A few hours ago, Evangeline Chipman – my last surviving grandparent and one of the strongest best people I’ll ever know – passed away after having been in ill health for some time.

I’m not interested in getting into any more details than that. I share only because – while it’s my intention to not interupt the workflow of my sites and projects (if anything, I really need the focusing-effect of work-to-be-done right now) – I can’t say what sort of things arrangements and obligations will do to my schedules and output. So, if this blog or other venues seem to be either less active or less “upbeat” than usual, I ask your patience and understanding as to why that probably is.

This is going to be a very difficult period for me and for my family, and your support and understanding is deeply appreciated.

Crack the bubbly and break out the unconventional pizza toppings – Paramount has indefinitely shut-down production of the (awful-sounding) Michael Bay produced TMNT reboot! The reason? Apparently, the script is terrible – who could’ve guessed, huh?

This is almost-certainly good news for Turtles fandom, and even better news for film critics who’ll now have one less Michael Bay movie to endure next year (the film is still on Paramount’s “schedule,” in much the same way that Warner Bros. is still super suuuuper cereal about “Green Lantern 2;”) but it’s just the latest in what has been a spectacular slow-motion implosion at Paramount. Just last month, the studio was “forced” to yank it’s mega-hyped, highly-anticipated “G.I. Joe” sequel from the Summer schedule for massive (expensive) reshoots and retooling so close to ‘last minute” that the merchandise is already in stores. Last week, it was revealed that the already troubled production of the zombie-actioner “World War Z” now includes a ballooning budget and the shooting of an entirely new third-act.

It sucks to be Paramount right now – they had a huge few years in the blockbuster business, but it was for distributing movies made largely outside the studio itself i.e. the Marvel Studios films and the Spielberg/Bay/Hasbro-backed “Transformers” trilogy. When Marvel started being absorbed by Disney (the only reason your not seeing mass-layoffs at Paramount now is that a contract agreement entitled Paramount to a bigger-than-you’d-think share of “The Avengers” massive haul) and it briefly looked like Bay would bow-out of the robot business after “Dark of The Moon;” Paramount scrambled to get new tentpoles set up to take their place… and it looks like the haphazard results of that scrambling are now coming home to roost.

It’s likely that the film will still get made, though probably not in the form that was taking shape at this point: The project was set up principally by Paramount’s fellow Viacom-underling Nickelodeon, which paid a small fortune to buy the rights from multiple sources including Haim Saban (who, in turn, went and bought his “Power Rangers” baby back from Disney, who suddenly had other things to pay attention to in the “action figure farming” department, and round-and-round it goes…) and is still set to launch a new series this year.

Bay is still supposed to be making “Transformers 4” for the studio as part of a deal to get his Mark Whalberg/The Rock bodybuilder-crimespree project “Pain & Gain” released. I was getting the sense that TF4 was on it’s way to falling by the wayside, but at this point they kinda HAVE to make it – it’s the only sure thing they’ve got in the pipe now.

So not metal.
BONUS! “Intermission” is a review of “That’s My Boy.”

Hey, do you feel like sleeping tonight? No? Good. Here’s the trailer for “Sinister.”

It’s been a long week, okay?

I have a soft spot of cheesy 50s/60s sitcoms, which definitely includes “Bewitched,” but I don’t know that I’d ever seen THIS episode before; which features the Stevens Family encountering a Christmastime houseguest/potential business-associate of Darrins who turns out to be a racist. It must have been pretty eyebrow-raising to even hear the WORD racist on a sitcom back then, alongside the bonus of one a rare instance of Samantha using her powers to “get” somebody (that was usually more of an Endora or Serena thing) – in this case zapping the bigot so that he sees everyone around him as black… and yes, the effect is accomplished by putting the “regular” white cast in tan makeup:

Yeah. The blackface is HILLARIOUSLY terrible. But Sam’s final pre-commercial break zinger? How the HELL did that make it to air on network TV at that time?

Note: I just wanted to publically thank Justin Clouse at The Escapist, who jumped in and helped finish this episode (re: assembling all of the audio/video files into a cohesive finished product) when my equipment went to shit with very little notice and only my own “unique” interpretation of editing-“plans” to work from. Guy did a bang-up job, in my estimation, and I’m just incredibly sincerely thankful.

Anyway! SPOILER WARNING on “Prometheus.”

Intermission responds to Sasha Stone re: The Avengers and The Oscars.

The trailer for The CW’s Green Arrow show “Arrow” (Green is apparently boxoffice-poison for Warners now) looks pretty awful – a textbook example of the Nolan-esque “realistic superhero” aesthetic in the wrong hands. Actually looks bad enough to be a parody of bad superhero adaptations, which is impressive considering “Smallville” stayed on the air for a decade.

One thing managed to catch my eye, though: Does this mask belong to who I think it belongs to?

So. It looks very much like Slade Wilson – aka Deathstroke The Terminator – one of the most iconic antagonists in the DC Comics canon… will be making his live-action debut in a series that looks SO BAD that this trailer contains the stuff they think will make you watch it:

Super. Think they’ll be clever enough to try and get Ron Perlman (Slade/Deathstroke’s voice from the “Teen Titans” series) to do the part – or maybe just the voice?

UPDATE: I’m leaving the original block-of-angry (which, just for perspective, was typed out on a phone while I waited to smother my angst in cheeseburger and beer) up after the jump for posterity/integrity’s sake, but I think I should clarify a few things:

1. I see people are hitting up the Tip Jar. While I deeply, deeply appreciate that – I want to be crystal-clear that I didn’t put this up looking for sympathy/charity in that regard. Those who chose to do so, thank you very, very much… but I don’t rage-post actively seeking that.

2. The screening I missed was not for a movie I wanted to see… well, okay, to be fair I do want to see it, but that’s not why missing it twice made my shit list. It’s a movie I have to see to review it for the show, and missing these two opportunities puts my ability to do my job in this instance in a certain amount of jeopardy. Movie critics don’t get to choose when they see movies – studio publicists contact us with a place/date where pre-screenings will be held, we have to show up, and if for whatever reason we are prevented from getting there 9 times out of 10 the critic is out of luck. Fortunately, in this case these will be at least one more opportunity (it’s a big movie, no it isn’t Batman) but if that weren’t the case I would be looking at being unable to fulfill a professional obligation to my employer because of two consecutive traffic issues.

I am not someone who believes in either karma or any other kind of universal balance. The universe is not balanced. The universe runs on random, heartless chance through which Natural Selection occurs. Times like these, however, make me want to reconsider that belief (or lack thereof.) Here’s what my last two days have been: FINALLY put a deposit on my first solo apartment after months of awful real-estate shopping. Good thing. Then, to “balance” it out? Boston traffic caused me to miss a screening. Next day: computer (the one on which ALL my work is done) decides to freak out – either a virus, software failure, burned-out board or all three. Repair bill on that? Don’t ask – more than I want to be spending in the midst of trying to put a move together. After that, a second chance at the film (no I can’t tell you which one) I missed at a screening an HOUR away out in the fucking sticks… which I have now managed to miss AGAIN because everyone and their mistress is trying to get into or out of Boston tonight and 93 was bumper-to-bumper all the way to fucking Dedham. So, yeah. This shit, on top of all the other rotten shit to deal with already? Fuck this universe. And if there IS some higher intelligence “in charge” of all this? Fuck IT; too.

Below, the trailer (in shitty Fandango-exclusive quality, sorry) for Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained;” which stars Jamie Foxx as a pre-Civil War slave who teams with a bounty hunter (Christophe Waltz) to hunt down and kill his former masters and free his still-enslaved wife. And in case any doubt was left as to whether or not Tarantino has just lobbed a slavery-revenge pop-culture cluster-bomb into one of the most racially-divisive periods (i.e. NOW) in recent American history; one of the money-shots is blood splattering all over a fluffy field of cotton. Sez Django: “Kill white folks and get paid to do it? What’s not to like?”

Ooooh… this is gonna be fun to watch – and the movie, too, most likely…

http://www.fandango.com/fplayer/player.aspx?mid=145508&mpsguid=2242676575&dm=3&genre=Action/Adventure,Drama,&rt=&title=Exclusive:_Django_Unchained_-_Trailer_Premiere&w=620&h=349&emb=user