“Cars” sucks. Yes, I think there’s more than a little merit to the notion that “movie people” who usually fall right in line behind Pixar wrote the film off early on because it was “tainted” by connection to the Nascar culture (and wasn’t interested in taking the piss out of the sport and – more specifically – it’s fanbase like “Talladega Nights”) …but “Cars” still sucks all the same. “Cars 2” sucks a lot less, but only by virtue of dropping the first film’s pretense toward Pixar-level meaningfulness and instead wallowing in the cheap slapstick and groaner car-puns that are it’s true nature.

Either way, it’s all academic because the “Cars” brand is a moneymaking machine for Disney’s toy licensing department; so we’re getting spinoffs. The first of these is “Planes” – still canonically-tied to the “Cars” universe* but actually being made by regular-ol’ Disney Animation. The trailer slipped out a month ago, but is back in the news now that instant-has-been Dane Cook has joined the voice cast:

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. YES.

The original “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs” is one of the great overlooked comedies of the 21st Century: An absolutely hillarious scifi/comedy in the mold of “Ghostbusters” that just happens to be animated. The sequel has been similarly flying under the radar, but now there’s a trailer (yes, it’s a shitty Yahoo embed, sorry.)

http://movies.yahoo.com/video/cloudy-chance-meatballs-2-trailer-213031855.html?format=embed&player_autoplay=false

Yup, looking good. My one concern would be that it looks like they’ve basically re-upped and expanded the finale of the first film into an entire movie, but the trailers for the original gave ZERO indication as to how brilliant the actual movie was so we’ll see. Even if it doesn’t quite measure up, the visual imagination on display in just the design of the food-creatures alone looks worth it.

Abrams-era “Star Wars” is probably deleting/ignoring the Expanded Universe. Should it? Should you care?

There should be something unseemly about a profession comedy outfit Kickstarting a part of their next “bit,” but despite their relative fame and legacies RiffTrax is actually a pretty small operation that generally does right by their fanbase; so I’m okay with this.

Anyway, here’s the skinny: RiffTrax wants to make their next big theatrical simulcast event a live-riffing of “Twilight;” but since securing the rights just to live-broadcast (to say nothing of make fun of) a recent, major motion picture is a lot more expensive than, say, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” they’ve set up a KickStarter to get them to what is presumed to be Summit Entertainment’s price (FWIW, it looks like they already exceeded the goal, but I could be reading that wrong.)

To my way of thinking, Summit would be crazy not to do this. “Twilight” was never going to be evergreen – it’s shelf-life is exactly how long it takes a majority it’s original fanbase of teenage girls to become cynical and jaded about romance (so, after dating maybe one or two actual teenage boys, really) – and if they’re going to keep making money of these films they need them to become ironically-beloved touchstones of “what were we thinking back then!!??” pop-culture infamy as quickly as possible. The brazen, balletic stupidity of “Breaking Dawn: Part II” was a good first step; hooking up with RiffTrax officially would be a great second.

Via ComingSoon

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” puts me into a profoundly schizophrenic state: It’s a movie I absolutely should be looking forward to (Spider-Man vs. Electro and Paul Giamatti as The Rhino? Awesome!) and by all right would sound like something worth getting psyched about – except it’s a sequel to “The Amazing Spider-Man,” which was fetid dog shit. And since most of the crew guilty of that previous film has come back for this one, well…

Problem is, that in-and-of itself doesn’t actually prove anything. It’s totally possible that Mark Webb has become a competent director of action, that Andrew Garfield has sat down and found a way to play Peter Parker that doesn’t make me want to wring his neck and stab out my own eyes (in no particular order), that the asinine “Peter’s Parents” backstory and all the other awful ideas and executions that plagued the first film have been purged from this one and that Rhino and Electro will show up looking an acting awesome (read: “like themselves,” because they are both awesome) …not likely, but possible. So until I start hearing concrete BAD stuff about this one, call me cautiously-optimistic. For now.

Case in point: This is a snap of the “new” costume for the sequel. LOVE the classic comic-style eyepieces. That’s something. That’s a concrete “like.” Let’s see the rest of it (and we will, shortly, as the film starts shooting today.)

I joined the Red Shirt Crew for a PODCAST recently, and you can listen to it HERE.

UPDATED: The “uncropped” version of the poster-image at Empire shows more details, discussed after the jump.

Love, love, LOVE this poster of Ben Kingsley as “Iron Man 3’s” big bad. The series has REALLY lacked for truly iconic heavies; and this guy just instantly looks like a great, unique, smug-yet-cool badass in the vintage-007 sense – EXACTLY the right tone. So fucking cool.

As mentioned above the uncropped still from which the poster was apparently made, viewable HERE on Empire, shows the detail that he’s using an Iron Man helmet as a footrest and that blue decoration to his right is a bullet-ridden blue military helmet that he’s using as an incense-holder.

The immediate assumption by a lot of folks is that this is Captain America’s WWII-era helmet, which leads back to that Cap-esque tattoo on the back of the guy’s neck in the first trailer. I’m sure the connection is intentional in terms of getting audiences talking (and probably making Marvel marketing very happy), but on closer inspection it looks like A.) there’s actually another one up on the wall and B.) it looks to me more likely that they’re U.N. Peackeeper helmets – probably “trophies” along with the dog-tags also decorating the place.

Look, it was a slow week.

ALSO: I probably got The Oscars wrong. Here’s how.

According to Variety, the Michael Bay produced “TMNT” reboot (which is back on after shutting down production allegedly because of script-suckage) has found it’s April O’Neil… and its Megan Fox.

Two things that are odd about this (other than Bay casting the way an Onion parody report would imagine him casting): 1. Fox and Bay were supposed to have had a major falling-out, so this is surprising; and 2. This indicates they’ve possibly changed their screenplay significantly – in the version I read before this was “delayed,” April and Casey Jones (the new versions male lead, a direct expy of Sam Witwicky) was a recent High School graduate. Megan Fox is many things, but passable as a teenager ain’t one of them.

Please feel free to continue telling me how absurd it is to pre-judge this movie in the comments, though.

Today is my Birthday. Hooray me.

In lieu of gifts, well-wishers are asked to watch this ALL-NEW EPISODE of “Adventures of The Game OverThinker” – in which I respond to Warren Spector and David Cage’s controversial DICE lectures – and then Tweet, Facebook and otherwise share it with as many others as you can 🙂