Thursday, October 15th, 2009

I have to admit, I enjoy the first Saw movie. This whole new subgenre of "gore porn" was in its infancy, and James Wan and Leigh Whannell actually seemed to care as much about plot, as they did the imaginative ways to implement a modern day Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefest. Now, we are almost at the release date of the sixth installment, with a seventh announced, due out next year, and to say that the franchise has gone stale, catering more to teenage boys with mental complexes, with complete abandonment of story, or horror for that matter, is an understatement. I mean, the movies even spawned a show in VH-1's Celebreality line-up to find a star for Saw VI for Christ's sake. Let's just say, as much as we all may tire of Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, we haven't seen their likenesses alongside Flavor Flav, that douchebag that killed Jasmine Fiore and New York in the same television line-up. Terrible. With that said, I also generally like 3-D. As a gimmick, take for instance this very NSFW trailer to Tom DeSimone's raunchy exploitation 3-D Prison Girls, it works great. For big budget events, it at least gets us excited, case in point James Cameron's upcoming Avatar. It also isn't that bad of an idea for a traditional showing, a la Disney's annual release of the 3-D treatment of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, this overkill of everything 3-D is killing me. With both of these generally good things, turned this cinephile's biggest maddening movie peeves, it is no surprise that ShockTillYouDrop has announced that Saw VII will indeed be shot in 3-D format. Is anybody honestly going to be excited for this?

Further destroying any hopes for me to write anything but some bitches and moans today, IWatchStuff posted an interview with Bill Murray, in which he states that Harold Ramis may have overstated Murray's possible return to the character of Peter Venkman in the possible Ghostbusters 3. It's not that Murray is completely against doing another film, but thinks the script should at least be better than Ghostbusters II. Really though, wouldn't we all be mad if Murray would return to something cheap. This is actually good news, masquerading as disappointment.

MovieWeb has the official list of the submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards. I really know nothing about any of the possible nominees. In fact, I've only heard of a few like Joon-ho Bong's Mother, Havana Marking's Afghan Star and Miguel Littin's Dawson, Isla 10. Of course, this award, more than any other at the Oscars, is the most political and usually many good films get left out. For instance, Tomas Alfredson's brilliant Let the Right One In got snubbed at last year's Oscars and Guillermo del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth didn't get the nod in 2007. One movie I have heard a lot about this year not present in the list is the South Korean horror flick Thirst. Anyhow, this is always just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Oscar displeasure, so stay tuned for those rants.