loonyblog.

Courtesy of Superhero Hype! comes this first look at the costume Halle Berry will be wearing in the new Catwoman film that starts shooting this week. I’ve never been a fan of the character in the slightest, but this costume is just plain hideous. This movie sounds like it will be the worst super hero movie since Supergirl. At least that movie was aiming to be a b-grade cheese fest (it also has all kinds of really bizarre gender issues bubbling under the surface).

This costume doesn’t even look good for what they’re trying to do! By comparison, the neoprene suit Michelle Pfeiffer wore in Batman Returns is a stunning bit of design work. That one at least conveyed a real sexiness. This one looks like an S&M Halloween costume bought at Rite Aid that was mauled by a tiger. No offense to Ms. Berry, but she’s going to look absolutely ridiculous in this getup. For her sake I really hope Sharon Stone has an even sillier costume in her role as the evil she-bitch bad person.

As the ShackReviews database over at Shacknews doesn’t go back past the 32-bit era, I’ve decided to post my review of Ys Book I & II for the Turbo Grafx CD/TurboDuo here. So read on for the review in its entirety.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fox News/CNN schoolyard rivalry took another turn for the silly yesterday…Apparently during his show on CNN, Tucker Carlson, while defending the rights of telemarketers to harass people, was pressured to give out his home phone number so people could do the same to him. So he relented, only instead of giving out his own number, he quite humorously gave the number for the Fox News Washington bureau.

Never one to take a spitball to the eye without retaliation, Fox fired back a wad of their own by posting on their website a story that prominently features Carlson’s real home phone number — in the headline, nonetheless.

I don’t want to publicize this too much, but I heard Fox calling CNN a stupid-head yesterday. Oooooh.

Am I the only one who finds the sudden increase in the number of political figures on The David Letterman Show to be a bit strange? It seems like at least once a week I find myself reading on CNN (as I did today) about a politician of some stature discussing world issues on the Letterman show.

I’m not knocking late-night variety shows or anything (although they really aren’t my cup of tea and I haven’t watched one in years and years) but don’t these figures have more important things to do than appear on a show between the “top ten list” and “stupid pet tricks”?

Courtesy of Sarah Dyer comes this collection of images showing off Liz Collins’ fall fashion lineup, which is based on — I kid you not — the Lynda Carter-era Wonder Woman series. Yikes. Fashion is really scary.

Courtesy of MobileTracker comes this image of Nokia’s upcoming 7600 series phone. I’m a big fan of radical new steps in interface design, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. It looks something like a Star Trek communicator mixed with 60’s era “futuristic” design. I’m not even sure where you talk into this thing. I guess Nokia deserves some praise for such an unconventional design, although I hope it functions better as a phone than the N-Gage, which, whatever its merits as a gaming platform, is not a very good phone (it has to be held perpendicular to your head in order to speak into it).

MSNBC has a new article up talking about the fact that the long-running Star Trek franchise is desperately running out of steam. As a bona-fide fan of the first three series and most of the movies, I have my own opinions on the matter of course. But some of the suggestions in this article are just plain bad. Case in point: the article cites Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home as being the “best-received” movie in the series. It may have been a fun movie and did well at the box office, but for the record, it was Star Trek: First Contact which was the biggest box office success (and was a much better movie than IV). I think Star Trek needs that kind of goofiness about as much as the Batman franchise needs to return to the hideous tone of Batman Forever (which was similarly a box office smash). Also, guest appearances by the original cast would seem like more of a death rattle than anything else at this point.

I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done to save Star Trek for the general public. A new television show simply won’t be able to reach a wider audience given the amount of sci-fi television that’s already out there. Probably their best bet is to make another, solid movie like First Contact, which is probably the best one for non-fans of the series, as it has everything: humor, action, drama…it’s a great movie, not just a great Star Trek movie.

As a fan, I’d like to see something new that didn’t totally suck, but I’m at a loss for what that would be. Plus of course, as my favorite series has always been Deep Space Nine, my opinions probably differ from that of the general fanbase anyway. Hopefully they’ll manage to turn Enterprise into a halfway decent show. I like the premise, but so far the episodes I’ve seen just haven’t been very exciting, and I can’t say I’ve heard anything about this new season that leads me to believe they’ve turned it around with their latest batch of changes.

…Quentin Tarantino seems to think so, anyway, In an expletive-loaded interview up on Empire Online (spotted via Gothamist), the director seems to have returned to his Pulp Fiction-era egomania, in which he says “This CGI bulls–t is the death knell of cinema” and, “The way it’s going, in ten year’s time it will officially be killed.”

Right on, man. Thank god we have people like Tarantino spending huge amounts of money on big-budget kung fu movies, because that’s going to be the antidote to big-budget CGI films. I don’t mind if someone wants to trash CGI movies, but at least let it be someone whose latest project isn’t so bloated that it it needs to be split into two movies. You want to know what’s the antidote to big budget CGI movies? It’s playing at theaters right now.

Today kicks off the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week.. Here’s the ALA’s mission statement for the event, which pretty much sums it up:

Banned Books Week emphasizes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them.

Interesting links: Why are Books Challenged? The Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2002 and the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

According to one poll, Clark has already lept ahead of Dean in the Democratic primary. I don’t put too much stock in that, particularly since Lieberman is tied with Dean, and chances are that means those people simply picked the candidate they’d actually heard of. Then again, I admit I’m biased there. I can’t understand why any registered democrat would choose Lieberman over anyone. Most encouraging however is the continuing slide in President Bush’s approval ratings, and the estimate that if Clark ran today, he’d have 43 percent to Bush’s 47. That’s awfully close, and there’s a lot more time to go before the election, and most voters still aren’t familiar with the candidates.

I’m still waiting for Clark to unveil his platform, as his campaign web site still hasn’t got the same kind of breakdown on the issues that the others have. But he’ll be at the debate this week (which is apparently being held at mine and Heather’s alma mater!) so we should know more by then.