I’m kind of preoccupied with that Runaways movie tonight, so I thought I’d follow up on the previous entry with the actual trailer:

I’m a little weirded out by how excited I am to see this… but I guess it’s not that big of a surprise. I love biopics about musicians; I love the ’70s; I love rock and roll; I love teenage girls — um, I mean, I love looking at teenage… oh wait, that doesn’t sound right either. Ah, hell, I just think this looks like a good movie about an interesting subject.

And for the record, the car that the girls are jumping on at about the 1:16 mark is a Ford Galaxie like mine; it’s a hard top instead of a convertible, but it’s definitely a ’63. Those deep round taillights are unmistakable. So this flick already has one point in its favor…

Everybody’s probably seen this by now, but just in case, here’s something that’s had the online fanboys buzzing for a couple days, namely a glimpse of Jeff Bridges in the upcoming sequel to TRON:

As usual, click for the full-size treatment.

Disney released this image Tuesday, possibly hoping to take advantage of Bridges’ Oscar nomination for Crazy Heart to start building some hype for Tron: Legacy. As my Loyal Readers can probably imagine, given my usual feelings about reimaginings, revisitings, and other such tampering with the pop-cultural landmarks of my youth, I am deeply ambivalent about this project. TRON holds a big place in my heart, and I always worry that returning to a much-loved universe will somehow lessen the original. (I’m sure you can think of plenty of high-profile examples of this phenomenon if you just put your minds to it.) Plus there’s also the question of why a sequel to a nicely self-contained story, and why now, after so much time — 28 years — has passed? If it’s just to apply some updated special effects to a familiar landscape, then I’m not interested. I’m probably one of the few Gen-X nerds on the planet who didn’t find himself drooling and making incoherent pleasure-sounds after seeing that teaser trailer that debuted at ComicCon a couple years ago. And the rumored storyline — that Legacy will be a sort of science-fiction Apocalypse Now, with Bridges’ character Kevin Flynn in the Col. Kurtz role, i.e., the macguffin at the end of another character’s quest — doesn’t do much for me, either.

Still…. I have to admit it made me smile to see The Dude wearing that glowing Frisbee on his back again. The fact that Bridges is involved gives me some hope that there might be something worthwhile about this movie, because he’s not the sort who takes on a job just to earn a mortgage payment. Also, I see on IMDB that Bruce Boxleitner, who played the title role in the original film, is on board as well. Granted, both men’s screentime may not amount to anything more than glorified cameos, especially if the Apocalypse Now scenario is for real, but as I said in defense of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it may be enough for me just to see what a couple of my old friends — Flynn and Tron — have been up to since I last encountered them.

Tron: Legacy is set to premiere in December. This pic is popping up all over; for the record, I first saw it here.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this; I just thought it was an awesome photo, and it’s one I’ve never seen before.
I took it from the Facebook page of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Here’s the information that was posted along with the picture:

Robert Landau, Native Guy And Photographer, Interview

 

Q-What is your favorite photo you’ve taken and why?

 

A-“Back in the 1980s I had a book published on the Sunset Strip billboards, called Billboard Art [Chronicle Books]. I was living near Tower records and every week there would be new hand painted pop art masterpieces promoting the latest Rock and Roll and movie stars. I took a photo of a street scene with a woman carrying a grocery bag walking under a billboard depicting an image of Christopher Reeve in Superman costume streaking across the landscape. It epitomized for me the surreal nature of Los Angeles with all its dimensions of overblown Hollywood pretense versus the reality of ordinary daily life.”

James Lileks, speaking of the Bedford Falls where George Bailey never existed:

I still think Pottersville would have been a great place to visit if you had a three-day pass from the Army.

Is it just me, or does our modern world far more resemble Pottersville than the quaint, well-mannered fantasy town in which George spends most of the movie?

I had just turned eight when Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in the fall of 1977, and I remember being completely freaked out by the commercials for the film. Oddly enough, the image that mashed down so hard on my “primal dread” button wasn’t even in the movie: a POV shot in which we’re flying down a highway at night toward a hill, on the other side of which is a brilliant, mysterious light. I’m sure my Loyal Readers would recognize that image. It was used on the movie’s one-sheet and various tie-in products, and it’s been copied and/or parodied so many times since that I’m willing to bet most people don’t even realize where it comes from. Whenever I run across it today, I experience a warm spark of nostalgia; back in ’77, it scared the ever-loving crap out of me.

The movie, of course, turned out to be entirely non-frightening (well, except for the scene where little Barry gets abducted from his house; that’s pretty scary), but think of how terrifying it would’ve been had the aliens come from, shall we say, a more southernly part of the galaxy….

Close Encounters of the Redneck Kind from Marc Bullard on Vimeo.

Via Sullivan, who somehow manages to find a lot of cool stuff in spite of making upwards of 50 or so political posts every single day. I envy him his blogging time…

Traveler’s tales are still forthcoming, but first, I’d like to provide a little educational service for my recent traveling partner, Cranky Robert, whose knowledge of all things pop-cultural is somewhat, shall we say, less expansive than my own. He is especially lacking in the areas of B-movies, comic books, and pulp sci-fi novels. You know, the crap I grew up on. Makes you wonder what they’re teaching those literature PhDs these days, doesn’t it?

In any event, we were sitting in a Washington Starbucks one night discussing — go figure — the sorts of women we find attractive, and somehow my memory banks kicked out an image of the actress Pam Grier. I was surprised to learn that Robert had never heard of in spite of her frequently being credited as the first female action-movie hero. That’s right, kids, there was a butt-kicking woman on the big screen long before Ripley told the Queen Mother Alien to get away from that little blond girl.

Pam may not be a household name, but she’s had a long, more-or-less steady career in film and television, beginning with women-in-prison schlockers made for the drive-in and grindhouse circuit, then finding her first surge of fame in a pair of classic blaxploitation flicks, Foxy Brown and Coffy. In the ’80s, she had a recurring role as Rico Tubbs’ old flame on Miami Vice, then in the ’90s, Quentin Tarentino gave her the lead in his Jackie Brown (no relation to Foxy Brown, as far as I know, but then I’ve never seen it). In between those landmarks, she’s appeared in a slew of movies and television roles. According to Wikipedia, she’s most recently been a regular on a cable TV series called The L Word.

But enough introductory blather… the point here is really to post up a couple pictures of Pam, to show Robert who I was talking about and also to amuse myself with photos of a beautiful woman.

Here she is in her blaxploitation heyday:

And here she is a couple decades later, looking classy in Jackie Brown:

I really need to rent that one, I think…

Hey, there, me droogies.

Sorry, I don’t know where that came from. Well, yes, I do, but I don’t know why I’m making a Clockwork Orange reference at this particular time, other than it seemed really boring to just say “Hi, I’m back from DC, how are y’all?”
Anyhow, I’ll be posting a recap of my Washington trip soon, but in the meantime, I’d like to celebrate tonight’s big New Moon premiere with an image that depicts the movie I’d like to see:

Let’s see if Edward Cullen’s emo dreaminess can protect him from the sword of the Daywalker! Ha!

Seriously, I’m usually right there in the front of the line for all of the latest pop-cultural fads, but the whole Twilight thing mystifies me. The Girlfriend says it’s because I was never a 15-year-old girl, and perhaps there’s something to that. (Although if 15-year-old girls really fantasize about awaking to find a sullen, beady-eyed, greasy-haired guy who says it’s a constant struggle to keep from killing them because they smell so damn good standing at the foot of their bed, and they think that’s romantic rather than alarming, then I obviously never understood teenage girls half as well as I thought I did.) In any event, vampire stories just aren’t what they were when I first discovered Lestat back in college. I’m predicting that once the cycle of movies based on Stephanie Meyer’s novels runs out, these venerable immortal anti-heroes are going to, ahem, go underground for a good long while… at least, it’s my opinion that they ought to. They’ve pretty much run their course for this generation. While they’re resting up for a few years, maybe someone can figure out how to reinvigorate werewolves the way Anne Rice did the bloodsuckers…

(Credit Where It’s Due Department: That nifty photoshop job has been all over the ‘net, but I grabbed it from Michael May; he also posted this little gem, if you’re looking for more Twilight-mocking fun…)