Tag: twop

  • Trailers Without Pity: Moneyball

    It it quite true that my brother knows much more about sports than I do and that Aaron Sorkin probably does, too. Sorkin scripted the upcoming movie Moneyball, about baseball and sabermetrics (hey, wake up!), which stars Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s also our last Trailers Without Pity episode of the season. We’ll be back in late October with new episodes.

    If you get bored the rest of the summer, you could check out the Trailers Without Pity video archive/episode guide. Fun times!

  • Trailers Without Pity: Conan the Barbarian

    We’re down to the last two episodes of Trailers Without Pity for the season (we’re not even sure what the last one will be; we’re still deciding). Our penultimate video for Season Three is this one for the pec-tacular Conan the Barbarian, a remake (or a reimagining? I’m willing to bet it was more making than imagining at work here) of the Arnold early 80s sword and crotch-garb classic.

    I’m a sucker for these kinds of movies (or at least mocking these kinds of movies from afar); my favorite episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains Cave Dwellers, starring Ator the Juiced. I could watch that a million billion times. The new Conan looks even dumber and more expensive. It’s kind of thrilling, really, how respectably goofy it looks.

    Enjoy!

  • Trailers Without Pity: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

    Oh my goodness, do my brother and I love monkeys. I mean we LOVE them. We ARE them, in our dreams, I think. Goddamn a banana sounds good right now. I’d settle for a plantain, even. Know where I could score a plantain?

    Anyway, it was a no brainer (or rather, a chimp-brainer, which is a big step up) for us to do a Trailers Without Pity video about Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and Of the Preposition). Monkeys, James Franco and science. What could be finer?

    This movie looks like it could be really, really bad, but awful in a great, entertaining way. Can. Not. Wait.

    After this episode we’ve only got two more videos left before the end of the season when we’ll go on a break for a few months. Enjoy!

  • Trailers Without Pity: Cowboys and Aliens

    So… cowboys. They are dusty! And aliens. They are often shiny or slick with grossness! Put them together and you have… this movie thing.

    Despite the potential of this concept, I wasn’t too thrilled about the initial trailer that ran during the Super Bowl; it feels way too on the nose and like a grim, money-extracting mechanism you install in a movie theater, not unlike an obligatory system software update.

    The trailer we ended up looking at for our latest Trailers Without Pity video is a little more lively, but that’s like saying an old, sedentary man barely clinging to life is more sprightly than most zombies. It’s not exactly a useful comparison.

    In any case, here’s our video for the Jon Favreau-directed Old West alien invasion movie Cowboys & Aliens.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Green Lantern

    When we made the list of some of the summer movies we would be covering on Trailers Without Pity, I was alarmed to see so many superhero movies. I didn’t think there was any possible way we’d have much to say about them (and, honestly, I really stopped watching them after Dark Knight. I mean, who’s gonna top that?).

    But then I saw the trailer for Green Lantern, which is genuinely weird. And not really in a bad way. This movie has big, glowing green balls for how out there it seems to be. I thought Thor looked nuts, but this looks even stranger.

    Which is all to say we had more fun than usual with this one. I might even go see it! (OK, probably not). Enjoy our Trailers Without Pity video for it!

  • So long, Smallville

    The last episode of Smallville aired last week and the final Television Without Pity recap was just posted yesterday. My friend Tippi Blevins did a fantastic job taking over recapping duties after I left two years ago and she was gracious enough to let me have the last word.

    I did watch the finale (OK, I skipped big boring chunks of it, but watched most of the show) and I was still in the process of catching up with about half of this season’s episodes on the DVR. But it was a little bit of a comfort to see that very little had changed in this big, 10-season-long run of cheese.

    You can read the full recap here. The part that I contributed to the recap, attempting to sum up 10 years of the show, starts here.

    A short excerpt:

    If Smallville was, for all of us long-suffering close-watchers, the story of missed opportunities and not-quite-theres, it was also at times a place where expectations were so low that small pleasures (John Glover’s purr; Allison Mack’s sunshine grin, Cassidy Freeman’s class) broke through like rainbows in the proverbial Dio dark.

    What I’ll miss most was the heady mix of cheesy earnestness and patent absurdity (and, of course, the Gay that was unintentional until it clearly wasn’t) that made recapping the first few seasons so much fun. The platitudes, the cows, the sweet, coppery-tasting anvils.

    Smell ya later, Clark Kent.