The Miss Universe Pageant held it’s preliminary National Costume Show a few days back, a pre-pageant publicity event where the contestants show off early builds of their outfits for the “National Costume” portion of the event – aka “dress up as the Sexy Halloween Costume interpretation of your country’s national identity.” You can imagine how this is supposed to go: Miss Sweden as a Viking, Miss Denmark as The Little Mermaid, etc.

Well, pictured at your right: Miss USA Erin Brady in her national costume interpretation of… Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots faction of The Transformers. Which were, of course, were Japanese toys – but that’s really the least silly thing about this, isn’t it?

The pageant itself will be held on Saturday, so there’s presumably some time for them to possibly get her into something else… but I kind of hope they don’t. This is us, America. Might as well just wear it.

Well, this still looks like shit. Nice to know some things are constant.

At least we’ve now got some kind of new-ish story to work with: In this version, OCP makes it’s money selling drones to every country but the United States; which apparently has either a law or at least a big cultural apprehension toward the use of robotic security within its borders (“Robophobia” waka waka waka fuck you.) and Robocop is a way around that: Ostensibly an augmented-human with bonus “second lease on life for a cripple” sob-story that’s actually little more than a corpse being remote-controlled by OCP and tricked into thinking it’s making its own decisions. But then he remembers to be human in time to get in elaborate (and PG-13 friendly!) CGI battles with other robots – i.e. exactly the sort of stuff the original movie devoted two entire sequences to making fun of.

Amusingly, the idea that near-future America is still considered a really important consumer market to “crack” immediately makes this a more optimistic movie than Verhoeven’s film. This will be out next year, so everybody remember to get just as psyched as you did for “The Thing” and “Total Recall,” both of which I’m sure we all have on fondly-displayed Blu-Ray and watch at minimum once or twice a week.

Where are all the black people, differently-abled and (other) women in the Marvel Universe? Netflix, as it turns out. Today’s big news: The ubiquitous streaming service will follow-up it’s year of turning the TV drama game upside-down with the breakout mega-success of “House of Cards” and “Orange is The New Black” by getting into the superhero game with Marvel/Disney.

Let’s talk about criticism.

“And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon upon him, his name was Death, and Hell followed with him.” — Revelations 6:8

In all seriousness, though – this is sort of interesting in the way that some of Perry’s projects are once you stop regarding them as films and start regarding them as “found art;” or some kind of anthropological discovery. Drafting Larry The Cable Guy into this (the story: Madea tags along with a friend to surprise-visit her daughter at Christmas, where they’re surprised to find said daughter has a white boyfriend with wacky redneck relatives) sound ridiculous for approximately 30 seconds, then it makes perfect sense.

Also, this (teaming with Dan Whitney aka Larry) seems to be the first time I’ve seen Perry acknowledge or actively court the unexpected crossover-appeal his movies have had with some more conservative white/rural audiences that typically wouldn’t have “black films” on their radar. And his presence will be (literal) Christmas Present to white hipster movie-geeks who’re “ironic fans” of Tyler Perry movies but might sometimes worry that they might unwittingly slip from “clever urbanite snarking at bad movies” to “clueless white person who doesn’t get some idiom of black culture OMG I’M TURNING INTO MY PARENTS AND I MOVED ALL THE WAY TO WILLIAMSBURG TO PREVENT THAT NOOOOOO!”

This will be out December 13th, with another round of “HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!!??” reports on it’s “unexpectedly” large boxoffice take from industry news sites who still haven’t grasped that there are indeed large economically-significant audiences outside their immediate readership to follow on Monday the 16th.

Not so good.

Also, Let’s Watch The WINTER SOLDIER Trailer.

Happy Halloween! Good news, THE LEGO MOVIE still looks like the best thing ever:

Well… it’s still early yet, right?

I’m not sure what feels more low-rent/half-assed about this first DOFP trailer: Using both the “Sunshine” AND “The Thin Red Line” scores – the most overused trailer-music lifts outside of “Crimson Tide” and “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” – or having Wolverine spell out why it’s stupid to send Wolverine on this mission (quantum-leaping back into his 1970s self to help the cast of “First Class” fight Tyrion Lannister’s army of Transformers and presumably retcon “X3” and “Origins” further out of existence) for no other reason than “he’s the popular one.”

Hey – remember that part in “The Avengers” where everyone else just hung back and did nothing the whole time so the camera could focus on Iron Man because he’s the money-shot? Oh, right… they didn’t do that.

I’m sure it’ll be just fine, but there’s no shaking the sense that “First Class” was probably as good as this series was going to get while still moored to the first two Bryan Singer entries. With apologies to Singer… the guy was never cut-out to make blockbusters like this, and he probably wouldn’t be doing them at all if the first “X-Men” hadn’t been so surprisingly-not-shit-for-a-pre-“Spider-Man”-superhero-movie. Maybe he’ll pull this one off, and better him than Ratner again, but still…

Happy Halloween!

This year’s (mostly complete) Halloween costume, as I continually checking off the list of “guys I maybe kinda look like in certain clothes” …SGT. SLAUGHTER (G.I. Joe-era uniform, for you completists):

Basically, my physique is ideal for certain pre-WWII cartoon characters, certain early arcade characters and any heavyweight pro-wrestler from before the bodybuilding/steroid era. So there’s that…