Crappy the Smart-Assed Toilet

Is this (The Wild) really the best Disney could come up with, when not being led by the nose to the computer-animated box-office trough by Steve Jobs?

Take the basic plot and two of the main characters from Madagascar (right down to the mid-strangulation giraffe sticking out his tongue for the poster), borrow the main concept and an accent or two from Finding Nemo, render as “realistic” instead of “stylized” to avoid complete Dreamworks copyright infringement, and call it a success!

What’s the over/under on whether this gets pre-screened for reviewers?

Watching HD movie trailers at Apple’s recently re-designed Quicktime movie trailers site. Why settle for crappy, pixelated Real Player choppiness, when you can watch in Quicktime HD, pause the second Harry Potter trailer, and read the Daily Prophet?

Although we do question the need for an HD version of the Barnyard trailer. And are the genius animators at Nickelodeon aware that male cattle generally don’t have udders, floppy or otherwise? Or is Kevin James’s “Otis, a carefree party cow” supposed to be a transsexual? Just wondering.

Note to “comic” strip writers, ad-writing hacks, sitcom foisters, and snarkier-than-thou bloggers:

Now that the American Film Institute has released their handy list of “100 Movie Quotes: America’s Greatest Quips, Comebacks and Catchphrases“, please restrain yourself, physically if possible, from ever again using variations, homages, references and (god forbid) verbatim quotes from these now-threadbare pieces of our cultural fabric. The chances that doing so will somehow be “funny” are now officially somewhere lower than zero. Please use the handy link above to lame-reference-check your work before unwittingly releasing it upon the public.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. We note the dearth of Mike Myers-penned lines, which suggests AFI was actually able to overlook the Annoying Catchphrase category, with the obvious exception of #25. So feel free to include anything ever appearing in a Mike Myers film on your do-not-recall list. Monty Python quotes as well, unless your audience is entirely made up of geeks.

Okay, so we’re the absolute last people in the entire world to comment on (let alone watch) Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, but a couple of questions troubled us. No, not “Did Natalie Portman really get nominated for an Oscar?”, but more Lucasverse-centric (translation: geeky) questions. Mainly of continuity and/or plausibility. Such as:

- Palpatine was intimately involved in the Clone Army project. He’s had his eye on Anakin since he was Little eventually-Orphan Ani, the scampy pod racer. Even as late as the transformation to Darth “Mostly Armless” Vader, couldn’t Palpy have scrapped the silly Jango Fett prototype, and started up the Stormtrooper 2.0 project with a few of Anakin’s amputated cells? You’d think an army of Chosen Ones might kick a bit of ass. Admittedly, Anakin sucks at following orders, but you’d think at the very least El Sid(ious) would want a couple of backup Anakins in the pipeline, you know, just in case the original loses a limb or two, slips into hot lava, or otherwise gets killed at some later date. There certainly should be plenty of spare lightsabers they could have cleaned up from the Jedi temple. Stupid Sith lords.

- For a group of people who can levitate themselves, heavy seating saucers, doors, boulders and the like, Jedi sure seem to spend a lot of time desperately hanging onto ledges by their fingertips. You’d think they’d at least start a seminar series on it for the padawans, or something.

- Why is it that Yoda and Obi-Wan can detect disturbances in the Force when people (not even Jedi) die light-years away from them, or detect Vader’s presence, but they have no clue that there’s a powerful practitioner of the Dark Side right next to them? And Anakin can, with certainty (or at least enough to convince Mace Windu)?

- If the redshirt Jedi masters that Palpatine hacked through like tissue paper were such lightweights, shouldn’t Mace Windu have thought about waiting for Yoda before trying to arrest the super-dangerous Sith lord? Stupid, stupid Jedi.

But maybe we’re just grumpy that our excellent casting suggestions were ignored…