…in as much as it makes the film merely look like a pointless, bland “modernizing” of the original; as opposed to the “eye-gougingly horrible shit” approach taken by the two U.S. trailers. Still, I could’ve gone on living quite contentedly having never seen Robocop do the three point landing bit.

Wow, who had a busy few days? Bob did. Here’s some of what might’ve been missed while I wasn’t posting:

SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD – REVIEWED for The Escapist (yeah, I’m doing this now)

AGENTS OF SHIELD: “THE WELL” – RECAPPED.

MARVEL’S NETFLIX SHOWS – Um… Talked About For Pageviews!!!

“CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS” – On The Game OverThinker!

So… remember how FX – Fox’s barely-watched teen/college-age basic cable channel – spun off a sibling network called FXX earlier this year? If so, remember wondering what sense that made, given how FX doesn’t really even have enough content for one channel as it is? Well, now we have our answer: THE SIMPSONS needed a cable home.

And just like that, the basic cable landscape just got shook the fuck up.

Okay, briefly: A few months back, the magic-number of years and money passed for 20th Century Fox to put THE SIMPSONS up for cable syndication deals. This previously wasn’t possible, because the syndication deals for the series were struck long enough ago that it was still not uncommon for network syndication contracts to include agreements that kept the series off of cable competitors. Hence why you haven’t seen, say, TBS, TNT or USA using this show to fill rerun-blocs like they do with LAW & ORDER, HOUSE, FAMILY GUY, NCIS, etc.

But now that’s over, and FXX has won the very competitive bidding war and can now run all 530 episodes from THE SIMPSON’s first 24 season (subsequent seasons will become available as they conclude on Fox) whenever and however they wish on the channel. Even if you’re in the “it hasn’t been good since Season 10!” camp, even just that would a crop of well over 200 episodes to work with. And they have precisely zero incentive to not run this massive backlog of content from one of the most recognized and popular multimedia properties of all time as often as they possibly can.

The “dirty” secret of minor cable nets like FX/FXX (or USA, TNT, TBS, etc) is that they pull serious ad revenue by booking blocs of familiar “comfort food” TV reruns (either one show or similar shows, see: USA’s daily LAW & ORDER: SVU marathons) largely on the calculation that people who keep their sets on all the time just for background chatter will just leave that channel running as they go about their home-stuff. THE SIMPSONS – whatever you may think of it now or previously – could not be more perfect for this: It’s colorful, it’s immediately recognizable, it’s family-friendly and thus can be on at any time of day, etc. Hell, add in the obvious 90s Nostalgia factor and it’s also the most ideal possible fit for the college/stoner/work-from-home “overnight programming” time-slots… which is why if you’ve got money tied up in Comedy Central or Adult_Swim, you are not about to have a happy morning.

The “special” programming possibilities are staggering, from ratings/ad-rev perspective. Consider: On Halloween, FXX could run all 23 “Treehouse Of Horrors” specials as a day-long marathon – I could see people building Halloween parties around that. Every Sideshow Bob story? Do-able. Smithers-centric marathon on Secretaries Day? A Moe Marathon? Holiday episodes? Hell, you don’t think legions of devoted SIMPSONS fans wouldn’t make lucrative “live tweet this” events out of, say, Bumblebee Man Night? Any half-decent programmer should be salivating at how easy this would make their jobs.

The deal also gives FX’s On-Demand arm, FXNow, exclusive streaming rights to every episode – which, yes, likely means you’ll be able to watch any of the 530 whenever you want on TV, mobile, PC, whatever.

My only immediate question is what (if anything) they plan to do about the significantly large number of episodes that were produced pre-HD. That handily includes all of the “Classic Seasons” and a good deal of the Silver Age, and its apparently why some network syndicators have dialed back on re-airing those because they worry people will be turned-off by non-HD visuals. Will they do an optimizing-pass on the classic seasons to make them HD-ready?

In 2003, 3 year-old Coulton Burpo nearly died during an emergency appendectomy. When he came to, he started telling people that he’d had a near-death experience and had gone to Heaven, where he’d ridden a rainbow colored horse with Jesus, met magically de-aged versions of people’s dead loved ones and brought back a message from his own miscarried would’ve-been sister.

Oh, and not that you should read ANYTHING into this minor detail, but Coulton’s dad Todd is a pastor (shocker!) who transcribed the kid’s “account” into a bestselling book, which (amazingly!) the Burpo Family has been able to expand into a hugely successful ministry movement; because apparently American “pop-Christianity” wasn’t embarrassing enough without stadiums full of clueless twits literally swaying in thrall to a not-even-Biblically-Correct spew of pablum from an oxygen-deprived 3 year-old.

And now it’s a movie, starring Greg Kinnear (why?) as Todd. Interestingly, the trailer (maybe also the movie?) seems to leave out the detail of this guy already having been on Heaven’s marketing team – which is kind of a weird detail to leave out of something like this…

I like how the trailer, while downplaying the proselytizing aspect (presumably the film will take a “true or not, isn’t it INSPIRING!!!???” track since it’s aiming to be a mainstream sort of thing) none the less manages to cram us much Christian Movie stock-iconography into the frame as well: Heartland sunsets? Firefighters? Soldier funerals? All that’s missing is Kirk Cameron and a 1-800 number.

Yesterday on Twitter I got into a bit of a “thing” with the Reddit Atheism crowd, suggesting that they might want to ease up on their typical behavior (and maybe while they’re at it those obnoxious “nyah nyah!” holiday-themed billboards) when it comes to Aronofsky’s NOAH movie. Well, regardless of how I feel about Internet Atheists… even the douchey-ist of douches can have a purpose, and stuff like this is theirs. Have at it, fellas.

“Finish him!”

ALSO: “Intermission,” in which I probably make some movie critics grumpy.

It’s kind of weird that Disney – named for a man who more-or-less invented the modern American concept of consumer-nostalgia – seems to have only figured out within the last decade that there are ways to mine it’s back catalog other than the perpetual re-release cycle. MALIFICENT, for example, is a two-fer: Part live-action remake of SLEEPING BEAUTY, part spinoff/prequel giving as “tragic origin story” [eyeroll.gif] to its iconic villainess:

Someone is going to have to explain to me how an infodump of background-detail actually helps this particular character beyond getting her Disney Store merch to move a bit faster. The idea of giving Disney bad guys franchises of their own to go be entertainingly evil in – PG-rated versions of slasher/monster “villain as main character” series, basically – is a good one… but Malificent’s whole appeal in this pantheon is that she’s really the only straight-out Satanic “evil for evil’s sake” major heavy Disney ever bothered to generate.

Seriously. Even Scar, Ursula and Jaffar at least have political “seize the throne” power as goals. Cruella DeVille had vanity. The Wicked Queen had both. Captain Hook wants revenge. Malificent is their “pure evil” baddie – there’s no motivation for what she does in the story beyond what’s played as feigned-outrage over a minor sleight, and she never seems to have a bigger goal beyond “feels good to be bad.” That black-pit lack of depth and nuance is entirely where the interest lies.

With it’s Blu-ray release now upon us and a surprisingly early amount of data about the sequel starting to hit, did we really need one more “fuck you!” to MAN OF STEEL?

Apparently, yes we did:

The assumption for awhile has been that The Dinobots would be the new showpiece toys characters in the fourth Transformers movie, and I mean before they were officially calling it “TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION.” Now, JoBlo.com (yes, I’m aware that they finally took the “Chud meets Maxim” routine revoltingly far a few months back – but a source is a source) says they’ve snapped some merchandising art that appears to show our first look at Dinobot leader Grimlock in his T-Rex alt-mode… and that’s apparently the newly-redesigned Optimus Prime riding on his back.

I’ll say this much: You have to be pretty bad at… well, everything if you can fuck up as simple a concept as Robot Dinosaur (car-robots are actually quite easy to fuck-up: just look at the Go-Bots) …and it doesn’t look like they fucked this up. I mean, I’m sure his robot mode looks just as bad as all the other live-action Transformers, but this looks about like it should look.

Assuming that this isn’t just crappy merch-art that couldn’t be assed to keep to scale, by far the most interesting thing about this is that Grimlock appears to be about 2 1/2 to 3 times larger than a real T-Rex, which Prime (going by the previous films) would be either at eye-level with or a bit taller when it’s hunched-over like that. All the Autobots are supposed to be getting major design-overhauls for this one, which is supposed to be a break from the story and human characters from the first three (no one has seen a good image yet, but the chatter has been more solid-looking bots with fewer moving-bits and exposed parts and they’ve said Prime is blue now) but Prime was confirmed to still be a truck and even if not it’s hard to believe they’d be shrinking him down to near human size. The simpler answer is likely that Michael Bay is exactly the filmmaker who would look at dinosaurs and say “No, no – we need to make them BIGGER!”

Against my better judgement, I’m holding out a certain amount of hope for this one. I really do regret the immature cheap shots I took at Bay (absolutely as a person and, to a lesser extent, as a filmmaker) back when Escape to The Movies was still finding it’s voice; and “PAIN & GAIN” was a potent reminder that whatever you think of his aesthetic predilections he really is something when he wants to be. The previous three Transformers movies all failed at least in part because of the tug of war between the Amblin-wannabe Sam story he was stuck with and the stuff that actually seemed to interest him – maybe (maybe!) now that that’s over with (Mark Whalberg is the new human lead) this will finally “work,” even if it still won’t likely be the Transformers movie some are still hoping for.

Good, maybe moves a little too fast.

ALSO: So long to Blockbuster.