You may have already forgotten this, but Michael Bay was producing a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot for Nickelodeon (retitled to just “Ninja Turtles”), but the project got shitcanned – I’m sorry, postponed – earlier this Summer. Said postponement came shortly after alleged details about the screenplay (reportedly hated by the people financing the project) leaked to the web. The “big deal” detail was that the main characters’ origins had been revised to make them aliens.

Well, now it seems like the full screenplay might have been leaked, according to the fan blog “TMNT, NOT TANT,” which seems to have been dedicated wholly to railing against this particular project. The whole thing is online in a pdf which is linked from TANT; but just in case there’s some kinda skullduggery going on here I won’t directly link to it.

There’s been absolutely zero confirmation of this yet, so this could all be an elaborate hoax. But I’ll say this: if this is a forgery, it’s a pretty damn good one – containing every detail that had previously “leaked” (even the non-outrage-inducing stuff) and reading like exactly what you’d expect from a Bay-produced “modernizing” of the franchise… but not in an overblown self-parody way.

Yeah, I read it. Yeah, I’ll fill you in. And since this MAY actually be the real deal, and the thing MAY actually still get made, SPOILER WARNING for everything after the jump.

Okay. Overall? It’s not good. The ritual-slaughter perpetrated on the mythos aside (lets be frank here: TMNT has already been drastically re-fitted and rebooted plenty of times before) it’s just not a very good action script. Locations, characters, arcs and plot turns are generic, action scenes are uninspired and been-there/done-that.

Biggest numero-uno glaring problem from a strictly technical standpoint: The four Turtles just don’t have any character “on the page.” They all read the same – which is to say, they all read like the first live-action movie’s version of Raphael. The character “details” are there (Leonardo is the pragmatic leader, Raphael is the sarcastic hothead, Donatello is the techie, Michaelangelo is the big kid, etc.) but they don’t “read” any differently. Admittedly, it’s the sort of thing good voice casting would go a long way toward fixing.

Either way, the Turtles aren’t the main characters. Our lead is Casey Jones – here, a small-town teenage hockey goon whose girlfriend (April O’Neil) has left him to pursue a TV journalism career (at… CBS?) in The Big City. It’s Casey who, by happenstance, discovers the Ninja Turtles, rescues them from a military experimentation facility, gives them their color-coded masks (they all look the same and he needs to tell them apart, haw haw) and offers to help them get back to Master Splinter in New York (exactly where April went – what are the odds!!??) Yup – it’s Sam from “Transformers” all over again.

The “alien origin” is in there, but it’s meant as a third-act surprise. The Turtles start out having been raised (by Splinter, as ever) under the impression that their origin was the same as the comics and the cartoon – i.e. ordinary turtles mutated by mysterious ooze. Speaking of which, the occasionally-stated dictum that this was going to be “closer to the Mirage comics?” Complete bunk – it’s the 80s cartoon by way of Bayformers; with Bebop, Rocksteady, Dimension X, The Technodrome and Krang all present and accounted for.

But what about Shredder? Well… this is the stuff that initially made me think this still might be a parody: In this version, the main heavy is COLONEL SCHRADER, who runs a covert military squad codenamed “THE FOOT” that is hunting the Turtles and also bosses around Bebop and Rocksteady (who are more-or-less direct lifts from the cartoon, save that they actually use their guns.) Big second-act reveal: Schrader is also a mutant/alien/whatever disguised as a human who produces blade from his body like a mecha-porcupine. (Michaelangelo: “Schrader? More like SHREDDER!”)

So what does Col. Schrader want? Well, he’s an advance-man working for Krang (still a living brain, riding in a humanoid mecha-suit with four arms) who’s waiting over in Dimension X to invade Earth (by merging the two dimensions) with The Technodrome (the Utroms, Neutrinos etc don’t appear to exist.) What’s been keeping him?

Well… the TMNT are Superman, basically. Humanoid Turtles are apparently an indigenous race to Dimension X (a generic jungle planet, incidentally), and the four we know are (what else?) THE CHOSEN ONES, spirited away to Earth via Splinter as newborns just as Krang was taking over and fated to return and use their predestined Ninja Weaponry (they seriously do not get their familiar weapons until the end of the movie!) to set things right. Also, there’s some B.S. about magic orbs that had been hidden on Earth that were holding Krang back, but we’re informed that he just got done tracking them all down offscreen.

The whole thing ends with the by-now expected “Return of The Jedi” pitched three-way battle: The Turtles fighting Krang on NYC rooftops while Casey and April try to short-circuit the dimensional merging aparatus (Casey single-handedly takes out Schrader, Bebop and Rocksteady. For real)as Splinter and The U.S. Military battle Krang’s invasion force; culminating in a bizzare setup for more sequels: Turns out the Turtles “destiny” isn’t to remain together and fight crime, but rather to split up to the four corners of the Earth and each guard one of those dimension-seperating magic orbs and to train their own individual squads of pre-teenage Ninja Turtles. In a final bit of fanservice, April ditches her go-nowhere “internship” at CBS (surprise! She’s exaggerated her glamorous NY life to Casey and was really just an errand girl – betcha didn’t see that coming!) and instead becomes an “underground webcam blogger” (oooh! How current!) for ChannelSix.com. Heh. Oh, and the “Turtles arriving at their orb-guarding posts” montage seems to set up a movie-verse version of Venus from “The Next Mutation,” FWIW.

So… this reads like it could be the real thing to me, but it could just as easily be bullshit. If it is real, though, it feels like a bullet has been dodged. It doesn’t even really read like a “Transformers”-style disaster, really more of a dull, standard-issue action dud. Despite how many franchise-friendly advances have been made in the fields of CGI and choreography, the script is shockingly light on the “Ninja” part of it’s title: The Foot Soldiers are just generic Black Ops mooks with machine guns (the Turtle’s shells are bulletproof) and most of the action scenes are just chases – until they get their weapons at the end, the extent of the Turtles’ martial-arts prowess is limited to shuriken-throwing and improv-weapons. The big final fight with Krang is clearly meant to be the big payoff – at least, here are the guys as you recognize them – but too little, too late.

I actually really like the prospect of having Bebop, Rocksteady and Krang turn up in live-action, but the execution of them is pretty terrible. Krang, especially, is a boring “evil for the sake of it” heavy; which is a problem because he becomes the main threat in the third act. Schrader is a pretty dull bad guy in his own right, but at least if he was the “end boss” there’d be history with the various characters sort of paying off. One of Krang’s (not-even-a-handful) lines is to trot out a version of the “Your father looked just like that when I…” lines; referring back to a (biological) father the Turtles and the audience never knew and just found out existed.

We’ll probably find out shortly if this is indeed the real thing. Until then… whoa.

Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human being to set foot on another world, a human achievement which has not yet been equaled (think about that for a minute – NO human being has done anything as monumental as that since) has died at the age of 82.

I’m having a little trouble processing that today, so instead I think I’ll repost THIS:

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Below, Bill Nye handily explaining WHY it’s important not to simply “let them be” regarding creationists, flat-earthers, etc.

There are two kinds of people in the world: Thinkers and Believers. The distinction has nothing to do with religion or “atheism” or even intelligence – it’s about how you approach life on a day-to-day basis. Do you think for yourself, or do you let someone (or someTHING) else decide for you? Do you put your trust in “traditions” or do you apply logic? Do you “feel” or do you reason?

I’m sure this will pass without incident.

Also, Tony Scott.

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A big conversation-piece last year on the festival circuit, “Butter” is a political satire – supposedly in the vein of “Election” – that uses a yearly butter-carving competition (yes, we are firmly in “Little Miss Sunshine” middle-america-as-quirktastic-museum-piece land) as a metaphor for “modern politics” (read: the 2008 presidential election.) Jennifer Garner is the deliberately Palin/Bachman-esque wife of the reigning champ who enters the contest herself in order to maintain her family’s prestige after her husband is disgraced by being caught with a stripper/hooker (Olivia Wilde;) only to find her victory imperiled by the arrival of an adopted African-American girl (standing in for, well, GUESS) who turns out to be a natural prodigy at the “sport.”

The first trailer, of course, is mostly downplaying that particular angle; which feels like a missed opportunity.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS after jump.

The film has had a good deal of ink already, mostly because Conservatives are getting better and better at mobilizing against stuff like this as though they were an ACTUAL persecuted minority, but the word from the critical press was pretty mixed otherwise: Heavy-handed, overly-broad/cute, etc.

Looks pretty funny to me, though, and naturally my interest perked up at the notion that Wilde’s character (apparently) turns her romantic intentions on Ashley Greene – who I think is playing Garner’s daughter. So… that ought to be something, at least. Though, it must be said, it’s a little weird that Garner seems to still be playing every role with the same “13 year-old grownup” affect from “13 Goin On 30.”

I was just talking with a friend about remakes tonight, too…

I’m not “against” remakes. You can make a good movie out of anything, “anything” includes other movies, and so on. But there’s a point where this just becomes nonsense. At this point the “remake cycle” is just that – a self-perpetuating corporate organism: You produce a remake of a known-quantity not only to hold on to any IP no matter what, but also to re-sell the original on Blu-Ray and because you know the outrage/intrigue generated by potentially desecrating a sacred cow will translate into massive coverage by a film press now dominated by I-watched-that-a-million-times VHS-generation movie geeks.

I get that, and I get why someone would want to remake “Total Recall” (wasn’t good, but could’ve been) or even “Robocop” (DOOMED) from a business and even an artistic standpoint. But… remaking “VIDEODROME!?”

Okay, here’s the problem with this:

A property like “Videodrome” neatly divides the entire spectrum of audiences into two camps: A relatively small number of people who adore it and will be immediately hostile to the idea of anyone touching it… and the vast majority of folks who have either never heard of it, never saw it or saw it and hated it. It’s not “Robocop” where you’re talking about a ‘brand.’ There is zero point in making this film – as opposed to an original film that “modernizes” the now-somewhat-dated “Videodrome” ideas – other than to feed The Cycle.

The original David Cronenberg film is technically a scifi mystery in which James Woods plays the boss of a UHF TV station (ask your parents) who starts broadcasting pirated signals of what he believes to be staged snuff-film footage originating in Malaysia but may actually be part of a government/corporate/mad-science experiment to alter the minds and bodies of viewers via TV signals; but the actual plot plays out almost like it’s being invented by the film (or hallucinated by the characters) on the fly. The real focus is on the elaborate nightmare sequences, bio-mechanical transformation FX and weirdly-prescient philosophizing about real life being supplanted by video life – the film essentially pre-figured the logical extreme of, say, “Second Life” despite The Internet having not been invented yet.

The remake (which I’m going to assume will likely port the focus from television to The Web) is angling to be a “large scale sci-fi action thriller” (gag!) possibly involving “nanobots;” which sounds to me like they’re going to try and explain the body-morph stuff whose surreal ambiguity was the point of the original film.

So… looks like we have this to look forward to – though, if recent trends are any indication folks will be lining up to tell me how wrong/biased/fanboy I am and how much better the original would be if only David Cronenberg had the foresight to make it as shitty as the new one. The director currently attached is Adam Berg, who has apparently been awarded a film career based wholly on a commercial for a now-defunct model of Philips TVs which was best described as a “Dark Knight”/Joker fan-film done in bullet-time.

Yeah, this totally has a chance in hell of being good…

Episode 74: “Rusty Pipes” – which will deal with whether or not the Super Mario Bros. series has overstayed it’s welcome and that other thing that was revealed at the end of last episode – will make it’s debut on Thursday 8/30. ScrewAttack Advantage members can get an early look on Monday 8/27.

It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here: Nintendo Power Magazine is shutting down after 24 years. If nothing else, a lot of people’s magazine collections are about to become really valuable.

I am feeling about as rotten about this as I did when Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson died. Yes, Nintendo Power was a nakedly commercial corporate thing – a singularly genius bit of marketing by Nintendo of America in realizing that there was going to be a “gamer culture” and getting in front of it with a big, glossy fan magazine of their own. (You can read the first issue in PDF format HERE.)

But it was a HUGE deal, legitimately, as well: Pre-internet, I don’t think a lot of gamers (myself included) would’ve become gamers without NP to show them that there were others and that codes, strategies, maps, fan-art etc was meant to be shared. Having this magazine showing up at my house every month for a decade or so did more to make me a better reader than almost any book did, and I can say for a fact that there were a lot of NES/SNES games now considered benchmark classics that I don’t think a lot of people would’ve connected with without NP “covering” them. A whole generation of (American) gamers were introduced to JRPGs when Nintendo Power gave away a free copy of DragonQuest (as “Dragon Warrior”) as a re-subscription bonus. I myself got my first internet connection – and first exposure to the “medium” where I now make my living – in order to use the Nintendo Power AOL site. The AVGN once summed up the memories thusly:

I hadn’t subscribed in years – like everyone else, The Internet replaced magazines for things like that for me – but it’s still pretty sad to see it go. This is real end-of-an-era stuff – another huge part of the Golden Age of Gaming is gone. In my mind, this is as quietly-devastating a loss as when Sega abandoned consoles.

Rest in peace, old friend.

NOT talking about that awful Chuck Norris movie.

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Tony Scott, younger brother of Ridley and easily one of the most important and influential action movie directors of the last several decades (an “of all time” case could absolutely be made,) is dead from an apparent suicide. Witnesses say he jumped to his death from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California, his body being later retrieved from the water by LAPD officers. What may have led to this fate is, at this time, unknown. Awful, awful news.

Like his brother, Scott had a quixotic career. Originally schooled as a painter, he became a sought-after director of commercials, documentary shorts and music-videos for Ridley’s video production studio in England. He was in his forties before transitioning to features with the cult-fave modern-vampire piece “The Hunger;” but subsequently became known primarily for his action movies via collaborations with Jerry Bruckheimer. The best of these came out in an impressive run between 1986 and 1995: “Top Gun,” “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Revenge,” “Days of Thunder,” “The Last Boy Scout,” “True Romance” and “Crimson Tide.”

Scott’s filmography can be found HERE. If there’s anything on there you’ve never seen, now would be the time.