Well, not really, but intercut from two separate interviews to get something of a virtual debate going.

Allah also mentions a "seven sided die." Which just goes to show you he's desperate to imitate my D&D coolitude, but he's inept at it, because everyone knows there's no such thing as a seven sided die.

Actually there is, but there's no possible way he can know that. So he's wrong even though he's right.

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (41)
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Sorry for all the SOAP stuff; this should just about be the last of such posts.

"Snakes On a Plane" Fails to Charm, runs the hed.

So much for the Internet hype.

"Snakes on a Plane," a camp thriller that generated an unprecedented tsunami of online hysteria during the past year, crawled into the No. 1 slot at the North American weekend box office with estimated ticket sales of just $15.3 million, its distributor said on Sunday.

New Line Cinema had hoped the movie would open in the low-$20 million range, a spokeswoman said. While the Time Warner Inc.-owned studio was disappointed, she said the film would be profitable. Hailed by celluloid cognoscenti as being so bad that it's good, "Snakes" cost about $30 million to make, a relatively modest sum.

The sales figure covers actual data from Friday and Saturday, as well as an estimate for Sunday. It also includes $1.4 million from Thursday-evening screenings.

...

"This tells you that you need to have a compelling story or premise to get an audience for your movie," [an analyst at boxofficemojo.com] said.

Really? You think? Let me write that down. "Compelling... premise... or... story... to get... an audience."

Hm. Well, it sounds crazy, but it never hurts to get a fresh take, no matter how counterintuitive and "out there."

Senior New Line executives were not available for comment.

Not a good sign.

The project had been in development since 1999, going through several studios, rewrites and directors. It became a cause celebre last year when Jackson publicly assailed New Line for changing the title to the nebulous "Pacific Air 121."

The studio backed down, empowering Jackson and adoring online fans to complain that the film was not violent enough. Scenes were added ratcheting up the gruesome quotient. The bloggers' victory ensured plenty of media coverage, seemingly turning the little B-movie into a preordained must-see hit.

Sigh. This is the sort of crap the Ain't It Cool News morons are always pushing -- more tits, more graphic violence. I think I've established my bona fides as being tit and graphic violence friendly, but these morons are just kneejerk geekwads who never stop bleating, "Make it more exxxxxtreme! More gore! More knockers! Now that's storytelling! Exxxxtreme storytelling!"

Uh, yeah, whatever. If that was the key to box office success, Friday the 13th Part X: Jason Takes Manhattan would be aheaad of Return of the Jedi on the all-time box office list.

Why the hell do they listen to these morons?

Has anyone seen Arachnaphobia? This movie was terrifying (despite having no "brown people" in the cast), and it was well-made, and it was funny. Even the character development was interesting, a completely unexpected bonus in a movie about a maurauding army of hybrid Warrior Spiders. And yet-- the violence in it was pretty much limited to spider-squashing. (Not completely, but pretty much.)

Really, I don't mean to go all cliche on everyone, but while graphic violence has its uses, it's really the anticipation of violence that gets people in the sense of manipulating emotions. The actual graphic violence elicits a wince by most and an emotionally-disengaged cry of "Yeah Boy, dat was exxxxxtreme!" from fourteen year old retards.

I remember reading Ain't It Cool News' gushing, ecstatic preview-review of Rollerball remake. Now, if you've seen this movie, you know it's one of the most inept films of all time, easily in top fifty worst (major release) films in Hollywood history. For reasons unfathomable, there's a six minute chase sequence shot entirely in night-vision film (or made to look that way). And for reasons even more unfathomable, it stars Chris Klein as the Toughest Meanest Kill-Crazy Athlete In the World.

And the reviewer's main reason for giving it such a glowing review? It had Rebecca Romaijn's tits and a lot of gore. Look, if I do the Ace of Spades Lifestyle (TM) schtick, I'll say "YEAH!!! BEST MOVIE EVER!!!" about Rollerball too, but, you know, unlike Knowles and crew, I'm joking around.

They say that "nobody knows anything in Hollywood," but there is one group who knows less than nothing, and that's the Ain't It Cool jagoffs and the internet geeks in general.

Basically, Snakes On A Plane was juiced up with nudity and violence to satisfy a demographic -- fourteen year old boys -- who may see the movie, but they can't actually buy tickets for it, so their ticket sales go not to SOAP's tally but to some random PG movie that just happened to be playing at the same time.

To quote Otter from Delta House: Hollywood, you fucked up. You trusted us.

Posted by: Ace at 03:14 PM | Comments (52)
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Rightwing Sparkle suggeted this. I was going to do my own, one with that picture of me naked with my cat, but I've been cleaning all day and I'm just tired.

Plus, I've written two funny things this weekend, which is way above my average. Time to coast for, I don't know, six or seven months.

So, why don't you morons do some work for a change.

Write your own personal ad to attract a "quality" mate.

Update: Beth thinks she's found a Quality Man for Jaqueline Mackie Paisley Passey.

He's offering $10,000 in "quality" for an introduction to the woman he proposes to.

His name is "Rod."

I'd like to put up his picture, but it's all flash media stuff, and so I can't.

Compelling, and rich.

Update: Several readers have sent me Rod's picture. Thanks-- but it's time to call off the hounds.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (64)
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I just watched that Dow Chemical commercial for the eleventy-fifth time, and I am so hot to buy chemicals right now.
Potassium is bonding with potential?
Shit-howdy. Put me down for two hundred units. I'm a-spreadin' that-there potassium all over me, and the lawn too.

And then there's the National Geographic-style photography. Gorgeous. I got to have some of that.
I want colorful indigineously-woven fabrics blowing in the wind and sand dunes lit by the afternoon sun, and cute foreigners with character etched in their faces.
That would totally kick the shit out of the neighbors' fancy hydrangea bushes!

If anybody can give me Dow's 1-800 number, I'd like to call them and order a bunch of stuff.

UPDATE: This goes for BASF too. They told me that they don't make the things I buy, they make the things I buy better.
And I have a garage full of crappy-ass consumer products that either don't fit or don't work, but they won't return my phone calls to fix this shit.
It's crazy.
These companies advertise all the damn place, but they don't tell you how to buy what they're selling.
Infuriating.
Put me some fucking potassium, and fix my shoes, goddammit!

Posted by: LauraW. at 02:15 PM | Comments (18)
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A $13.something weekend take, putting it at Number Two behind last week's realease Talledega Nights.

Not poisonous, but neither is it soaring.

Allah and I currently arguing if this is weak or very weak for a movie with so much free buzz, and whether that means that blogs and the alternative media are paper tiger (cubs) or not.

I think it's just weak, not very weak. Late August is a dumping ground for weaker popcorn fare; big hyped tentpole movies don't get realeased August 18th.

Still, with all the buzz, I'd've expected higher. How much higher? I don't know. If I had to guess, I would have said 40 mil or so. So that's a pretty big underperformance by my own (completely uniformed) retroactive guestimate.

Then again, most of the buzz was of a decidedly forked-tongue-in-cheek nature. No one was really hyping this as the next Lord of the Rings. It was always mentioned in a giddy, can-you-believe-this-silliness? way.

I guess my own negative review didn't help. I guess I should have actually seen the movie before reviewing it, but brown people scare me too much, unless they're avuncular men of wisdom and kindness, like Morgan Freeman, although Morgan Freeman scares the crap out of me too. I rate Driving Miss Daisy as one of the most viscerally horrifying films since The Exorcist.

Allah thinks it establishes that the Internet can't shape opinion, and no one reads blogs.

Mr. Sunshine, this one is.

I know the studio people must be pretty bummed. They probably figured this to be a modest ticket-seller, but then began ratcheting up expectations when the premise caught the imaginations of most of the Internet. Those elevated expections have been pretty well dashed, I think.

But again, it only caught people's imaginations in an ironic kind of way.

As I said to Allah, no matter how much free buzz this movie got, it was still a movie about Snakes On A Plane. Viral marketing can't turn a cheesy snakespolitation goof into a Sixth Sense.

Note: The film's budget was only $33 mil, and I'm guessing about that much, or a little less, was spent on promotion. Internet buzz -- of, again, a dubiously-helpful ironic kind -- increased name recognition to a certain extent, surely, but I disagree that silly photoshops and the fake-excitement "countdown clocks" were worth many millions in free advertising.

The film will make a profit, but it doesn't look like it's going to be a blockbuster. It'll take in $100 million domestic, tops, unless it has some incredibly-impropbable Sixth Sense/Titanic repeat-viewing phenomenon on its side.

Hollywood Stock Exchange: I've never really understood how this thing worked; it's kind of a TradeSports for movies. If I'm reading this right, Snakes on a Plane has lost about half its highest price as a "commodity."

But I have no idea if I'm reading that right.

I also have no idea if that matters at all.

It does seem to indicate a big reduction in previous estimates of the film's box office. (If I'm reading it right.)

Geeks Can't Create Buzz: Jim Rockford notes that despite lots of geeky internet love, Serentity (or "Fireflop the Movie," as he calls it) still did pretty weak b.o.

I think we can use some common sense here and figure out what's going on.

If no one listens to us socially-retarded Garanimals-wearing geek morons in real life, why on earth would anyone pay us any real mind on the Internet?

Negative Internet Publicity? It's actually possible, I think, the Internet lost SOAP box office, because the "free hype" was of a mocking variety. Mocking in a gentle and fond way, but still mocking.

What if the studio had gone ahead and given the film a less silly title, like, I don't know, Venom or something? The Internet buzz kind of locked them in (or so they thought) into the absurd snakesploitation title Snakes on a Plane.

It's kind of hard to take a movie called Snakes on a Plane seriously. That's kind of what created all the "buzz" in the first place.

Posted by: Ace at 01:24 PM | Comments (46)
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Chuck wants me to make with the funny, but I can't. Too tired.

The "children" of Portland supposedly wrote themselves a Bill of Rights. You can read the "children's" work here.

I'm surprised they didn't go into great detail about reforming OSHA workplace rules, or weigh in on accelerated depreciation schedules for new purchases of equipment for tungsten* mining and, of course, smelting.

Is this the sort of maudlin, manipulative bullshit the lefties are using to peddle their agenda? Do we on the right now have to begin faking up a "Children's Manifesto on the Inherently Confiscatory and Anti-Growth Nature of the Death Tax," written by "Billy," "Susie," and "Li'l Stevie" under the "supervision" of the Heritage Foundation?

For crying out loud. Just when I think American politics, and the American left, couldn't get any stupider, they find a way to up the moron-ante.

* A footnote by a six-year-old clarifies that tungsten is also known as "Wulfram."

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (34)
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Asked for comment, Mrs. Lieberman responed, "I assure you that that is not the case, thank God."

Meet the new boss, definitely not the old boss. The new boss is unbridled, unhinged, unrepetetant, unreformed neoleftism that the Democrats had been running from for thirty years.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., blasted a fellow Democrat, Sen. Joe Lieberman, for continuing his bid in the Connecticut Senate race despite a narrow loss to newcomer Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary earlier this month.

"I'm concerned that [Lieberman] is making a Republican case," Kerry told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" in an exclusive appearance.

Kerry accused the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate of "adopting the rhetoric of Dick Cheney," on the issue of Iraq.

"Joe Lieberman is out of step with the people of Connecticut," Kerry added, insisting Lieberman's stance on Iraq, "shows you just why he got in trouble with the Democrats there."

Kerry called Lieberman's independent bid a "huge mistake" and applauded businessman-turned-politician Lamont as "courageous" for challenging Lieberman on the war.

Of his own views on Iraq, Kerry stated forthrightly, "The course of this country in Iraq is making the world more dangerous."

"Forthrightly." ABCNews, shockingly enough, just editorialized in a supposedly straight-reportage piece.

There's hardly anything "forthright" about John Kerry. The truth of the matter is that almost all Democrat were against the Iraq War but voted for it anyway for the sake of political expediency and to retain presidential viability.

Republicans voted for the Iraq War because they believed in it. They may or may not have been wrong -- but they beleived the war was the proper response to Saddam Hussein.

Democrats voted for the Iraq War, a war they believed was doomed to become a Vietnam-style quagmire, in order to to retain/expand poltiical power.

Which is worse?

John Kerry voted for a war he never believed in, and always thought would result in thousands of American casualties, because he was too chickenshit to voice his true beliefs.

John Kerry voted for the deaths of 2500+ American soldiers not to vindicate a mission he believed in but to help get him elected President.

And yet no visits from Cindy Sheehan, eh?

"Forthrightly." Okay.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (41)
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Patterico nails an angle I don't think occurred to many.

The plaintiffs in the suit against the govenrment alleged that they were "harmed" because their clients overseas did not feel free to speak since the disclosure of the NSA intercept program.

Is this not proof of the allegation that the NYT undermined America's national security?

If the plaintiffs are lying, the suit must be dismissed as they have no standing.

If they're telling the truth, the NYT has changed the behavior of foreign terrorists and made it more difficult to monitor them.

Via Michelle, who's back from vacation, and has more.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (5)
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Read the depressing analyses from Mark Styen and others before getting to Allah's update.

The Lebanese army will stand with Hezbollah?

That will clarify things for the next war.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (4)
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Now that 85 celbrities/studio heads/producers/directors have signed a letter denouncing Hezbollah and Hamas, of course the Huffington Post commenters begin blowing, as Tim Robbins might say, "an ill wind of repression chilling the speech of entertainers who dare to speak out."

Check out some of the nuanced calls for McCarthyism coming from the deranged Huffbollah left.

Mr. Willis....I pray you are on the next plane that goes down. Get over yourselves Hollywood,we hate you off screen.

...

Hollywood is chock full of Zionist sympathizers who are just as responsible for the henious acts committed by te terrorist nation they wholeheartedly support - namely ISRAEL - the mother of all terrorist nations. Nicole Kidman is in bed with Rupert Murdoch, Arch Zionist supporter and propaganda news cheif du jour. She doesn't have a clue as to the serious threat posed to the US citizenry by the US Zionist Occupied Government, nor does she care. Why should she when Rupert's her homeboy? She worse than Ava Braun.

...

Why doesn't Nicole take a listen to MP George Galloway about Hamas and Hezbollah (instead of listening to her Jewish agent and producers in Hollywood):

...

I smell a zionist ... and they do smell you know.

...

“Repeat-why have you all, in the ad, never served in our military? People with money and jews don't have to, is that it?

...

Job security in Hymiewood is now assured.

Let's see: ZOG (the "Zionist Occupational Government") plus dark talk of "Jewish agent and producers." And death wishes for Bruce Willis.

And "Zionists" who smell, most likely of dirty money from all that shylocking.

And "Hymietown."

Tim Robbins, don't you have an incensed statement to make?

There's more there, of course.

Thanks to steve_in_hb.

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (158)
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