The MacGuffin

In honor of The Cabin in the Woods, Spencer and Greg look back on Joss Whedon’s career. Then they discuss prison movies before giving a rundown of DVDs out today.

Please note: starting next week our video and audio podcasts are splitting, and becoming their own individual properties. Hopefully you’ll check them both out.

The press materials for I Kissed a Vampire, directed by Chris Nolan (not that Chris Nolan), want you to know that it is a perfect mixture of Twilight and Glee/High School Musical. I am not a big fan of the “Movie C = a perfect combination of Movie A + Movie B” equation, but it kind of works here, if only to show you what they were aiming for. (But not where they actually landed.) If you have an unsophisticated young person in your life between the ages of seven and twelve who loves Justin Bieber and doesn’t know what Auto-Tune is, he or she might really enjoy this movie. (And, if my daughter’s high school had put this on as a musical, it would have been AWESOME. For reals.) But, for anyone over twelve, this movie is going to be hard to sell; which is fine, not every movie needs to be for everybody.

Cruising

Cruising is the story of cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who has accepted the task of going undercover to investigate the murders of several gay men in New York City during the late seventies. He has no police backup, can’t tell his girlfriend what is going on, and all of the action takes place in gay S&M bars, which is not a milieu with which he is all that familiar. So he packs a suitcase and moves to the gay part of town, where he spends all of his time in bars hunting for the serial killer or hanging out with his nice neighbor, Ted (Don Scardino). As time passes, he changes, losing sexual interest in his girlfriend and having doubts that he can handle this situation. Things get more and more out of his control until he thinks he has found the killer.

While in the last few weeks I haven’t had much opportunity to get to the theaters, just like everyone else at the MacGuffin, that hasn’t stopped me from watching stuff.

I just got done watching Unstoppable on Blu-ray. This is the Tony Scott runaway train movie starring Chris Pine and Denzel Washington. People often describe this as Speed on a train. While that’s a nice tweet sized summary of the plot, it’s still pretty amazing how much tension Scott was able to ring out of what essentially is an industrial accident involving a freight train. One of the main differences from Speed is that there is no nefarious purpose behind this plot. Quite simply, a railyard worker (played by Ethan Suplee of My Name Is Earl fame) jumps out of the cab of a slow-moving train to throw a rail switch, but is too slow to get back in the engine. The throttle gets stuck and then the race is on.

There I was, standing in line at the concessions stand. I hadn’t had anything to eat the entire day, had stayed out way passed my bedtime the previous night, and now was suffering the consequences. A buddy of mine had called me at 9:00am to wake me up, excited about going to this convention for the very first time in his life. Now, 9:00am isn’t exactly the crack of dawn, but when you go to bed around 6:00am that morning, it can be a little tough. But that didn’t deter my enthusiasm for being there. Emerald City Comicon is one of the biggest conventions the Pacific Northwest has during the year, attracting thousands of geeks and nerds out of their parents’ basements, dressed to the nines in their most detailed and extravagant costumes, ready to mix and mingle with their fellow peeps regarding everything in the world of comic books, video games, and sci-fi film and television. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that people can be as passionate about something as these people are; I read comics as a kid but unfortunately not as much now a days. I think events like the ECCC are great and lots of fun, but at that particular moment all I wanted was a bag of peanut M&Ms and a soda.

What if you could find out the exact moment that you were going to meet your soul mate?  Would you do it?  Would you want to know?  Or would that ruin the excitement of it?  If you want to know the instance when you will first see the person who will make you happier than anyone else in the world, it will just cost you $79.99 and easy monthly payments of $15.99.  However, we are not responsible if you are unhappy with the soul mate you receive or if you are upset by how long or short it may be until you find that one.