According to some gossip site (via Jezebel), actresses Rebel Wilson and Melissa McCarthy made “a pact to stay just the way they are.” Who knows if that’s actually true or not, but they’re both awesome regardless. Here are a bunch of GIFs of them being awesome:
Do you need a reason to have a GIF of SVU’s Captain Cragen pulling a gibbon out of what appears to be a basketball?
No. No you do not need a reason.
Thanks to my wife buying a new Subaru with built-in satellite radio and a trial subscription, I was able to get a device for free to put in my 9 year-old clunker (by comparison) of a car. The radio arrived in the mail today.
That’s right, folks.
Shit’s about to get Sirius.
The Asylum is an interesting film production company. On the one hand, I give them props for sheer brazenness. In addition to sharing Sharknado with the world, this is the company that produces direct-to-cable or -DVD films that often bear remarkable resemblances to, and with release dates in close proximity to, major Hollywood films. When I Am Legend came out in 2007, The Asylum released I Am Omega (or I Am Ωmega). (That’s even funnier if you know the Will Smith movie’s predecessor.) Its counterpart to Roland Emmerich’s 2008 film 10,000 BC was entitled 100 Million BC, and apparently had dinosaurs. The Keanu Reeves-led remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was joined, so to speak, by The Day the Earth Stopped. Right before the Brendan Fraser film Journey to the Center of the Earth came out in theaters, The Asylum released a film starring Greg Evigan (the other one of My Two Dads) entitled…..Journey to the Center of the Earth. I guess there’s plenty of Jules Verne to go around. The list goes on and on.
You might think that The Asylum would have some major copyright problems, with a movie like The Terminators coming out close to the same time as Terminator Salvation. You can’t copyright an idea, though. This is how movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact can coexist. Continue reading
Say what you will about ’80s hair metal, but you have to give them this: they did not give a flying fuck what you thought about their clothes or their hair. Maybe it was all the hipster music I heard at the Austin City Limits Festival a few weeks ago, but there’s something sort of liberating about music that is utterly devoid of irony. Your mileage may vary, and that’s cool.
Here’s a bit of ’80s metal. If I recall correctly, this was the first track on Skid Row’s self-titled debut album, meaning that you could listen to it as soon as you got the tape into the deck, without even having to fast-forward.
Here’s a lesser-known bit of ’80s rock, from Shark Island:
Science fiction based in the future is fascinating for what it tells us about the present, or at least the period when the particular work was produced. The scifi movies of the 1980’s are especially interesting now, in the sense that they might have anticipated technology that has not yet happened, like distant human space travel, but failed to anticipate technology that did happen, like flat-screen computer monitors. Their most egregious predictive failure, of course, was in the realm of fashion. Many 1980’s scifi movies now look like period pieces about time travelers from the 1980’s going to the future.
I vaguely recall a movie from my early teenage years called “Nightflyers.” Mostly, I remember noticing that it starred Catherine Mary Stuart, a/k/a Maggie from “The Last Starfighter” and Regina from “Night of the Comet.” It was released in 1987, and it looks like what you might imagine would happen if a spaceship captain grabbed a group of people out of an era-appropriate diet cola commercial and sent them out of the solar system. Story-wise, it’s a but like “2001: A Space Odyssey” meets “The Breakfast Club,” if HAL had a mullet.
About the only reason it grabbed my attention recently is that I learned it was based on a novella of the same name by George R.R. Martin. That makes it at least worth a look. Luckily, the whole movie is on YouTube, albeit broken down into multiple parts. I made it all the way to part 5, so see if you can beat my record. Enjoy! Continue reading
Via quickmeme.com
Via quickmeme.com
Getting back to last night’s episode: in the era of the DVR, not everyone watches a show at the same time, meaning that some people were not interested in discussing “Ozymandias” at the water cooler this morning. In the era of social media, the water cooler discussion has expanded far beyond the water cooler. This raises an interesting question. In social media forums like Facebook, it is relatively easy to post spoiler warnings, but not so much on Twitter. What sort of etiquette, if any, exists to guard against accidentally revealing key plot developments to people who are not ready for them. Conversely, what is the responsibility of the spoilee to avoid discussions that might lead to spoilers? It hardly seems fair to ask people who have seen the episode, in all of its [redacted], to wait to discuss it until everyone has had a chance to see it. Continue reading
Via laurapreponme.tumblr.com
An article on some website takes Billy Ray Cyrus to task for not condemning his daughter’s blatant acting-like-a-sexually-independent-young-adult in her latest video. (The article’s subtitle states “BILLY RAY CYRUS ENABLES MILEY BY APPROVING HIS DAUGHTER’S NUDE VIDEO FOR ‘WRECKING BALL.'”) When asked about her mostly-nude performance in the “Wrecking Ball video” (because a father’s opinion is the most relevant thing regarding anything an adult woman does), Billy Ray reportedly said:
“I’m a song man. A musician singer songwriter who loves all styles of music. But again…I come from the old school where it starts with an artist and a song …colliding if you will … in a moment where the song, the singer, the producer, the band and the listener become one. It wouldn’t have mattered if Miley would have worn jeans and a flannel shirt, a tux or a nun’s habit,” and that “her performance vocally on the tune reflects her root and sheer God-given talent.”
The author’s response to this supportive father, who is clearly proud of his daughter’s musical chops?
Seriously Billy Ray! It would have totally mattered! She might actually be taken seriously instead of the butt of every joke.
An expression of concern about a young woman being “the butt of every joke” is utterly, completely meaningless when it comes from the people making those jokes. Continue reading
Every year, around this time (i.e. approaching Halloween), I have to confront the contradictory facts that I do not like slasher films on a very fundamental level, yet I cannot seem to turn away from them when I come across them on TV. (Whether or not I deliberately seek them out on some subconscious level will have to be a question for my biographers.) Since SyFy is apparently running a Friday the 13th marathon today, I suppose the die is cast. In honor (or shame) of this film franchise, here are some (mostly-non-gory) GIFs culled from Google. Spoiler/NSFW alert, I guess.
The original slasher, Pamela Voorhees:
Via patron-saint-of-the-denial.tumblr.com
Via cheatingjudases.tumblr.com
An early appearance of George McFly:
Via x-entertainment.com
The man himself: Continue reading
You’ve probably seen the StePhest Colbchella ‘013 “Time to Dance” video by now. Unless you’ve been living under a rock or were really busy like me today. If you missed it, here it is (at least for as long as Comedy Central makes it available for embedding):
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive
Because I am always several years behind the times when it comes to the internet, upon seeing the video, I figured I ought to make GIFs of the video, like I recently did for a Dos Equis commercial I found amusing. Alas, Comedy Central has done a good job blocking downloads of their streaming videos. I know some tricks, but not enough tricks.
Vulture, however, obviously knows more than me, or they have access to an actual video file. They have some GIFs up on their site. I hope they don’t mind if I post a few highlights here.
Totally worth it for the Matt Damon Booth.
