You’ve heard correctly.

“Intermission” is about the Summer’s big surprise hit.

I keep wanting to make the usual joke about whose blood Alicia Silverstone has been bathing in to still look exactly like she did over a decade ago today, and then I remember she actually is playing a vampire in this movie… which I can’t make up my mind about: Does this look terrible or weirdly good?

I’m a “South Park” fan, but everyone could use a little dressing down now and then.

Honestly, I whipped this up one night awhile ago and never put it on The Tubes because I didn’t think it came out AS cutting or funny as I wanted it to be, overall. But the music I found makes it work out better, I think… but maybe I’m wrong. You tell me…

Bullied, overweight kid in Seattle is rescued from suicide by a sketchy slacker, who then decides they should form a punk band. Matthew Lillard directs.

I get the sense that this will be a teenage movie I will actually like. I’m getting the sense that Lillard is turning into an interesting talent again.

“Red underwear man… PRETTY!”

“Crave” is the feature directing debut of Charlie de Lauzirika, who’s been one of the top-tier DVD producers for years now. The film was just awarded the Best Director (Next Wave) prize at Fantastic Fest.

Big fan of his work, never met him personally (in reality, anyway, we’d had some friendly interactions on a long-gone movie chat outlet maybe ten years ago) but he’s always struck me as one of the good ones. Good to see him make it.

You may have heard that Badass Digest helmer Devin Faraci and “mumblecore” darling Joe Swanberg participated in one of Fantastic Fest’s infamous “debates” over the weekend. If you’re not familiar with the format, FF lets participants lay into eachother verbally in a conventional debate… then the opponents put on boxing gloves and settle up for real.

Swanberg won the physical matchup rather definitively (you can see the footage after the jump) – he’s a big guy with almost a foot on his opponent, and in Devin’s own words he got “the piss beaten out of him.” The whole thing is more-or-less for show; but these two guys don’t like eachother and for my money Faraci won the war of words with this brutal slapdown of the “mumblecore” movement:

I’m not always Devin’s biggest fan or even “defender,” but I can’t help but give a colossal FUCK. YES. to that.

I’m being told on good authority that a Chinese film called “Lee’s Adventure,” billed as the big breakout vehicle for Jackie Chan’s son and just screened at Fantastic Fest, is the next great “movie about video games.” Based on an animated short, plot concerns a teenager with a bizarre mental affliction attempting to complete a game which he believes will allow him access to time-travel. Trailer below the jump:

Something fun, for your Sunday.

I think “Muppet Babies” might be (by default) the closest to “overrated” any of the mainline Muppet productions ever got, mostly because it was probably a certain generation of kids first exposure to the characters. Absolutely not a BAD show, by any means, but watching it again now it’s kind of unnavoidable that the ratio of preschool-moralizing to actual humor is a bit lopsided in the not-as-funny direction (also, yes… having all the character voices pitched so high starts to grate after a bit.)

But, fond memories I still have; particularly of the handful of episodes I had on tape and watched incessantly as a kid. One I only think I saw once, however, was (for obvious reasons) burned into my head just enough that before you could look these things up on the internet there was a period when I thought I’d imagined it: “It’s Only Pretendo.”

If you’re not familiar with (or don’t recall) the premise of the show, the Babies would play this or that make-believe game, which would flip back and forth between the “real world” of their nursery and elaborate visualizations of what they’re pretending is going on; often using mixed-media additions of movie and TV footage (usually public-domain, but sometimes big stuff like “Star Wars” which is why this isn’t on DVD yet.)

This episode is built around playing “Pretendo,” which you’ll gather is supposed to be a video-game console (the “lesson” turns out to be “play friendly and share” rather than “put that down and go outside,” UNHEARD OF in any other cartoon of the era where gaming was involved!) Aside from the obvious, I think the reason this one probably stuck out to me as a kid was that you almost NEVER saw video games being played by characters on TV and you definitely never saw reference to ACTUAL games. But that’s what goes on here, as the main part of the show is essentially wall-to-wall reference to Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Frogger (of course) Q*Bert and even The Power Pad(!) plus relative obscurities like Keith Courage and Fantasy Zone.

Enjoy! Part I   Part II   Part III

Everyone else is running this, so I figure I might as well get my clicks while I can.

In one of those developments that I’m sure I’ll be hearing about as the “symbolic death of film journalism” at the next critic’s meetup; major movie news has once again been (potentially) made by the release of a toy company’s product schedule: LEGO has been giving retailers the heads-up as to their 2013 licensed products, and references therein seem to have let some possible-surprises slip a little early.

One of them isn’t all that much of a surprise (pretty much everyone has figured out who/what Ben Kingsley is ACTUALLY playing in “Iron Man 3,” yes?) but the other MAY have given away the game for Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan’s “Man of Steel.”

All speculation at this point, but still… POTENTIAL MAJOR SPOILER AFTER THE JUMP!

Last chance to turn back, kids:

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The last entry on LEGO’s product list for playsets reads as follows: 76009: SUPERMAN BLACK ZERO ESCAPE. If there’s an especially well-versed DC Comics fan reading this in the vicinity near you, it may be wise to give them a bag to breathe into.

Who or what is “Black Zero?” Well, to give you an idea of why this could be the mother of all spoilers for this particular movie, the Silver Age (1968) story that introduced the first iteration of the character/concept was called “The Man Who Destroyed Krypton.”

Yeah.

In the story (now long-deleted from “official” Superman canon by a Crisis or fifty) Black Zero is an alien “space saboteur” who specializes in causing the destruction of entire planets; and reveals that while Jor-El had been right about Krypton’s demise being probable, the “internal pressures” issue would actually have worked itself out had Black Zero not given them an extra shove. When Zero turns his attentions to Earth, Superman is forced to release a Kryptonian supervillain named Jax-Ur from The Phantom Zone in order to defeat him.

In post-Crisis continuity, “Black Zero” is the name of a terrorist organization that was part of a clones-vs-natural-borns Civil War on ancient Krypton whose superweapon “The Destroyer” set in motion the milleniums-long chain reaction that eventually. resulted in the planet’s ultimate demise. There’s also been a “Black Zero Computer Virus” and the original’s name/costume were adopted by an alternate-universe doppleganger of the post-Doomsday Superboy.

So, then… assuming that this is legit, what is “Black Zero” in “Man of Steel?” Is “what destroyed Krypton?” part of some big overarching mystery in the film? Is it a character? An organization? Just a “shout-out” for fans? Mucking around and “over-complicating” the Krypton backstory has been sketchy territory for Superman adaptations in the past… but it’s also something I can easily imagine Warners aiming at to give the character some Batman-ish angst; and it’d be VERY typical of the ultra-literalist, mechanics-fixated Nolan Bros. to want to tie the end of Krypton in the backstory to the main story (re: Superman has to literally protect Earth from the same fate his father failed to prevent on Kypton.)

I’ll be honest… neither of those theories sound like particularly good ideas to me, but I’m intrigued.