Mongo Nation

Lots of awesome things come on discs: movies, music, video games, pizza… At least they do for now, until the technology becomes obsolete and everything goes digital. Except for pizza I guess. Digital pizza doesn’t rally make any sense if you thing about it. But until that day comes in which we can download movies and pizza directly to our brain, we can still enjoy them the way nature always intended: in disc form.

Anyway, we’ve thought long and hard about it and came up with a list of the preeminent things on discs that you should watch, listen to, play or eat this summer:

DVD/Blu-ray

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (17 disc complete series collector’s set)

For the hardcore G.I. Joe fan, this boxed set contains all 95 original episodes of the series, plus all the toy commercials and PSAs (my personal favorite), new featurettes, the original 1963 Toy Fair Presentation, a voice cast reunion and a live action fan film, “Battle For the Serpent Stone”. All this comes on 17 discs, in a custom footlocker, with a 60-page book, a script from one of the episodes, dog tags, rub on tattoos and a bunch of other crap. The only thing it doesn’t come with is an excuse for your girlfriend as to why you just spent $145.00 on a bunch of crappy old cartoons! (Protip: Women don’t understand nostalgia like men do. Knowing is half the battle!)

Watchmen (Director’s Cut, Tales of the Black Freighter, Under The Hood, The End is Nigh, The Complete Motion Comic, etc.)

There is no end to the supplemental material that comes along with the theatrical version of the blockbuster comic adaptation of Watchmen. You got your extended director’s cut, your motion comics, your episodic video games, your pirate movie, and your origin story… You can even buy a bundle that contains most of this stuff, tucked into a light-up, electronic Owl Ship replica. Fanatics and completists will probably have to take out a mortgage in order to procure all of this crap, but normal people should be content with the Director’s Cut of the film on DVD or Blu-ray.

I Love You, Man

This was the funniest film of the year without question… at least until The Hangover came out. But The Hangover isn’t on a disc yet, is it? So you’re going to have to settle for I Love You Man for right now, dig? Not that I’d really call it settling: This is Paul Rudd at his everyman finest, not to mention Jason Segel, who proves here that he doesn’t necessarily need to live in Apatow and Rogan’s shadow to get over. Not only is this a great movie to watch with your friends, but it’s a good date move as well. Your girlfriend will laugh her way right into your pants, instead of laughing her way out of them like what usually happens! The dialogue is smart and the I Love You Man is one of those rare comedies that you can watch over and over without getting bored. Totes my goats!

The State: The Complete Series

Put quite simply, The State is just about the finest TV sketch comedy show ever produced. Despite this fact, it’s been collecting dust on the shelves over at MTV for over ten years now, before finally seeing a comprehensive DVD release of the entire series this July. You’ll be doing yourself a favor by picking this up, whether you were a fan or not. Not only does the humor holds up better today than anything else from that era, but additionally, you’ll recognize a number of actors from some of today’s most popular TV shows and comedy films. Original cast members included everyone from Thomas Lennon, Kerry Kenney and Robert Ben Garant (Reno 911), Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black and David Wain (Stella, Hot Wet American Summer), Jo Lo Truglio (Superbad, I Love You Man) and Ken Marino (The Ten, Diggers, Hot Wet American Summer) to name a few. If you only buy one show on DVD this summer, make it The State. You won’t be sorry. And if you only buy ah-two hundred, and forty dollars… a-worth o’ puddin’, this summer… everything is still gonna be aallll riiiiight!

Eastbound & Down: The Complete First Season

In this HBO series from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, Danny McBride stars as Kenny Powers, a former pro baseball player that embodies the American spirit of overconfidence and underperformance to hilarious results. Forced to return to his shitty hometown after a disappointing run in the majors, Kenny must reconcile his ego to the reality of a world that doesn’t quite see him the way he sees himself. Eastbound & Down is one of the most vulgar and quotable comedy series on television, and also bears the distinction of having just about the best theme song of any show, ever.
Read the rest of this entry →

Sign of the apocalypse or just the natural progression of things?

I was reading an essay by Chuck Klosterman the other day that was about Gene Simmons recording a song with Bob Dylan, and how that signified the logical conclusion of rock and roll.

When the most commercial individual in rock does a song with the one guy who is generally considered to be the single most “credible” person in rock… there just isn’t anywhere else to go from there.

That was true until just recently, when gothic nerd band My Chemical Romance did a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”, pretending to be the Dead Kennedys, in a video that was shot by Academy Award winning DP Guillermo Navarro, exclusively for the soundtrack to the as yet unreleased Watchmen film, based on the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore. How’s that for meta?

Check out the video in question here:

Why watch the Watchmen when you can play them instead?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Pics from the new Watchmen game are beginning to leak on the internet, along with more detailed info as to what kind of game it’s even going to be.

Surprisingly, it’s being developed for Warner Bros Interactive by Danish developer “Deadline Games”, a relatively unproven studio that up until now has specialized in making action games about shooting Mexicans (Total Overdose, Chili Con Carnage… yeah I haven’t really heard of those either). Even more surprisingly, it’s being released as digitally downloadable only, episodic content, a first for the industry when it comes to high profile movie tie-ins. Not at all surprisingly (again, it is a movie tie-in after all) Watchmen appears to be primarily a beat-em-up rather than the story-driven, detective adventure game one might expect from this particular franchise. We’ll reserve judgment until we see the final product for ourselves, but until then, check out these new pics:

Nite Owl getting his ass beat by a gang of Top-Knots Read the rest of this entry →

Except for, like, most of them actually were…

By Jeremy Azevedo

It took me ages to get around to finishing this book, which has physically been through hell in a remarkable parallel to the stories contained within…

…This book has been lost, found, forgotten (due to the recent purchase of an Xbox 360), dropped into a toilet at a cabin in Big Bear, left outside to dry, been run over, gone camping, been sexually harassed by an older book on MySpace, and found out that it was adopted. Nevertheless, I proudly soldiered on so that I could pass along my opinion to the three or four of you out there that actually still read books. So without further ado, please enjoy the long awaited review of “The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies never Made”!

Originally published in 2002, David Hughes’ recently revised book, “The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made” is an exhaustively researched and immensely fascinating look into just how inept the studio system really is. Even when handed over an incredible story that really require very little embellishment, every single one of these films quickly spirals out of control, with numerous screenwriters pushing the story further and further out of context, budgets spiraling out of control, and a revolving door of star directors and actors collecting paychecks to talk about what could have been in interviews. The title of the book is a little misleading because most of these movies actually have been made by now. But it’s more about what the movies could have been than it is about incomplete projects.

A page from Kevin Smith’s lost Superman script (lovingly rendered in crayon), in which Superman saves NASCAR from a diabolical monkey and says the word “feltch” a lot.

What’s truly fascinating about some of these stories, each of which plays out like it’s own individual little spy novel, is how some of the scripts that fail have their carcasses stripped and re-purposed for other films. “Men in Black” was essentially all the best parts of “The Tourist”, minus the dark drama elements. Spielberg’s horror picture “Night Skies” became “E.T.”, of all things. “EL Topo” director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune” became David Lynch’s “Dune”. It becomes apparent to the reader how important and universal some of the themes in science fiction really are (as well as how difficult it can be to protect one’s intellectual property). Read the rest of this entry →