There are two types of people in the world: Thinkers and Believers.

To my overseas readers: If you’re ever struggling to understand why Americans behave like we do, it’s primarily because our national psyche is fundamentally schizophrenic – we’re a nation born in bottom-against-top revolution, and we still haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile our self-image (“scrappy underdog”) with our post-WWII “Superpower” status.

You can see this divided-mindset in the platform of the Republican Party as embodied (this week, anyway) by Mitt Romney; which bases it’s political appeal entirely on telling white heterosexual Christian men – the least oppressed, most culturally-dominant, most unduly-priviliged class of human beings ever to walk the Earth – that other types of people becoming their social/cultural equals or no longer seeing their culture held as the only or most important qualify as acts of oppression against them.

If you’ve got cable, you’ve probably seen the trailers for “Last Ounce of Courage” and divined that it’s a kind of sappy-looking family movie about the surviving relatives of a dead veteran (angsty teen son and aging-biker grandfather, primarily) getting their shit back together to fight some kind of local corruption. Well… those are the general-release “stealth” trailers – designed to make it look like a real movie when it’s actually a Christian-Right propaganda piece. Here’s the REAL trailer, in which we learn that the evil our heroes are fighting is one of the favorite boogeymen of make-believe oppression: “The War on Christmas.”

I for one can’t wait for the innevitable scene where assholes who insist on barking “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!” back at anyone (particularly service employees) who dares to wish them “Happy Holidays” are lionized like they were freaking’ MLK…

Speaking of which, gotta appreciate that they went all-out with “Sinister Black Politician” as the leader of the Christianity-smashing efforts – I can’t imagine who THAT’S supposed to remind me of. I also love the little dipshit onstage holding up the American Flag in the middle of a High School Nativity play: A more perfect symbol of present-day religious conservatism I couldn’t have imagined.

Film opens September 14th – unsurprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be screening for us godless round-Earth-believin’ science-lovin’ critic types. Ah, well.

September is what critics call the hungry month…

“Intermission” is about “Batman: The Animated Series” turning 20.

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Huh. Y’know, I kinda thought this project was over and done with when the first one bombed – I mean… The Market had spoken, no?

In any case, they seem to have aquired a whole new cast, and it looks like the low budget is going to be even more apparent now that the bigger scifi stuff starts showing up in the story. For those of you only tangentially familiar with the material – no, believe it or not The MacGuffin seen in this trailer is not a new addition to the story: The supposed “Right-Wing Bible” of American political philosophy really does end up revolving around the good guys having to protect a Green Energy Source.

That said, as anyone who watched the DNC tonight can attest… there’s still only one King.

So… Devin Faraci is getting torn-apart on Twitter and on his own website for posting (well, more for posting and being enthusiastic about it) a “no texting during the movie” bumper from FrightFest (horror movie festival) that is, to put it mildly, pitch-dark stuff.

I’m not going to embed it here – not because I believe in “censorship” necessarily but because I DO take things like “Trigger Warnings” seriously and I’m not comfortable putting it up where someone might click it without wanting to. But, this IS one of “the” movie-geek discussions of the day, so if you want to see Devin’s original article, the video itself and the subsequent blowup in the comments click HERE. (incredibly NSFW, obviously.)

Description of said video (as said, Trigger Warning) and some thoughts after the jump…

Okay, so…

The basic idea of the clip is as follows: A woman is texting during a movie. The guy behind her asks her to stop. She blows him off. He stabs her in the back of the head with a pencil, killing her (this is, I stress, a horror movie festival dedicated to the extremes of the genre – think “A Serbian Film.”) He then unzips his pants and proceeds to perform a sex-act on the stab-wound, literally climaxing with his semen running out of the dead girl’s mouth and onto the screen of her smartphone. The End.

Yeah.

Well.

Do I have a problem with this? Kind of, yeah.

I’m not against shock-art, and I don’t think the overriding idea of the piece (a bloody version of the “dont text or something bad will happen” bit because it’s a horror festival) is out of bounds at all. And, while I’m at a loss to imagine HOW it could ever be done “right,” I suppose that if every other form of horrible violence can be fodder for “fun” horror-exploitation rape is “on the table.” And while I don’t share Devin’s enthusiasm (it’s not well-executed, enough, frankly – goes on too long) I “get” where he’s coming from in appreciating the sheer audacity of it.

What bothers me about this isn’t necessarily the rape (though, obviously, that’s unpleasant as all hell and goes on WAY too long for it to have any hope of being “clever” or “funny” in even a black-comedy way) but the misogyny behind it. Yes, naturally, male-on-female rape is always automatically misogynist in nature… but the conflating of it HERE with “don’t fuck up our movie-watching experience” angle and the “girls are the ones who theater-text” stereotype puts a (likely unintended) extra dimension onto the whole thing that makes it feel like her “crime” was less specifically texting and more being a woman in a traditionally male space – i.e. “stupid girl doesn’t know how to act at our Hardcore Horror-Geek FilmFest” with rape/murder as a “put her in her place” corrective.

I’m not saying that was the INTENT of the filmmaker, but it’s how it comes off – so, yeah, in that context I can see why people reacted so negatively to the way Devin presented this.

20 years ago today, EVERYTHING changed.

September 5th, 1992 was one of the most quietly-epic days in the history of not only animation and comics but of the modern-day Geek Culture: the television debut of “Batman: The Animated Series.” It was a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of good fortune: Warner Bros. was so eager to get ANY Batman-related toon onto afternoon TV to drive the brand in-between the movies, the production team on this series got an unprecedented level of creative freedom for such an important project… and the results changed not only the animation industry but also comics and even FILM in ways we’re still feeling. It is, quite simply, one of the most important popular-culture artifacts of the 20th Century.

“BATMAN: TAS” almost singlehandedly restored “credibility” to the U.S. action cartoon genre, which had been (fairly or not) “ghetto-ized” as strictly the realm of toy merchandise-driven fluff since the 80s. And it struck, to my mind, a perfect balance between a “serious-minded” approach to the Batman mythos and an acknowledgement that Batman and his world still work best when also sharing threads with the more fantastical side of the broader DC Universe – a balance that the actual comics and the ongoing film adaptations are still struggling with. For a generation (maybe two, by now,) THIS version of Batman is seen as the gold-standard of the character.

And think about this: Before “The Avengers” and it’s “Cinematic Universe” was even a gleam in a producers’ eye, THIS series brought comic-book style continuity into the American mainstream by gradually spawning an unprecedentedly-massive shared-universe of it’s own – “Batman: TAS” begat (and frequently crossed-over with) a “Superman” series and an entirely-original DCU-future in “Batman Beyond”… and then all three of those were linked by the two “Justice League” series.

I distinctly remembering seeing it for the first time (“Heart of Ice” was my first episode) after months of buildup, and even as an 11 year-old I knew I was seeing something important. Something game-changing… but I never imagined (how could any of us have imagined?) just how big, long-lived and influential this was. I sincerely hold that without this show and it’s success the “Spider-Man” movies, the “X-Men movies,” “Batman Begins,” “Iron Man,” Marvel Studios, “Avengers” and now the impending “Justice League” movie… NONE of that would’ve happened.

There will come a day when even I am finally tired of “Movies that sounds like parodies but played totally straight so that fellow prospective audience-members who aren’t in on the irony are part of the joke” filmmaking. But it is not this day…

Y’know what I love most about this trailer? More than HALF of it seems to be shots of weapons being opened, loaded, unfolded, cocked, drawn or assembled. Remember when the joke was that people in action movies never reloaded their guns, and now there’s more reloading than shooting.

Overly-combative headline not withstanding…

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Has-been B-movie fixture and Total Gym spokesperson Chuck Norris (and the missus) have hit the web once more with a bizzare video message urging Evangelical Christians to turn out on election day and stop Barack Obama (whose name Mrs. Norris intones in the manner of a dismayed peasant maiden lamenting a long-problematic dragon in a fantasy novel) from being re-elected. If their efforts fail, we are informed, America faces “A Thousand Years of Darkness.”

So, hey – good job, willing patrons of “The Expendables 2,” in kicking a few more coins toward delightful folks such as these…

The nudge-nudge coding at play for the prime audience is surprisingly overt: Evangelicals are the target here because it’s believed that widespread distrust of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith within fundamentalist Christianity could keep them home on election day – the “Thousand Years” bit is a reference to certain fundamentalist interpretations of “Revelations” …in other words, they’re wink-winking about Obama being The Antichrist.

Charming.

I’ve been waiting on “The Comedy,” which now has a proper teaser-trailer, for awhile now – pretty much ever since it caused a storm of walk-outs and furious rebukes at Sundance. I’ve heard it described as an anti-mumblecore mumblecore movie, in that it’s another “observational comedy” about priviliged white male hipsters… where the principal “observation” is that priviliged white male hipsters are frequently such terrible fucking people:

The film stars comedian and certified secret-badass Tim Heidecker of “Tim & Eric” (Eric Wareheim is also onhand) as the nominal leader of a group of thirtysomething Williamsburg manchildren who spend their days (and their money) slacking around and treating the world around them – people and all – as playthings they’re already bored with. The main plot supposedly concerns Heidecker’s character being on the verge of inheriting his dying father’s fortune and somehow becoming an even worse excuse for a human being as a result. I’m kind of hoping that it has more to say than “See this? THIS is what you look like!” But we’ll see.

Movie hits VOD in October before a theatrical run in November.