Do not mess with Shirley Manson

T-1001 Shirley Manson slaughtering humans - terminator tscc
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Once again: You're telling me they cancelled this and renewed Dollhouse?

Oh well, at least the second-season DVD set sounds like it's going to be brilliant. But that's a rental--a definite rental, but a rental. However, on the subject of good shows that didn't do well enough in the ratings, I see by TV Gal that "The Unusuals"

will be coming out on DVD, but there’s no release date yet. I’ll keep you posted.

If there's enough drool-worthy special features, that might be a wannabe purchase.

Just when you thought the Iran thing couldn't get any weirder...

From Salon via Cal my second-best Canadian blogging friend:

In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past.

Who picked this film? I start to suspect that there is a subversive soul manning the controls at Seda va Sima, AKA the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. It is way too easy to play with the film, to draw comparisons to what is happening in real life. There are the overt Mousavi themes: the unwanted quest and the risking of life in pursuit of an unanticipated destiny. Then there is the sly nod to Ahmadinejad. Iranian films are dubbed (forget the wretched dubbing into English in the U.S.; in Iran dubbing is a craft) and there are plenty of references to "kootoole," little person, the Farsi word used in the movie for hobbit and dwarf. "Kootoole," of course, was, is, the term used in many of the chants out on the street against President Ahmadinejad. He is the "little person." ("And whose side are you on?" Pippin asks the ancient, forest-dwelling giant named Treebeard. Those watching might think the answer is Mousavi, since Treebeard is decked out in green.)

On the television screen, Boromir, human of Aragon, falls. He dies an honorable death defending the lives of his compatriots.

"In edame dare." This is to be continued. The phrase has become our hesitant slogan, our phrase of reassurance. "In edame dare." People are not going to let up so easily.

Oh, why can't that poor Jennifer Aniston manage to hold onto a man?

Then again, if who-the-fuck is he? actors like Bradley Cooper are going to damn her with faint praise ("A very interesting woman?"), maybe she's better off.

Conversations you can't imagine having about a Sylvester Stallone or Eli Roth flick

Just trying to back up my frequent insistence that the Saw movies are directed with a sensitivity (well...the first four, anyway) and performed with a seriousness lacking in other horror/thrillers...

"Aren't you the girl I saw in Saw III?"

Debra Lynne McCabe is used to those kinds of questions.

"Yeah, I get things like, 'Didn't she freeze to death in a meat locker?' " the Canadian actress said. "And I say, 'Uh, I've done other things, too!' "

"It's funny to me," McCabe said of her continuing pop-culture association with Saw III, which came out in 2006.
"That role was a personal challenge. I needed to be as brave as I could be.

"No matter what I'm playing, intense or not intense, comic or not comic, what I'm interested in is the honesty of the character," McCabe said.

"Sometimes you have to dig pretty deep to find it and you have to go places you couldn't even imagine going.

"Like, I did die in a meat locker in Saw III."

Emphasis mine, natch.

This is the darndest thing I've ever heard...

...but I think I kinda love it.

Assorted thoughts on Michael Jackson

Now this one, I did not see coming. Farrah Fawcett, anybody who kept even one eye on the news-of-the-fabulous, knew was dying. But Michael Jackson? No, did not see that one coming.

My first thought is...I hope he's in a better place.

It's been a source of sadness to me, more than anything else, to see what he's done to himself over the years, with the hacked-down face and the puffed-up insistence on being referred to as "The King of Pop."

He's one of the chief examples to me of how fame can drive you batshit crazy (another being Mickey Rooney, and who would've ever thought Michael wouldn't outlive him?). He became an impersonation of himself, and a bad one.

But for my generation, "Thriller"--the album, song and video--was kind of a big deal. Some of those songs will always be about girls I liked in Jr. High. And who doesn't love "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5?

And for what it's worth, I never thought he deserved to be convicted on the child-molestation charges. I'm not inclined to let anything like that go, but everything I learned about him made me think that although he was surely batshit insane 10 other different ways...that wasn't one of them.

Oh and hey, I just remembered something weird: Last night I caught part of an old Cosby Show where Sondra and Elvin went to a Michael Jackson concert. That in turn reminds me that according to Randy Taraborrelli's bio, when the "Victory" tour was going out and the other Jacksons; promoter Don King were all about getting paid, Michael insisted on making the show accesible for some of his lower-income fans. That was nice of him.

Though I've always had a certain amount of resentment that the most popular song with my name as the title is A: By Michael Jackson and B: About a rat.

Doing a little Googling now...I don't know which I find harder to believe: That I'd forgotten he married Elvis' daughter Lisa Marie Presley...or that he married Elvis' daughter Lisa Marie Presley.

Finally, I don't want to forget The Wiz, which I think is at least somewhat underrated. It's got a few big problems, and it's a toss up as to which was the biggest: The screenplay, the miscasting of Diana Ross, Richard Pryor's meek; tame performance.

But the music, sets, and Jackson as the Scarecrow (along with Ted Ross as the Lion and Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, among others) made up for a lot. It was also important in the history of music, not just in the life of Jackson himself, because that's where he met Quincy Jones, who would go on to make Off The Wall, Thriller, and Bad with him.

I feel for the guy.

I hope he's in a better place.

Oh, it is so on.

Three More Saw Movies?
Tobin Bell says Saw 8 may not be the end of the franchise.

Saw VI hits the big screen this October, but according to franchise star Tobin Bell there could be a further three movies in the series.

Bloody Disgusting caught up with the "Jigsaw" star at E3 and he confirmed that parts seven and eight are being discussed by the Saw team, if the latest entry does well at the box office.

Bell said that [Saw VI] was being conceived as the final instalment, but added: "I look forward to filling out the other pieces of the puzzle. There's some pieces that people still haven't seen... If there's more good story to tell, it's good to have more opportunities to tell it."

Marry me, Rachel Abramowitz

As one or two of you may know, I have recently been reading a book called Is that a gun in your pocket? : women's experience of power in hollywood by Rachel Abramowitz.

It's a fine book, and I was already thinking about talking it up here and/or writing one of my Amazon reviews when I've finished it. But not until I read the following paragraph on pp 416 of the hardcover edition, did I realize that my emotion toward Ms. Abramowitz had ripened beyond simple admiration for her work.

In her review of [Mimi] Leder's Deep Impact, The New York Times's Janet Maslin singled out the director's female touch as evinced by the fact that the film "emphasizes feelings over firepower whenever possible," though the film's kinder, gentler quality (which drew a heavily female audience) could as easily have been attributed to the influence of Steven Spielberg, or to the craft of its cowriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, whose other major credit was Ghost, the ultimate female fantasy film.

Rachel, let's get married. I know: It says on the back jacket flap that you already are, and you have a son. Mazel Tov. But a woman who knows that the kinder, gentler feelings of a film need not come from a female and that a man could write a "female fantasy film" is not to be parted with lightly.

(It gives us hope, I tell ya, "us" being we guys who want to write kinder, gentler stories that some might actually call "female fantasies" like that. I always liked Ghost.)

I'll meet you in Argentina. Whadaya say?

I swear to god...it's not like I look for this stuff...it just keeps coming to me

Check out this incisive political comment from the great state of...oh g'wan, guess.

Slowly but surely, Kim Kardashian is turning into a horse.

The evidence.

I won't mention him by name, but how many of you know who I'm quoting here before you follow the link?

You know...you make these "jokes" about certain people being angry, soul-destroying, sorry; disturbed failures with (and scared of) women, total voids. Then you find out...it's worse than you ever imagined.

And every time I called her that day -- I called 158 times -- I took a razorblade and I cut myself on my face or on my hands."

I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer."

Another day...

...another Amazon review.

Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press

I never thought I'd be saying this, but thank you, reactionary wingnuts

In Think Progress:

On Saturday, Pat Buchanan hosted a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a majority in America. During one discussion, panelists suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.” The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children’s classics to improve her grammar while attending college.

Buchanan was referencing a New York Times article, which talked about how hard Sotomayor had to work to graduate at the top of her class from Princeton. The article stated that she “spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books.” Sotomayor never read children’s books as part of her “college work” and the books consisted of classics such as “Huckleberry Finn” and “Pride and Prejudice” — not Snow White, as Buchanan contends.

One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled “Conferenece.”

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's really all I can say.

The whole "sanity in Tennessee" premise is badly dented

Via Daily Kos:

Bob Corker Blows Off Meeting With Sotomayor

Can't walk? Sell it up the street, says Bob Corker:

Last Thursday, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) was scheduled to meet with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Yet when Sotomayor was delayed because of her recent injury, Corker decided that he had more important things to do than to wait around for a potential lifetime appointee who is temporarily disabled.

What a guy.

Not to worry, George, I'll get the rake

It was a year ago today we heard that George Carlin had booked it outta here. In his memory:

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

Lounge Orchestra...

I've said it before, but this song pleases me

It's just cool.

Greatness.

With a salute to Calvin's Canadian Cave, I give you the ongoing blog project of comics artist Neill Cameron, who's putting together a kind of ABCs for geeks.

He's up through "I" so far; these are the best, in my so-not-humble-opinion:

Barack Obama is the bad guy in Iran.

Why? Because he took his daughters for ice cream on Father's Day (it's a scandal!). Oh, and he

used the words "shocked and outraged" about the murder of Dr. Tiller but not about Iran.

He doesn't even care about the Iranians.

According to the right-wing bloggers, anyway, who, as always, want him to send other people to fight in battles they won't dirty their hands with.

I especially like the guys who think they can rewrite the statements of one of the most eloquent Presidents in our lifetime. I'm not talking about disagreeing with him (I do that on some things, myself), I'm talking about thinking they can write better than Obama and his staff.

Which is highly unlikely, at best.

I'm still in wait-and-see mode for this.

Zombie's Halloween remake was probably as good as it could've been, but his Halloween II might actually be better, for the simple reason that it would have to suck like E. coli to be worse than the John Carpenter/Debra Hill/Rick Rosenthal version.

Because nothing says...

...parenting, like Alec Baldwin.

And nothing helps your cause like enlisting Andy Dick.

Son of a bitch!

Ok. You guys know how I think Tim Burton is a talentless hack who wouldn't know a good screenplay if it bit him on his pale, pimply ass, right? Then you may also remember that I have long wondered, what is his deal with casting nominally brunette actresses (Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci) opposite Johnny Depp and making them into blondes?

Well...as if I needed yet another reason to hate him with all the heat of 1000 suns...look at what he's done to Anne Hathaway for what he's doing to Alice in Wonderland.

Blasphemer.

Honest to God, sometimes I really don't know what the Republicans think they're doing.

Republican senators criticized President Barack Obama on Sunday for not taking a tougher public stand in support of Iranians protesting the outcome of the country's contested presidential election, with one saying the president had been "timid and passive."

We've seen what happens when a president is aggressive and knee-jerk in his responses. It doesn't work out well.

"The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on a Sunday morning talk show. "He's been timid and passive more than I would like."

Sometimes part of leading is to be cautious.

For Jason and all the other dads who are away on Father's Day