Snakes in Retrospective: Tiresome

It's like one of those cards you get on planes 'cept it's like Snakes on a Plane. Yeah. So, Snakes on a Plane huh? Oh, and Chuck Norris, and Leeroy Jenkins, and 'I'm the Juggernaught bitch!'. I don't want to be accused of being partisan. Look at the past nine months with the right kind of eyes and you can see the wave of hype for Snakes building until on August 18th it finally hit the shore, broke and receeded. It was one of those 'not with a bang, but with a whimper' moments. Right now there are teenagers on every continent walking out of movie theatres nervous about being the first person to say that Snakes wasn't as good, or even so-bad-it's-good, as they expected. They're probably realising that Snakes wasn't really intended for anything more than a perfunctory theatrical release before crawling onto DVD and, at best, a spot in Somethingawful.com's movie review section with Cheerleader Autopsy, Hard Rock Zombies and Inseminoid. Samuel L Jackson's involvement can be explained by the fact that the guy can't pick good movies, and, much like Al Pacino of late, seems to think acting and shouting are the same thing. It should have sunk as deep as director David R. Ellis's other pictures: Final Destination 2, Homeward Bound 2 and the forthcoming Shakers, a Fast and the Furious knock-off when the series is becoming a knock-off of itself. Instead there were news reports on it. The BBC took time out of coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to say "Ppl on teh Internet <3 style="font-style: italic;" face="arial">Snakes on a Plane its out tooday LOLz ^____^'.
It's easy to get so caught up berating Snakes on a Plane for being a shitty, overhyped movie that we forget about the innocent victims of its internet-fueled rampage. Victims like the film Crank.
Get this: Jason Stratham's plays Chev Chelios and- actually, I could probably stop right there because a) Jason Stratham actually getting hired to be in movies is pretty funny in and of itself and b) He plays a character named Chev motherfuckin' Chelios. It's already blown the whole 'it's a film about Snakes on a Plane called Snakes on a Plane rofl' thing away, and we're not done yet.
Chev Cheerios has been injected with a drug that'll kill him if his heart-rate drops below a certain point. You would have thought if somebody, a crime-boss in this case, had the opportunity to inject their enemy with something they'd pick ricin or bleach or something, so maybe in a display of intertextual synergy this is the same crime-boss who put snakes on a plane instead of a bomb. The drug doesn't cause Mr. Cheetos to run to the nearest hospital and do laps of the waiting room until he could be treated, oh no, instead he does EXTREME things until the movie stops. Also: REVENGE.
In the right hands this premise could be a clever postmodern take on set-piece driven MTV actioners like the xXx franchise, a comment on movie audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans and ever-expanding willingness to watch crap as long as there's tits and bullets, or the Speed films taken to their logical extreme- where the vehicle is the human body (and as any drug user will tell you, what is Crank but a more EXTREME form of Speed?). It's in the wrong hands though, the hands of Stratham, two first-time writer-directors and perky nonentity Amy Smart, so it could be the beautiful train-wreck Snakes wasn't.
It comes out tommorow so watch this space for a review.

Crank: Rated R. For 'retarded'

Robot Apocalypse Alert set to Orange

Click for a closer look... at doom!

Take a look at the delightful lady above. Lovely, isn't she? Lovely from her cute button toes down to her cute button nose.
But what if I told you she wasn't a lady at all...but a machine?
Or, more accurately, the photo-realistic honey above was painstakingly rendered in Photoshop by Thai artist Ussa Methawiitayakul. Like in that movie S1m0ne, part of Pacino's 'I have bills to pay' period.