Director Craig Mazin has delivered a groundbreaking, whip-smart comic-book spoof that deftly deconstructs the genre without relying on surface-level parody...it’s called The Specials, and it came out nearly eight years ago. Superhero Movie, which is only Mazin’s second directorial effort, is everything his first film was not: predictable, flat, name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

Drake & Josh’s Drake Bell stars as Rick Riker, a hapless Tobey Maguire wannabe who’s bitten by a genetically enhanced insect and becomes the Dragonfly; what ensues is a silly Spider-Man spoof that’s ironically less witty than Sam Raimi’s source material. Note to screenwriters: it’s clear you think that jokes ending in the words “Myspace,” “YouTube,” or “Wikipedia” are automatically funny, but it just ain’t so. The best that can be said for Mazin is that he’s still a step up from the demonic duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie), and Superhero Movie does deliver a small handful of laughs, mostly thanks to the presence of Jeffrey Tambor as a whacked-out doctor. But our standards for parody need to be higher than this.

No film pick this weekend. Nothing even remotely fun-looking is opening. But I did see SHUTTER, which opens today. It's not very scary.

Compare and contrast: Toshio, that malicious, pale little boy from The Grudge, will follow you home with his pissed-off mother in tow and maybe rip your jaw off. Ringu’s watery witch Sadako will reach out from your TV set and paralyze you with her stare of doom. Megumi (Megumi Okina), the roving angry spirit at the center of Shutter, will shoot you icy looks from afar and ruin your wedding photos. Oh, and give you a shoulder cramp. Scared yet? Jane Shaw (Rachael Taylor, the blonde-bombshell hacker from Transformers) sure is—so terrified that she occasionally forgets she’s supposed to have an American accent. And yet, if the ghost never actually hurts her, why should we care?

A newlywed in Japan alongside jet-setting photographer hubby Ben (Joshua Jackson), Jane first encounters Megumi on a lonely country road, and in several visions and blurred photos thereafter . . . but nothing really happens until about an hour into the movie, by which point it isn’t long before the inevitable series of fake-out endings and obvious “twists” kick in. Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film—by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast—this plays more like a video copy of The Ring which has so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.

No doubt your history teacher failed to tell you of the long-lost Yagahl tribe, which apparently thrived on snowy mountainsides 6,000 years before Mike Huckabee believes the earth even existed, and consisted of one Jamaican (Mona Hammond), one Maori (Cliff Curtis), and a whole lot of white people sporting dreadlocked wigs and dirt on their faces in order to appear more ethnic. The aspiring hero of this tribe was D'Leh (Steven Strait) – pronounced “delay,” which is pretty funny considering how needlessly slow the story sometimes becomes – who risked everything for the love of the only woman in the world with blue eyes (Camilla Belle). Her name was Evolet, and we're told that means “the promise of life” in whatever made-up language these people are supposed to be speaking.

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend” begins an invisible narrator, voiced by Omar Sharif with no apparent connection to the story at hand (not much time, though – takes about 5 seconds to figure out that “truth” isn't an issue here). As in 300, this is supposed to signal that what we're seeing is a sort of campfire tale, and exaggeration that doesn't require literal historical accuracy. Unlike in 300, the purpose of the telling never figures into the actual film. But if you didn't already know that woolly mammoths didn't build the pyramids, it's nice that they gave you an extra reason to be skeptical.

It is frequently said, by critics, of the romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out that “if you’ve ever seen a movie before, you know exactly what’s going to happen.” In the case of PENELOPE, one doesn’t even need to have seen celluloid projected upon screen.

As the opening phrase “Once upon a time” suggests, anyone who has ever heard a fairy tale knows what direction the story will take, though there is admittedly no evil step-parent in this case, and the only wicked witch is but a minor player who long ago placed a curse upon the Wilhern family that the next girl child born to them would have the face of a pig, until such time as one of her own kind could love her for who she is.

The Wilhern family live in a big country estate that is also somehow smack-dab in the middle of a city whose central core looks like New York, with outskirts cribbed from both London and the movie MOULIN ROUGE. Motor-scooters exist in this world, as do spy cameras and two way mirrors; yet reporters bang away on manual typewriters, and there is clearly no Internet, for if there were, pig-nosed Penelope (Christina Ricci) would have zero problem finding a man – there are undoubtedly porcine fetishists out there.

And they will surely beat off to this movie for ever and ever (finally, for them, something besides the Muppet Movies).

In the movie THE SIGNAL, my film pick for this past weekend, a mysterious subliminal pulse is sent out via various forms of media, turning the people who receive it crazy, and usually homicidal.

The movie is a work of fiction. But at the AMC in Fullerton, it came true, during a screening of THE SIGNAL:

Shortly before 7:30 p.m., officers were sent to the theater at 1000 S. Lemon St. after someone reported finding a bag with what appeared to be illegal substances, said Fullerton police Lt. Tom Basham.

While the officers were at the theater, people started running out of the theater showing "The Signal," including two men with blood on them, Basham said.

Just before people started running out in a panic, two men sitting in separate areas of the theater were randomly stabbed by an unknown man, Basham said.

"He started stabbing at the theater seat and then he stabbed the victim," Basham said. "As he fled, he stabbed another victim sitting near the exit."

Basham said the victims did not know each other or the suspect.

No doubt this is great fodder for those who'd like to ban horror movies, or think that people will invariably copy what they see. So thanks a bunch, dumbass criminals, for ruining it for the rest of us.

Unless the Signal IS real...

(hat tip: AICN)

Most people wouldn’t bail out of the OC Weekly’s Savviest Singles party early to run and catch a midnight screening of Larry the Cable Guy’s brand new movie WITLESS PROTECTION. But that’s why you have me, and believe it or not, it’s the most fun part of my job. Wouldn’t trade it for the world.

It will very likely not surprise you that the pun contained in the title of this film is as clever as the humor gets. This is a movie in which an FBI agent is named “Agent Orange,” and a security firm is called Private Maximum Security (PMS, get it?). It is also a movie that begins by playing “Eye of the Tiger,” a cliché that ought to be put out of its misery since PERSEPOLIS came up with the last possible clever variation on its use (no I’m not going to explain that further – go see PERSEPOLIS. It’s damn good. You’ll like it. If you hate subtitles, there’s even an English version coming).

Hey, heard about that new George Romero zombie movie, DIARY OF THE DEAD? Pissed off that L.A. got it last week and we didn't? Well, turns out it was worth the wait.

Any fans interested in checking out DIARY OF THE DEAD among like-minded individuals (as opposed to the typical mall multiplex denizens, who are only zombie-like) needs to come on down tomorrow, February 22nd, to the Irvine University 6 theater at around 7 p.m. Prior to the 7:40 showing, there will be special giveaways -- but you need to come in your best undead attire to qualify for them.

Sources tell us that other theaters will be looking very closely at the 6-plex's box office receipts...If it does well, they'll think about spreading it to their own halls, like some zombie contagion.

I haven't seen the movie yet myself, but I damn sure hope it's better than LAND OF THE DEAD. The positive reviews seem to imply that it is, but they're only at 59%.

When you interview a comedian, there are nearly always more good lines than can fit in an article. So go check out my interview with Bobcat Goldthwait first; then come back here and check out the extra stuff that didn't quite fit.

Bobcat likes OC
"I’ve performed behind the orange curtain a few times over the years. It is a little Stepford Wifey, ya know, you do have a feeling that there’s bodies in the crawlspace. The last time I played in Brea, I had a good time. I did pick towns and cities I had enjoyable times and memories at, I passed on some of the hell gigs."

Is it hard to do stand-up again?
"I guess it would be hard if I took the time to come up with new material. My act has never been too structured."

After directing movies about alcoholic clowns (SHAKES THE CLOWN) and dog-fucking (SLEEPING DOGS LIE), how can you go one better next time?
"I don’t know if I can top it, but the tone [of the next film] is kinda similar to SLEEPING DOGS LIE. I have a script that I wrote and Robin Williams is attached, so right now it’s a combination of getting the funding, and because there is a strike I’m not really out peddling it. I hope I can keep making movies. Unfortunately, I guess the key to making movies is you have to make one that makes money. But until I write a comedy where everybody has funny things to say, I think my comedies will continue to make hundreds of dollars"

An imagined conversation deep within the halls of Lionsgate’s marketing department, a year or so ago...

SUIT 1: Curses! Those dastardly critics have finally realized that when we don’t show one of our horror movies to them in advance, that means it sucks!

SUIT 2: Screw ‘em. Critics all hate horror movies anyway. Besides, that godawful EPIC MOVIE did fine for Fox with no reviews.

SUIT 1: Yeah, for like one day, until people realized the critics were right. They’re starting to catch on! Now the public has some idea that movies not screened for review are bad!

SUIT 2: Hmmmm....Hey, I have an idea. Let’s just never show any of our horror movies to critics, ever. That way they’ll be faked out, and have no idea whether the movie really sucks or not! Plus, we’ll sell about 40 more tickets by making them pay!

SUIT 1 (suddenly becoming a Guinness commercial): Brilliant!

SUIT 2: Brilliant! (both proceed to get drunk).

Yes, this is a long-winded way of saying that just because Lionsgate doesn’t screen a horror movie for review, doesn’t mean it sucks, even if sometimes it does. This week, we have THE EYE, and it doesn’t suck. It’s far from brilliant, but as weekend multiplex popcorn fare, it mostly gets the job done.

On February 23rd, which will be Oscar Eve unless some kind of strike-related silliness postpones the show, the AMC 30 at The Block in Orange will be one of approximately 80 theaters nationwide to screen a quintuple-feature of all the nominees for Best Picture. Thirty bucks gets you a pass to all five, plus a free unlimited-refill popcorn bucket (soda NOT included -- those tricky bastards!).

That's a pretty good deal, if not quite as good as SAWFEST last year (four SAW movies for the price of one). But the funny thing is that aside from the Academy, no-one would ever program these five movies together on the same bill (THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN would make a great double-feature, though).

The program kicks of at 11 a.m. with the moody, broody legal drama MICHAEL CLAYTON. That's followed at 1:20 p.m. by Daniel Day-Lewis' over-the-top early 20th century oilman spouting off about milkshakes and drainage in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Then at 4:20 p.m., the beautifully shot tragic romance ATONEMENT; there will be tears, and possibly spit-swapping. After that, at 7 p.m., JUNO, the pregnant teen comedy that functions as a palate-cleanser just long enough so that when Javier Bardem shows up blowing holes in people's heads at 9 p.m. in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, your senses won't feel so pummeled that you can't be shocked.

A special lanyard will be given as your ticket so that you can go chill at the mall for a while between movies (and if you have to skip one, make it ATONEMENT. Have to skip a second? MICHAEL CLAYTON can be missed).

Tickets should be on sale now. The event is Saturday, February 23rd.

And yes, I'm up prior to the crack of dawn to get them to you. The biggest surprise, if you can call it that, is the strong showing by MICHAEL CLAYTON, with six nominations. Not so surprisingly, THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN each have eight.

Via CNN, because it announced even before the official Oscar site:

The nominees for best picture are "No Country for Old Men," "There Will Be Blood," "Atonement," "Juno" and "Michael Clayton."

JUNO? Really? Just goes to show there's a right way to market a teen comedy. And yes, all those spouting the cliche were right -- it IS this year's LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE.

The nominees for best actor are Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood"), George Clooney ("Michael Clayton"), Johnny Depp ("Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"), Tommy Lee Jones ("In the Valley of Elah") and Viggo Mortensen ("Eastern Promises").

Tommy Lee Jones for ELAH rather than NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN? That's a head-scratcher, and proof that irrational love for Paul Haggis is still ever-present.

The nominees for best actress are Marion Cotillard ("La Vie En Rose"), Ellen Page ("Juno"), Julie Christie ("Away from Her"), Cate Blanchett ("Elizabeth: The Golden Age") and Laura Linney ("The Savages")

Nothing much to find fault with here, although I'm told ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE wasn't worth seeing, so I never did. Blanchett has little chance at this.

The nominees for best supporting actor are Javier Bardem ("No Country for Old Men"), Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Charlie Wilson's War"), Casey Affleck ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), Hal Holbrook ("Into the Wild") and Tom Wilkinson ("Michael Clayton").

Casey Affleck's was really a lead performance, but whatever, so was Geena Davis in ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Philip Seymour Hoffman had his best performance of the year recognized after all.

The nominees for best supporting actress are Ruby Dee ("American Gangster"), Cate Blanchett ("I'm Not There"), Saoirse Ronan ("Atonement"), Amy Ryan ("Gone Baby Gone") and Tilda Swinton ("Michael Clayton").

Ruby Dee is a sympathy vote, nothing more. It's between Blanchett and Ryan, and frankly, imitating Bob Dylan doesn't strike me as that hard. Haven't we all done it at one time or another?

The nominees for best director are Ethan and Joel Coen ("No Country for Old Men"), Paul Thomas Anderson ("There Will Be Blood"), Julian Schnabel ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), Jason Reitman ("Juno") and Tony Gilroy ("Michael Clayton").

As always, one odd one out -- Schnabel's movie gets a bone thrown to it. (Matthieu Amalric should have gotten a Best Actor nom too).

The rest after the jump:

As much as I enjoy Star Trek, and always have, I can't say I was that enthused by the idea of “Star Trek: The Tour.” What could they show me that I haven't seen? Could it possibly top the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas? Do I really want to pay top dollar to see a bunch of multicolored spandex uniforms?

But duty calls, and I'm certainly the most qualified person at this publication to volunteer for said duty – I had William Shatner's “Transformed Man” on import CD before it was re-released stateside, and I even acted and assistant-directed a movie with Walter “Mr. Chekov” Koenig (Mad Cowgirl, available on DVD everywhere). I'm not one of those guys who can explain the fictional physics behind a warp core breach, nor could I tell you what number a particular episode is where something happened. But I do know that you're supposed to do a shot every time Worf says “I am a Klingon!” on Next Gen.

Boldly going to the Queen Mary, I stood in line behind the world's worst queue – one of my pet peeves, and perhaps yours, is when a line is already moving really slowly, and the person at the front of the line decides to have a conversation with the cashier, rather than simply saying “One adult, one child,” and moving along.

After approximately five Miller Lites from my favorite OC bartender Ife (he works at both Cafe Tu Tu Tango and The Auld Dubliner), I had a decision to make: which midnight movie to see?

CLOVERFIELD would clearly have been the best option, but I had already seen it. That left two options:

27 DRESSES
Pluses: Katherine Heigl's hot, and Malin Akerman is both hot and amazingly talented. And Judy Greer as the trainwreck supporting character; I've liked her since THE SPECIALS. I think Cyclops from X-men is also in it.
Minuses: Sounds exactly like THE WEDDING PLANNER, which really sucked, and starred Jennifer Lopez. But I repeat myself.

MAD MONEY
Minuses: Stupid title that sounds like a bad rap song (see also HOW SHE MOVE, opening next week). Queen Latifah hasn't been in any good movie I can remember since HOUSE PARTY 2 (yes, CHICAGO included, though ICE AGE 2 was semi-okay).
Pluses: Ted Danson and Stephen Root. And it has Katie Holmes, who's extremely easy for a critic to make fun of. Also the movie's kind of an underdog opening against a big monster action movie and a wedding-based chick flick.

I went with MAD MONEY. And it isn't terrible. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, so be it.

Rarely have I gotten the kind of hate mail that I received a year ago when I gave a semi-positive review to Uwe Boll’s BLOODRAYNE. Anonymous posters attacked me personally and went after my family and regular website commenters in an almost deranged fashion, merely because I had deigned to write something less-than-hateful about Boll, who inspires a visceral disgust in cinephiles that could almost be equated to the reaction George Bush evokes in liberals. And it’s not exactly unfair, either – HOUSE OF THE DEAD, which may be the only movie to intersplice video-game footage into live-action fight sequences, is easily one of the worst major motion pictures ever produced; and ALONE IN THE DARK is the only movie I can think of that has the audience in stitches (unintentionally) before a single frame of footage rolls, merely because of its 12-paragraph opening text crawl that goes on forever and makes no sense at all.

ONE MISSED CALL, based on a Japanese movie I’ve never seen that was in turn based upon a Japanese novel I never read, is unfortunately not a movie I will wholeheartedly recommend. It has moments, and gets very close to being something worthwhile, but just when it’s about to get there, it pulls back. Ah well, the movie can still hold bragging rights over the American remake of DARK WATER, which is the all-time champion of what not to do.

The poster is damn creepy – shame it’s only based on a minor background detail – but what I have to ask is this: Do I really care about a malevolent spirit that kills people through their cell-phones? Yes, admittedly, I gave in and purchased one of the heinous devices a few months back, but I keep it turned off except in case of emergency or missed connection. Those who use them all the time, to be honest, are the types of people I would like to see murdered by evil spirits. Hey, it’s quicker than the brain tumor you’re quietly nursing.

Our sister publications LA Weekly and Village Voice just published their annual, massive film critics' poll for 2007, which includes 102 of the nation's critics, some of whom you know and some you don't, though all of the critics you regularly read in our paper are included. (My own page in the poll is HERE.)

Topping the list are the usual faves: THERE WILL BE BLOOD, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, etc. But further down the list you get to more eccentric choices -- NORBIT? Comedy is highly subjective, I suppose; I put HOT ROD on my list, after all. And I have to give mad props to whoever voted for "Meatwad" as Best Supporting Actor for his role in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie (were there an award for best poster, that would have to take it too). SOUTHLAND TALES is loved and hated, but it's interesting to note that most of its strongest supporters don't actually live in the Southland.

The Worst list is where things get interesting. I hate when readers impugn motives without evidence, so I don't want to do it too much here, but it's notable that almost every highly acclaimed movie of '07 is on the Worst list somewhere. I understand visceral reactions to polemics like REDACTED (though I liked it) or even the "cranky critic" reaction against FX-heavy flicks like 300 and TRANSFORMERS. But when titles like JUNO and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN make the list, it feels like the choice is simply to spite one's peers, a reactive move prompted by them being chosen as #1 elsewhere -- I confess, I was tempted to vote for THERE WILL BE BLOOD just because I'm tired of it winning everything and being excessively compared to Welles and Kubrick (oh, how it wants to be them, but it ain't), but it has a lot of merits despite its flaws.

But really, there are things one can reasonably dislike about a movie like JUNO; but...worse than EPIC MOVIE? Worse than BRATZ? THE MESSENGERS? There may be an element here of critics with a certain degree of power choosing not to have seen those movies in the first place. Or the idea that such films aren't even worthy of bashing.

What do I know, though. I liked SHOOT 'EM UP.

While the rest of you were, I hope, getting happily drunk with friends and/or family yesterday, I was "enjoying" the two-hot-dog special at the Block (no other food places were open on Christmas at 11 p.m.), watching ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (which I will henceforth refer to as AVP2, as the AMC's marquee did). A more conventional capsule review of the movie will appear next week in the paper (UPDATE: It's online NOW), and probably tomorrow on various Village Voice Media websites, but with the short word limits imposed by such things, it's hard to tell the fans what they really want to know. So without further ado, I give you the sci-fi nerd Q&A version, anticipating the queries of the mildly curious.

The call for fans to bring forth their own Wally George archives continues to be heeded, this time by an enterprising YouTube user named Billybopper1, who has compiled thirteen montages of Wally getting prank calls live on the air. Long before Howard Stern's penis and Baba Booey became call-in catchphrases, the best recurring phone pranks involved Wally's impotence.

It isn't clear whether Wally simply couldn't afford a call screener or didn't want one -- it's evident watching these highlights that he realized on some level it made for entertaining TV. Though it's also clear that he wasn't always on the ball -- the same group of jokesters would regularly call in using names like "Norm Peterson," "Cliff Clavin," "Frasier Crane," "Robert Plant," and "John Paul Jones," which any other host might have recognized immediately as fakes. But not our Mr. America.

Check out Volume 9 below. Then hit up YouTube for all the rest.

The publicists for STEEP seemed rather anxious for me to write about it, though I'm not entirely sure why – it's not my kind of film at all. I offer that as a caveat, in anticipation of those who will tell me that I just don't get it, because in some ways, I don't. I find it amusing that once upon a time, somebody said to him or herself “Hmmm, you know what would be fun? Strapping thin planks of wood to my feet and pushing myself through the snow with a pair of branding irons!” And then lots of other people liked the idea: presto, skiing. To STEEP's great credit, the movie actually brings up this very point pretty early on, but that's close to being as deep as it gets.