and I suspect that the more movie producers ruin perfectly enjoyable films with this complete nonsense the quicker this whole 3D craze will end. The 3D in Piranha 3D is so bad that at some points it looked like they just left the 3D conversion system on random setting and went on a lunch break or something. The whole experience was so awful that I couldn't even spot Dina Meyer's role in the film until I went through the script and spotted her lines! Seriously, my dream job will always be to work as a 3D conversion engineer in 2010, because you can pretty much do whatever you want with the source material you're given and no matter how sloppy the result is you still get paid for it and they will still show it to millions of unsuspecting movie goers worldwide. Piranha 3D is definitely not a perfect movie, but I think I would still have enjoyed it quite a bit had I had the opportunity to watch it the way it was originally shot, the way gawd had intended for it to be watched. The best thing that came out of it was that I got to see a bunch of 3D trailers, including Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (ooh, talking owls. *yawn*), Tron: Legacy (looks pretty good, even though the 3D wasn't that impressive) and the new Resident Evil movie (totally friggin' awesome). Show me a Milla Jovovich shot with a PACE Fusion 3-D camera any day and I will show you one seriously happy Ben with a pants tent so large it could easily house a medium sized erection, and quite comfortably so.

Ahhhh!!! Crazy flying piranhas in James Cameron's 1981 sequel!

In other news: I'm about halfway through the first season of The Hard Times of RJ Berger, and so far it's been pretty entertaining (and how could a show about a dork with a massive schlong not be?), but what really surprised me when I looked it up on IMDB was that the smoking hot actress who plays the smoking hot cheerleader chick is almost 30 years old, and that the guy who plays the chubby best friend is in fact 31! And they're all supposed to be like 16! I guess that just goes to show you that there are only two types of people who can play the roles of teenagers well into their 30s: gorgeous people, and fat people.

Guess which type Amber Lancaster is!

Men, hold onto your totems!

Last week I went to see Inception again, and I think that this time I've finally figured out what it's all about. Inception tells the story of this little architecture student chick named Ariadne (after the wife of some Greek mythology wino, I'd imagine) who studies in Paris under the supervision of Professor Michael Caine and just happens to be as cute and pretty and the proverbial picture of a button. One day Professor Caine introduces her to his son, who turns out to be some sort of criminal with a face like a constipated pug. This dude seems to be all jazzed up about some kind of new gadget he's got that lets you sneak into other people's dreams and watch them have sex with their grandma's corpse or something, and he offers her a job designing a series of dream worlds so he and his little buddies could go inside this other dude's head and insert this one specific idea into it that could change the world of energy corporations forever, or some such thing. Pugface then tries to sell her some sob story about how his wife offed herself a while back and how he can't go back to the states and see his kids, which is the reason for this one last job he absolutely has to do in order for his Japanese boss to make everything better again, but by this point it's pretty obvious to everybody that he's just trying to get into Ariadne's fragrant little pants, if only subconsciously, since he is after all still completely obsessed with the memory of dead wife, aka Lady Sidewalk Stain, who keeps haunting him in his dreams and ruining it for everyone who visits them. Long story short, after a fun little '80s montage of everybody preparing for the job by taking really long naps they all get into this dream along with the designated mark, and then into a second dream within the previous one, and then into a third dream inside those other two, and it's then that things start getting really complicated, and of course by complicated I mean super crazy awesome! Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, a man who judging by his casting choices over the years I was almost completely sure was a raging homosexual, but this movie has pleasantly proved me wrong. After a string of obnoxious female leads like Carrie-Anne Moss (eww), Hilary Swank (looks like a dude), Katie Holmes (cute but boring and lame), Scarlett Johansson (meh) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (mildly cute, but nothing to write home about), this time Nolan has finally managed to get some high quality ass to work for him, in the shape of Marion Cotillard and the lovely Miss Ellen Page. I don't really care much for Marion Cotillard, but I think that has more to do with something vaguely anti-semitic she may or may not have been quoted saying a couple of years ago (I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was, so it couldn't have been that bad), and less with her looks and acting skills, as she is pretty damn hot and not too awful an actress. The real treat here however is the beautiful and talented Ellen Page, who I've been obsessed with ever since I first saw her in Hard Candy as a pissed off teen who for some reason really doesn't like pedos. Oh yeah, she can totally deball me on cam any time. I don't think I've seen Miss Page on the big screen since Juno came out here, which I guess is a good thing, because the years since then did manage to give me a short period of time during which I wasn't too constantly preoccupied with the idea of smelling her from head to toe. As far as I can tell Ellen Page is currently the prettiest and coolest young actress chick out there, and I will passionately hate Joseph Gordon-Levitt (awesome performance, by the way) with a fiery hate until the very end of all times for briefly making out with her on camera. The rest of the movie is pretty great too, it's totally revolutionary and it completely reinvents modern science fiction cinema as we know it and stuff, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that when all is said and done, I definitely wouldn't mind having sexual intercourse with Ellen Page, if you know what I mean. If you catch my drift. Hint hint, nudge nudge. Oh yeah, you know what I'm talking about. BAM, right in the vagina! Damn I'm smooth.

I don't even care that you have oddly hairy arms, Ellen Page!

I also watched The Plan last week, which finally completes my long journey through the universe of Battlestar Galactica. And what a journey it's been, one during which I gradually became convinced that I was a cylon myself, until one by one they were all revealed and I was forced to accept my stupid humanity as a sad fact of life. If I ever get a Blu-ray player, which I seriously doubt, the complete Battlestar Galactica box set would definitely be first on my TV list, because it really is one of those extremely rare shows which truly deserve to be watched over and over again. For now, I guess I'll just have to wait patiently for the second half of the first season of Caprica. October should be getting its ass over here any time now, right? Right?

I already miss Starbuck. *sob*

A hand watching True Blood

Yeah, I know. I'm retarded.

Update: this video has been blocked in Germany due to music copyright issues. Damn you, YouTube! How the hell am I supposed to get some of that sweet Deutche tail now?!

Taking the scenic route to calling TV execs retarded

Today, for the second time in five days, I got my stupid little heart broken. And as is usually the case, it wasn't because some chick turned me down or anything boringly pathetic of that sort. No, this time it was because I finally finished watching all eight existing episodes of ABC's Happy Town. Out of all the newly aired TV shows that are about a police-type person who finds themselves in a new position in charge of a seemingly normal community that is actually teeming with creepy paranormal activity, it was Happy Town, easily the best one of them, that got canceled after only six aired episodes, while lesser shows like Haven (cute FBI chick, but I was never really that much into blondes) and The Gates (pretty good and it's not like you can ever go wrong with Rhona Mitra as a vampire, but not nearly as cool as Happy town) manage to live on for now. This does not make any kind of sense to me. How could the American viewing public possibly not fall in love with a TV show that shows you a guy driving a giant railroad spike through some dude's head on the first episode, before the opening titles?! How could American men knowingly not watch the only show out there to feature the stupefyingly attractive Lauren German? How could American teenage girls not get completely obsessed with that romantic subplot about the two high school kids in love who come from two completely different worlds, one of which is portrayed by an actor who (probably) has male genitalia and yet is prettier than most girls? And how could the slightly more mature broads of America not fall madly in love with the ever-charming Sam Neill, who is still a total hottie even in his late 60s? And how could fans of the Buffyverse forsake a show in which Amy Acker plays a rather dull yet central character? Not to mention all the bloody severed hands, and the FBI dude who is actually some sort of foreign lunatic who likes to terrorize little blonde girls (and don't we all?), and that wild pack of fifteen odd redneck brothers whose idea of a nice night out is having sex with a can of baked beans in a garbage dump, and that cold blooded redheaded witch who controls the entire town using her eight spidery appendages, and those weird little fish that somehow have something to do with the all-powerful town kidnapper known only as The Magic Man? They really should stop handing out people meters to the mentally disabled like candy, because it has been proven time and time again that the current methods of TV ratings measurement pose a great danger to TV shows that possess true greatness. I guess what I'm trying to say is that anyone who took part in the decision to cancel Happy Town needs to have his balls chopped clean off his crotch and then fed back to him in front of his least hated friends and family members. Yeah. Um. What if it's a woman though? At least a couple of the evil douches who murdered Happy Town have to be female, it being 2010 and all, right? Do women even have anything over there you could chop off? Does anyone really know what they're actually hiding down below? That's a pretty good question, isn't it? Anyway, if a chick was partially responsible for this travesty, I guess you could always just call her fat or something, whatever has the power to crush a woman's spirit these days. Calling a woman a slut works pretty well too, in my experience. They really don't like that, for some reason. Go figure. Oh, and if you were wondering why they drew the question-mark-with-a-halo tattoo on Lauren German's shoulder right next to that little mole instead of over it, just look for photos of her back online. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what you'll find, especially if you like moles, which I sure don't.

Nice last name, Lauren German!

I also finished watching Surface today, which was a TV show that was also canceled prematurely a few years ago. Once again, I am completely baffled. How could anyone not love a show about sea monsters?! Sea monsters! Friggin' sea monsters!!! They're monsters, they're ginormous and they live in the ocean! That's like the awesomest thing in the entire universe!!! The only problem I could find with the show was that as the plot progressed, they started showing less and less of Leighton Meester in a bikini. But come on, just the mere possibility of seeing Miss Meester in a bikini for one second is enough to make me watch pretty much anything. I guess the lesson is that if you want to keep a show on the air, you better keep putting more and more of Leighton Meester in a bikini in it. Not less of Leighton Meester in a bikini, but more. Not less, more. And that's a piece of advice you can take all the way to the bank. The sperm bank is still a bank, right?

Leighton Meester in a bikini

Leighton Meester in a bikini, back view

Leighton Meester out of a bikini