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Movie Review: Drag Me To Hell
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Drag Me To Hell
Directed by Sam Raimi
Starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao,
Rated PG-13
Release date: May 29, 2009
“There are three rules. Law number one is The Innocent Must Suffer. Law number two is The Guilty Must Be Punished. And the third law is You Must Taste Blood To Be A Man. We’re working now on a fourth law, The Dead Shall Walk; but we’re not sure whether or not it’s universal.” – Sam Raimi
I love Sam Raimi and that special power of his to take all the unrestrained visual madness constantly bursting forth from his medulla oblongata and shape it into something wonderfully entertaining. I have missed him in the years since he started seeking respectability. The impish son of Polish Jews from the frozen wilds of Michigan got his start directing crazed Super 8 short films loaded with slapstick violence when he was just a kid. Over the years he built up a company of repertory players as full of imagination and crazed bravado as he was, the most prominent members being actor Bruce Campbell and producer Robert Tapert. This team under Raimi’s refreshingly unpretentious direction refused to buckle under the pressures of Hollywood conformity and brought us a veritable slew of genre-defying classics such as the Evil Dead trilogy and Darkman.
Then Raimi broke from his posse and struck out on his own into the wilderness of mainstream success. His hyperkinetic directorial style was clamped way down on films like A Simple Plan and The Gift and was only occasionally let out to play on the Spider-Man trilogy as Raimi pursued stories that valued emotion and character over visual razzle dazzle. He defied expectations to deliver movies that were better than they had any right to be, but that crazy old Raimi black magic was sorely missed. Rumors of a fourth Evil Dead and even a remake of the original were batted around but never seemed to gain momentum while Raimi and Tapert’s low budget horror boutique label Ghost House Pictures floundered with substandard assembly line product like the Grudge movies and Boogeyman. Tension could be seen building in Sam Raimi. The man was sick of being Thor. He was ready to unleash his inner Loki and reign chaos onto his celluloid canvas once more, to inject adrenaline into the cameras and make the sound system rumble like the gods on their bowling league night. He was ready to bring us Drag Me to Hell!
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E3 Video Game Convention Preview!
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Game Trailers TV had a great special on recently which debuted a bunch of great new videos for games expected to make impacts at the great E3 convention — the convention where most of the year’s biggest and best video games make their first impressions.
Below is a list of big upcoming games, a little about them, and the links to some great video previews that video game fans just need to go and watch. Once you watch one of the videos, you can search for a title on the website and watch any other videos or trailers that they may have.
Keep in mind these are just previews of some of the promising-looking multi-platform games that might be big at E3, which takes place June 2-4 at the LA Convention Center. There’s a whole lot more games than this that are coming out soon that have us all Christmas Day-excited for them. There will also be countless other games talked about at E3. Hopefully, you might find a game here that you weren’t aware of!
Think of this like our Summer Movie Mayhem, but with games. Be sure to stay tuned for any giant E3 announcements that may come along this June!
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Tags: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Brink, Brutal Legend, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Dantes Inferno, Dragon Age: Origins, E3, Jack Black, Mark Hamill, Mass Effect 2, Video Games
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AMAA Still Lobbying For Movies With Smoking To Be R-Rated
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The American Medical Association Alliance is at it again, making a push for any and all movies that include some form of smoking to be given an R-rating. Dr. Jonathan Fielding of the AMAA drops the heavy research evidence that 1-in-3 kids who see smoking in movies, or whose favorite superstar smokes in a movie, are much more likely to start smoking themselves. Also, that 56% of movies of the past couple of years that were “youth-rated” G, PG, or PG-13 included smoking.
The MPAA quickly corrected the very obvious fact that they had no G-rated films with smoking, and that the others were rated appropriately for their content. The MPAA also reaffirmed that they have been including the act of smoking in their rating systems for a while now and that of the 55% of all movies that included any kind of smoking, only 21% were given a PG-13, with 5% being PG — leaving 75% of the movies getting an R.
This isn’t good enough for the AMAA, who again want any movie with ANY kind of smoking to be rated R. Their “case-closed” example of the year is the recent hit X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which had Hugh Jackman apparently smoking a cigar for two-hours straight in a cinematic homage to the late, great George Burns. AMAA President Sandi Frost called the cigar smoking featured in the film “gratuitous” and had this to say…
Millions of children have been exposed to the main star of the film, Hugh Jackman, with a cigar in his mouth in various scenes. I’m willing to bet that not one child would have enjoyed that movie or Mr. Jackman’s performance any less if he hadn’t been smoking.
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Master of 140-Characters – More Warren Ellis ‘Tweets’
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Warren Ellis is a lot of things: comic book author, script writer, storyteller, unapologetic drunkard, and generally a badass. But, most people don’t realize he’s also a master of the 140-character message, also referred to as a ‘tweet’ on popular microblogging site Twitter, which allows its users to update a stream throughout the day. In Ellis’ case, he warns the scum that follow his updates about the dangers of unicorns, warns of unwanted genitalia contact, and threatens the well-being of Apple fanboys.
About a year ago we ran a similar article that sifted through Ellis’ message stream for the top ten best ‘tweets’, but honestly, it doesn’t do him justice. Below are another ten messages that only required looking at the last two months. But, lest ye still challenge my claim that Ellis is master and commander of microblogging, check out his full Twitter page, or better yet, venture on over to his personal site [warrenellis.com] to see some long-form examples.
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Spoiler Talk: ‘Drag Me To Hell’
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Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots with Drag Me To Hell, which opened in theaters today.
Spoiler Talk is usually reserved for a spoiler-filled discussion about a movie — and we’ll get to a little bit of that later — but for this edition, allow me to focus on the true spoiler of Drag Me To Hell — the American teenage audience. That’s right, I made the dreadful mistake of going to a 7:30pm Friday showing of this PG-13 horror flick, so I got the special viewing complete with running commentary, texting, and cellphone lighting.
The beauty of a Raimi horror film is that there’s suspense, there’s tension… you’re on the edge of your seat the whole time. You know something is going to go “bump” in the night, yet when it happens, you’re startled nonetheless. Well, all of that is lost when Vinnie Stunad and his buddies NEVER STOP TALKING through the entire movie. God forbid there’s a split-second of silence, these hormone-raging ADHD morons just HAVE TO say something, anything, doesn’t matter what it is, if it makes sense, etc. When they’re not adding their retarded (yeah, I said it) commentary to the film itself, they’re trying to explain what happened in the movie to their equally moronic girlfriends who weren’t paying attention because they were busy texting.
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