Normally this time of year, I’d be reviewing a bunch of weird holiday movies. This year I’m going to do something a little different. To commemorate the premier of the movie that James Cameron has been working on since before I was born (maybe it just feels that way), I will do a series of Movies the “Avatar” Trailer Reminded People Of.

(10/17/03)

Halloween kicks ass! Seriously, you get to wear a costume and you get free candy. As a kid in the suburbs, this is as close (legally) as you’ll be able to get to a Mardi Gras style fervor. I mean come on! Costumes! Annoying your neighbors! Spooky stuff!
FREE!  CANDY!!!  For Free!!!
But to score candy, you will need a costume.

David Carradine and Richard Roundtree save New York City from the first mythical being the guy who made the “It’s Alive” movies pulled out of a hat.

(10/20/05; new material added 10/14/09)

Holiday Greetings from Chazkowski the Happy Halloween Acorn Squash!  (Shop ‘N’ Drop was out of pumpkins one year, and ever since then he has become something of a Clan Mad-Ness tradition.)

I am dead effing serious when I tell you that this is the closest any movie has come to threatening “Theodore Rex” as the most inept, incomprehensible, and terrible movie I have ever seen.  It’s just barely less effed up than that “Titanic” animated movie.

NOTE: It goes without saying that watching the “Voices That Care” documentary now is the funniest of Funny Aneurysms. Rest assured, I support our troops. That said, I’m not here to mock Gulf War 2, or even to bring up what everyone thinks about it. I know it’s a sensitive issue, and in so many words, let’s not even go there. I’m just here to make fun of Michael Bolton.

I really doubt that there will ever be as much nostalgia for the 1990’s as there was for any other decade. I mean no offense if you were born then, or if you grew up then (cause I did too).  The reason for this is simple: we are going to have to owe up to a lot of REALLY embarrassing crap. Not the funny kind of embarrassing, the REALLY embarrassing kind of embarrassing.
The popularity of one Mr. Michael Bolton for one thing.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called “Graffiti Bridge”.

We started the older reviews with Michael Jackson, it’s only appropriate, I think, to kick off the new reviews with him.

(3/14/05)

THAC0 is WAC0, if you’re a teen!
I was browsing in the Harvard Cooperative, and thumbed through the long-rumored second volume of the controversial newest version of the Dungeons and Dragons Monstrous Manual.
Already I have probably lost a few people.
Okay, then. Help For Not-Geek-Being People: This is a big, big book that describes all kinds of different people and creatures and whatever that live in the D&D universe and that your role-playing character might meet at some point during a game. You with me so far? Okay, well as I understand it (I am no gamer, but I do like their illustrations), D&D had been using essentially the same format and set of rules since it’s inception in the late 70’s. They changed everything quite radically a few years ago, much to the confusion and annoyance of pretty much everybody. And it seems that they’ve kept on changing. Evidently the book I was looking at was a “reload reboot”, and if you can follow that without getting a headache, here’s a dollar.
Anyway, the Manual has illustrations of all the characters in it and many of them are surprisingly inventive takes on classic mythical creatures. However, most of the creatures were invented by the makers of the game.  From my very brief glance at their menagerie, it may be fair to say that they’re really reaching (how many different undead things or part-bear things do you really need?)
The creatures you will see now are each based off of a Manual character I thought was just too much.  They will have their stats a la the second (I think) edition Monstrous Manual and will be illustrated with my “bored waiting for a table at dinner that one time” colored pencil sketches.

(3/25/08)