Corona | Coming Attractions

Mal Shot First wrote:

That other new woman who joined the team this season is a Megan Fox lookalike.

I had actually forgotten about her when I wrote my post. Silly me forgetting the only hot girl on the show. I don't think she looks anything like Megan Fox on House, but I looked at the picture of her from The Unborn and she does resemble her rather closely. I also noticed on IMDB that she was in the original Transformers. Do you think Lebouf actually had sex with Yustman and thought it was Fox? If you don't notice the thumbs, I guess you could make that mistake.

He thought it was Fox until he noticed her face changing expression mid-coitus. He threw her off and yelled, "This be some manner of trickery!" 

Fox's stone-faced laughter boomed through the thin trailer walls.

I watched the season 2 premiere of Shameless last night.  It was quite enjoyable and you got to see Emily Rossum's breasts.  Since I had Showtime for free for the weekend, I was actually able to record the episode on my DVR and noticed the trailer for their new show, House of Lies, that premiered right after Shameless.  Dang it all, why didn't I know about this!  It has Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell and looks pretty good, so I acquired it late last night and will probably catch it this weekend.  Anyone else catch it?  Is it worth the time?  All I want to know is does Ms. Bell get naked?

She doesn't, but her body double does. She'll need a new one soon. The current one's voice is beginning to crack. Sure, he can start shaving his chest. This is the HD age, though. The stubble will still show.

Don't think for a second that you got away with editing your post before someone saw the original post.  There are eyes watching.

The original post was fine. I just decided I prefer the new wording.

I concur.

I forgot about the KB show.  I need to check that out.

Drakemd wrote:

I don't think she looks anything like Megan Fox on House,...

I guess I don't look at enough pictures of Megan Fox to notice the difference right away, and I've only seen her in Transformers 1 & 2 so I'm not even that familiar with her acting. When Yustman first appeared on the show, I was shocked that they would get Megan Fox as a member of the cast and not advertise it more. It wasn't until I had checked IMDb that I confirmed she was a different person.

 Currently watching Transformers 3.  It is one of the worst films I have ever seen.

Let us know how it ends.

I went and saw that in theaters, I had heard good things about it and how it was better than the second one. I think it's only redeeming factor is that it makes the second film look decent in hindsight.

The second redeeming feature is Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. 

I recall Patrick giving the 3rd one props. Fortunately I was pre-set on not watching any of Michael Bay's Transformers, so I was not swayed by the propaganda.

To have $200 million to play with and to deliver that is a crime against cinema. I fell asleep with a while to go.

It makes Pirates IV look like Oscar winning movie making.

Saw "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" today--very good, if a little long and confusing in spots (I haven't read the books). Loved loved loved the title sequence--one of the best I've seen in the past few years--and the score should earn Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross a second Oscar. Thought the cinematography was very good, as well. Definitely makes my top 5 of 2011.

I am watching the old Hammer Horror 'The Twins Of Evil' with Peter Cushing.

Damn, these Hammer movies must have been practically p0rn in their day!!

I watched the last installment of series 2 of Sherlock. I am still trying to make sense of the ending.

Gonna watch "Spock's Brain" soon.  It's so awful, it's awesome!

Annnnd just to keep up with the Oscar bait, the spousal unit and I saw "War Horse" today. Gorgeously filmed ... but if this wasn't a Spielberg flick, I don't see it getting all the great reviews. The first 20 minutes were every single trite animal movie cliche you ever saw, the whole plot was totally predictable, the dialogue was unmemorable, and the acting wasn't anything special--a problem that could be attributed to the utterly cardboard characters.

The cinematography was outstanding, as you'd expect, but the story seemed too harsh for younger viewers--it made the 10 year old behind me sob at two points--and too simplistic for older viewers. It wasn't horrible, but I expected it to be a lot better from the reviews and from Spielberg's rep. 

Continuing to sludge through ST: DS9. I assume the entire first season sucks? (BTW, if someone knows Ipsy personally, could you give him a little slug for me?)

Was going to watch a stolen copy of Smokin' Aces, based on a work recommendation, but I had dl'ed a foreign language version. And since I'd missed my weekend window to watch it, instead I finally got around to watching the Red Letter Media Review of Attack of the Clones. I couldn't watch it on youtube, because the video had been set to private, and the only one I could find was SFW (fuck that!). Anyway, I went to Red Letter Media's site and found it easy enough. Obviously it was hilarious. I'll watch the Revenge of the Sith one next weekend.

I've watched a couple of documentaries about miscarried justice (or, at least, that's the theme, whether it's true or not). First I watched 'The Thin Blue Line', about the murder of a Dallas police officer in November 1976, and how the convicted murderer, Randall Dale Adams, was possibly (probably, according to many) innocent. The documentary came up while I was reading an interview with the filmmakers of the three 'Paradise Lost' documentaries, about the West Memphis Three and how they are possibly (probably, according to many) innocent of the strange and possibly brutal murders of three eight-year-olds in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. One of the documentarians mentioned how after the first 'Paradise Lost' documentary came out, he thought that it would blow the doors off the case and result in the releases of the defendants, the same way 'The Thin Blue' line started a chain of events that led to Randall Dale Adams being released a year after the documentary was released (Adams served about twelve years in prison, I think). While the first 'Paradise Lost' caused the case to become famous, and led to many people, including some celebrities, wanting to help the defendants get a new trial, they were still in prison in 2011, having served eighteen years at that time.

I had actually already read about the case illuminated by 'The Thin Blue Line' in Bill James's book 'Popular Crime', and I'd wanted to watch the doc, but had forgotten about it. It's pretty good: it didn't even occur to me at first that the movie has no voiceover narration, until I read some articles about it that mentioned that. That's just crazy. I don't remember 'Paradise Lost 2' well enough (and haven't seen the first one), but having just watched the third one it doesn't have voiceover narration, either, but it does have a text narration. The funny thing about the case behind 'The Thin Blue Line' is just that most of the evidence pointed to the guy, David Harris, who most people think actually committed the murder (and who sort of halfway admits his guilt in a taped interview played in the last minutes of the doc; amusingly, he missed one of his scheduled interviews with Errol Morris, the filmmaker, and later ended up being convicted and sentenced to death (later carried out) for having committed another murder during the time period that the interview had been scheduled for. I think Morris claimed that was his favorite excuse for somebody having missed an appointment); the police were actually first led to Harris because he had bragged to everybody who would listen that he had killed the cop, and he had also stolen the car that the dead police office had pulled over (it was incorrectly identified as a blue Vega by his partner, but later police realized it was a similar looking Comet), yet the police still believed him when he then claimed that he had lied about killing the cop, and Adams had actually done it. Harris only having been sixteen years old at the time, though already with a record of armed robbery, and having a charismatic nature helped with the police believing him, I suppose. Experienced investigators and profilers would've realized that somebody who would so callously kill a police officer during a traffic stop (the other police officer told how the driver had just turned and opened fire as her partner approached the driver's side door) would almost certainly have a history of violence, which Adams didn't have. Unfortunately for Adams, some people with sketchy reputations who had driven by the scene just before the shooting but after the cops had pulled over the driver, and who had seen Adams's picture in the paper and read about the $20,000 reward, came forward as eye witnesses (though the doc confirms that at least one of them failed to pick Adams out of a lineup). If it wasn't for the eyewitness testimony, I would've thought that convicting Adams on the evidence they had was a bit ludicrous (though they did have Harris testifying that Adams had killed the cop, while all Adams could say in his defense was that he didn't know anything about a shooting, and had been in his motel room with his brother at the alleged time of the event).

Current TV apparently placed 'The Thin Blue Line' #2 on their list of the fifty documentaries YOU need to see before you die (as opposed to after). That special was hosted by Morgan Spurlock, though, so that doesn't help its case. Possibly not coincidentally, 'Super Size Me' made the list at number five. If they'd thrown that one on there at #50 I would've figured that they were being more objective, but just couldn't leave Mr. Spurlock's opus off the list as a nod to him (this just in, eating McDonald's food three times a day and drinking supersized non-diet sodas to go along with it (and never exercising) will make you fat). Of the movies on the list, I've seen #46 'Little Dieter Needs to Fly', #41 'The King of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters', #37 'Inside Job', #31 'Jesus Camp' (not that great, IMO), #30 'Fahrenheit 9/11' (I'll just make a blanket statement that none of Moore's work is that good, though it's been a long time since I've seen 'Roger & Me' and that one seemed better, though probably is just as manipulative and misleading as his others), #29 'Man on Wire', #25 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', #22 'Dixie Chicks: Shut up and Sing', #18 'Food, Inc.', #15 'Crumb', #12 'Bowling for Columbine', #10 'Grizzly Man' (maybe my favorite), #8 'An Inconvenient Truth', #5 'Super Size Me', #3 'Roger & Me', #2 'The Thin Blue Line, and #1 'Hoop Dreams'. I've actually seen a lot more than I would've guessed. Of the ones I haven't seen, I'd like to see #13 'The Fog of War', #28 'Gasland' (actually have it on my external hard drive, but just haven't gotten around to watching it yet), #38 'March of the Penguins' & #43 'When the Levees Broke'. When I was a kid, I would've loved to see 'Madonna: Truth or Dare', but that was before internet porn. Of the few documentaries I have seen (or just heard about, in some cases) and can think of, the ones I'm surprised aren't on the list are 'Cocaine Cowboys' (that one's just crazy) 'An Unreasonable Man', 'Waiting for Superman', 'The Gates of Heaven' (another doc by Errol Morris, who did 'The Thin Blue Line'; I haven't seen it, but Ebert puts it in his top ten movies of all time, so it can't be too bad) and 'Restrepo' (haven't seen this one, either (also on my external HD), but people talk about it in such a revered way, but maybe that's just cause the guy who made it later died doing war correspondence in Iraq (I think; it's got to be either that or Afghanistan).

I'd seen the second 'Paradise Lost', since it had already been released at the time I first heard about the case, and I didn't really want to watch two documentaries about the same subject, and I figured the second one would be the one to watch. That one was released in 2000, and the third one just aired for the first time four days ago (an earlier version apparently was played for audiences at the Toronto Film Festival, though I'm not sure what year (probably the most recent one), but was then modified because of late-breaking events in the case). The second film had all of the groupies that the first movie attracted, and some criminal experts that they had then drawn to the case. The amount things have changed in the last decade is staggering, though. Now the defense has the help of a murderer's row of retired FBI profiling and forensic experts who have been attracted to the case. I actually felt a little sorry for the retired chief of police who had led the investigation for years; he almost looked like he wanted to cry when talking about the behemoth he was up against (even though he was retired, and could only speak about his past involvement in the case). He refused to answer some questions for fear of misstatements hurting future trials, and also out of fear of lawsuits against himself. He was still convinced of the defendants' guilt (or at least claimed to be) as of his last filmed interview that was included. It was interesting to see how the case has turned over the years as increasingly expert experts joined the proceedings. The FBI profiler (whose credits included testifying against Bundy) and the forensics expert (who apparently was touted as having written the "bible" on FBi forensics) made claims about the case that were counter to both the prosecution and also previously involved defense experts. One of the defense's longstanding claims was that the prosecution's theory of the case was horribly flawed, in that the scene where the bodies were found was clearly not the place where they were killed, even though the prosecution's key piece of evidence, a seemingly coerced confession by one of the defendants (a semi-retarded teenager with an IQ of 72), claimed that it was in fact the place the kids were killed. The retired FBI experts claimed (as far as I could tell; they didn't linger on where the new experts might've disagreed with the old, unfortunately) that it was in fact the kill site, and the lack of blood, despite some grievous bodily injuries by at least one of the boys, was because the wounds were post mortem, inflicted by scavenging animals during the night after the murder but before the bodies were found. They claimed it was very obvious that the wounds supposedly made by a cerated knife were actually claw marks that could have been made by a variety of animals. Maybe the thing I found most interesting was the profiler's guesses about the killer being too sophisticated to have been a teenager, and that it was also likely the work of somebody close to the victims (and also likely by somebody with a history of violence, which is usually the case with these types of murders; one of the boys' step-fathers had a history of violence, and had an alibi for the time of their death that was contradicted, and claimed not to have seen the victims on the day of their murders which also turned out to be contradicted by three neighbors who claimed they saw him with the boys around 6:30 PM, which is right in the block of time of their murders according to the police).

I was a little surprised that while watching the documentary I realized that I just didn't really care that much anymore. When I first read about the case then watched the second doc like five or six years ago, I thought it seemed like an outrageous miscarriage of justice. Now I just think that this shit just happens, that you're not going to have a criminal justice system without some innocent people being convicted. Of course, I guess I thought the same thing before, it's just that the evidence against these guys seemed dramatically short of being beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, I'm just not sure what can be done about it, unless the lessons learned by police over the last two decades would really result in better investigations and more careful prosecutions. But this was a medium-sized town in the backwoods, which wasn't prepared to deal with this type of crime. It was a happy ending, anyway, since the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that new DNA evidence (no DNA from the defendants was found amongst the evidence collected from the crime scene, while a hair that matched one of the victims' step-fathers (though it could only be narrowed down to 1.5% of the population, so not super strong DNA evidence) was identified) would allow for them to hold a hearing which would weigh all of the evidence, both that introduced at trial and new evidence never before introduced at trial, and decide if a new trial should be held. The state attorney general apparently didn't like that idea, and offered the defendants a rare deal to enter Aldford pleas of guilty (which would allow them to still proclaim their innocence, but unable to sue the state) and then release them with time served. They took the deal and are now free, though I wonder if freedom will match up with their expectations. It's probably better than prison, despite what every old convict in 'The Shawshank Redemption' thought.

The Gates of Heaven is probably my favorite documentary of all time. Thin Blue Line is pretty good, but I saw it as an adult, after shows like America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries had been using its narrative tricks for years. I imagine it would have had more of an impact if I had seen it for the first time closer to its release.

Morris basically just points the camera a folks an lets them talk themselves out for Gates of Heaven. He doesn't say much of anything, which probably makes them uncomfortable, and probably makes them continue talking to try to cover the uncomfortableness. And some of these people seem pretty lonely, and seem just to want to talk. He chooses interesting people, and doesn't noticeably judge them.

My second favorite is probably either Titicut Follies, Sherman's March, or Crumb.  After those, it's probably Sick.

I caught the Hansel and Gretel episode of Once Upon a Time the other day. I hadn't watched any episodes of the show until then, and really the only reason I watched this episode was that I was channel surfing and stopped because I recognized a familiar face. It took me a while to remember where I knew him from, but I eventually figured out that it was Nicholas Lea, who played Alex Krycek on The X-Files (and I didn't even have to look him up on IMDb!). I always liked that Krycek kept popping up throughout the series and you would never know who he was working for each time.

Mal Shot First wrote:

I caught the Hansel and Gretel episode of....

Han-sel? Han-sel?