Here are the movies vying to be “Twilight 2.0”

Well, that’s that, then.

Just over a week since the first man who accused Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash of engaging him in an “innapropriate relationship” as a teenager recanted, a second accusation has arisen with implications that more are on the way. Citing that his personal life has become a “distraction,” Clash has resigned from Sesame Workshop as of today.

Sad day for kids everywhere. Ironically, until the documentary “Being Elmo” last year, Clash was as anonymous as most other muppet performers, meaning that – since Sesame Workshop has confirmed that Elmo will continue to be part of the series under new performers – had this all happened a year or two ago it would’ve been able to do so without younger fans having to be aware of it.

What if “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” made a baby? Well, previously I’d have had to say that Harry Potter would play more like early-period Chris Claremont “X-Men” than it already does… but now I guess the more apt answer would simply be “The Mortal Instruments.”

I’d managed to be largely unaware of this most-recent YA Fiction phenomenon until just now, outside of the fact that it existed and that it was considered vaugely controversial for reasons I never bothered to look up, but it’s yet another success story for a onetime fan-fiction author making the jump from re-writing existing material to writing something really, really similar to existing material. In this case, the pitch seems to have been “American teenage female Harry Potter,” which isn’t all that bad a place to start really…

Our seemignly-normal-hero-secretly-hidden-from-heroic-destiny-for-their-own-protection for this go-around is a Brooklyn high-schooler, the Secret World Just Under Our Noses is a shadow-war involving tattoo-powered magic users battling the usual urban-fantasy monsters plus The Nephilim, who somehow went from being a Biblical obscurity only theology geeks cared about to the most overused cliche in genre-fiction within the last decade. and

I’m informed that part of the “hook” is that the main characters jump on the “lets imperil our Save The World Mission by letting our hormones override every other instinct” romance-go-round pretty much right off the bat and with less… “binary” approach to who’s-pining-for-who re: sexuality, so there’s that. In particular, the first one is supposed to end with a “twist” (which apparently becomes THE central character-conflict of the series) that I frankly have no idea how they plan to translate to the screen without creating a minor freak-out among mainstream audiences; though maybe that’s what they’re counting on?

…it’s kind of awesome.

ALSO: I’m not good at things.



By all means, feel free to share around:



All that changes within the first few minutes of “Breaking Dawn: Part II,” however – and the bit that does it made the trailer. What you’re hearing is true: The movie is a STUNNINGLY magnificient disaster – and the animated gif at your right encapsulates WHY:

Sam Raimi’s “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” is officially a non-canonical prequel to Baum’s original “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz;” but from the brand-new full trailer it’s very apparent that they want audiences to take it as a prequel to the classic MGM film: Here’s Oz as you (and your parents, and their parents…) grew up with it – right down to the black-and-white ‘real world’ – but now even bigger and realized with state-of-the-art FX and 3D cinematography.

Given that, the powerful place the MGM “Oz” has in the cultural memories of millions worldwide and the fact that the film is looking pretty handsome; it’s probably appropriate that the trailer includes a scene of the main character tumbling into a mountain of gold coins to shame Scrooge McDuck:

Ho. Ly. SHIT is that final shot money – the sound of five generations worth of movie audiences reacting the way Marvel fans do whenever Guy-No-One-Else-In-The-Audience-Has-Heard-Of turns up after the credits. There’s a lot of Margaret Hamilton’s Witch in the way Raimi tends to depict monsters and/or evil in general, and you can tell that they know full well that that’s the character to be teasing here; even as the rest of the trailer is going “YELLOW BRICK ROAD! EMERALD CITY! FLYING MONKEYS! MUNCHKINS!”

The whole point of this project, initially, was to beat “Wicked” to theaters before that production stalled. MY question now is, if this is even close to good… do they still bother with “Wicked?” I know the play is a huge deal, but don’t movie audiences look at the trailer for that and go “Didn’t we already see that?”

As expected, both Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell are scheduled to appear. Film opens in March.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with The Other Blog, here’s what’s up: TGO’s original home on ScrewAttack is now inhabited by a spin-off series, “OverBytes.” The original series has been retitled “Adventures of The Game OverThinker” and now appears on Blip. Here is the debut episode:

http://blip.tv/play/AYOI8AUA.html?p=1http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYOI8AUA

Steve Head and John Black had me back on the Post-Movie Podcast this week, talking “Wreck-It Ralph,” “SkyFall” and whatever else popped up.

The New York Times reports that the yet-unnamed man who alleged that he’d engaged in innapropriate relationship while underage with Elmo voice/puppeteer Kevin Clash has recanted his accusations through his attorney.

Good news for Clash, certainly, and it’s done with quickly enough that the scandal didn’t quite go irreparably memetic; but I get the sense Sesame Workshop is probably still going to dial it back on Elmo for just a bit. Still sucks, but could’ve shaken out a lot worse.

UPDATE: Owing to an error on my part, a bunch of comments that should’ve gone through got dumped into moderation. Should be fixed now, learning curves and all that.

Assuming all the coding works out, this post and all others for the forseeable future will be running on a new commenting system called “Intense Debate,” which I’m going to assume most web users are familiar with by now.

This decision was made because it allows for last-resort measures such as banning IPs, usernames and emails from trolls, spammers, threadjackers and other abusive behaviors while simultaneously giving readers more options to comment overall.

Anonymous comments are no longer enabled, but using Intense Debate you can log in under Twitter or OpenID (working on Facebook logins, seems to be an API Key issue currently) OR get a FREE IntenseDebate login ID at their homepage.