Look Bruce Willis has made some of my favorite movies of the past 20 years. No one can really challenge the good movies on his resume… except my brother, but he’s dumb.

Surrogates is a bad movie. It’s boring. It’s humorless. It’s heavy handed in its commentary. It’s just not fun. I want better for Bruce Willis. I’d rather see another Whole 9 Yards sequel than him make another film this uninspired.

The basic premise is that technology that was invented to help people who are confined to wheel chairs or maybe to fight wars without losing American lives has been subverted to allow people to live artificial lives through robots. Fat dudes can control hot chick bodies and have relationships with other dudes and no one can tell the difference. Old people can run around in bodies that look decades younger and they do. People are living through their surrogates nearly 24 hours a day. They NEVER leave the house anymore. It’s like life only better. And if I remember correctly this evolution of human existence is supposed to happen within fifteen years. One of the key results of the emergence of surrogates, however, is that murder no longer exists.

There are small groups of humans who hate the idea of surrogates and live in reservations throughout the country that for some reason the government has no jurisdiction over. They’re led by a dude called the Prophet. Isn’t that a cool name? Too bad he’s in the film like all of three minutes…

Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent who misses having a human relationship with his wife who lives completely through her surrogate. Turns out something bad happened to them in the pre-surrogate era. Willis of course ends up investigating the first homicide in years and then a bunch of dumb stuff happens. Guns are shot. A helicopter crashes. People are betrayed. Nothing is as it seems. It’s all so shocking in its unoriginality.

The ending of the film is inexcusably convenient and undermines the entire conflict of the film.

Credit where credit is due, there is one visually interesting scene near the end of the movie, but of course it was spoiled in the commercials. Though to be honest, I’m not sure other people thought it was as cool looking as I did. There was A LOT of laughter in the theater during the scene and yet… no jokes. At the end of the flick a few people clapped and they were laughed at by the rest of the crowd. So someone somewhere did like it. But they’re probably dumb… like my brother.

Zombieland is the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater this year since Star Trek.

It doesn’t aim particularly high. What it does do is aim to be funny, gross, and charming. And it succeeds time and again.

The movie stars Jesse Eisenberg as Columbus. A huge nerd who has outlined rules for himself for life in a Post-Apolcalyptic America populated predominantly by zombies. Following those rules has kept him alive. Eisenberg is fine in the part and probably has cemented for himself a role as the guy directors go to when Michael Cera turns them down.

Woody Harrelson hasn’t been this fun in forever. He plays Tallahassee, a guy who’s good at killing zombies and enjoys being creative about it.

Emma Stone picked another winning project after Superbad and Lucky Louie. Ok so maybe Lucky Louie didn’t turn out to be a winner, but I loved it. I can’t make any excuses for her for doing The Rocker though.

And the other guy steals the show.

If you’re interested, the zombies in this film are basically the result of a mutated case of Mad Cow disease and they sprint fast. Really fast.

Every web site in the world seems to have something special going on for 9/9/9 so the least we could do is write an update.  I’m really excited about the movie 9 that premieres today, and who wouldn’t want to see sock puppets fight with scissors.  However, my attention has been suddenly and unexpectedly drawn to the movie Whiteout that comes out this Friday.

I’ve seen two very different commercials for it.  In one, the movie is presented as something very creepy and intriguing set in the hostile landscape of Antarctica, only briefly mentioning the presence of Kate Beckinsale (which is in no way negative).  The other has her make-up face running all over the place, falling into ice caves, and seemingly unfazed by the unfriendly environment as she stares off across the ice.  I want to see the movie the first ad presents, and almost wish I hadn’t seen the second.  I’m just a sucker for anything set in Antarctica:  The Thing, Alien Versus Predator, Happy Feet.

None of this even begins to address the fact that convincing chicken-pants Angie to see this is going to be next to impossible.  She’s even claiming that her attendance at next week’s screening of Zombieland will be under duress, and that’s clearly a comedy.  It’s not like I’m asking her to see the terrible looking Jennifer’s Body.  I’ve seen enough of Megan Fox lately with Transformers 2 and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and I only saw commercials for Transformers 2.

I thought a nice compromise would be to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but apparently this deviates from the children’s book too much for Angie’s tastes.  Just can’t win sometimes.

I want to go to there.

Just read the first issue of The Marvels Project, the crown jewel of Marvel’s 70th Anniversary celebration.

Before reading it, I took the time (and it did take time) to read a reprint of Timely’s Marvel Comics #1 from 1939.  This was released on the same day as TMP #1 and tells tales of “Marvel’s” Golden Age characters including: The Original Human Torch, The Angel,  The Sub-Mariner, and Ka-Zar the Great.  It’s a little crazy to think about how old these stories are, and the changes that have occurred in the comics medium are astounding.  This thing was densely packed with material and every story had an incredible amount of substance to it.  It was almost a little too much for my modern mind.

The book served as a great primer for TMP #1 as the story is set in 1939 and told from the perspective to Dr. Thomas Halloway, the masked detective known as The Angel (not to be confused with the X-Men’s winged Angel who wouldn’t appear until years later) and focuses on The Original Human Torch and Namor The Sub-Mariner.  The premise is that in the early days of World War II, the United States and Germany were racing to create the first super-human (the series’ title is a reference to The Manhattan Project), and all of the pulp adventures published during that era are a part of this world and very connected to the modern Marvel Universe.

In the opening issue, we also see the Western hero The Two Gun Kid, Nick Fury, Dr. Emil Erskine (who developed the Super Soldier Serum that powers Captain America), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I’ve been reading Marvel Comics for most of my life, and this is like a hidden history that I never knew about.  I don’t think I would have ever given it any attention if it weren’t for the amazing work that writer Ed Brubaker and artist Steve Epting (whom I have great memories of from his X-Factor run) have done with Captain America over the last five years.  The Marvels Project has the potential to be one of the great tales of the Marvel Universe and is well on it’s way with issue one.  I wish I hadn’t held off reading it for the past few weeks, but I’m not kidding about how long it took me to get through Marvel Comics #1.

This image has apparently made its rounds on the internet recently.  But I just discovered it today.  And it is AWESOME.

From what I can find – original posting is thanks to passiveaggressivenotes.com