This “job montage” sequence from this week’s Step Brothers, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, drops a lot of F-Bombs. A lot. I haven’t heard that many since my sophomore year in high school when my pre-algebra teacher called me in for a meeting. That was rough. This is just funny.

Despite the quality of his comedies trailer off sharply, we still have a soft-spot for man child Ferrell and when John C. Reilly does goofy comedy like this, there is hardly anyone better.

Now that everyone has seen the movie, we can probably talk about it openly.  How much money is the movie going to make?  Bundles more, there really isn’t anything on the horizon that looks to challenge the movie.  I’ll be back tonight to offer some thoughts about it and basically say goodbye to the movie after following it’s development from start to finish.  Quickly: I love it.  Thought it was pretty remarkable, but I did have some problems with it and I wanted to share them and see what other people thought.  So look for that tonight.  I don’t want to be contrarian, however, I think some things need to be discussed, things that need time to be fleshed out further.

I find these superhero toy parodies of the PC/Mac commercials fairly odd yet engrossing. It started as a Marvel vs. DC Comics thing. It’s a tiny internet meme, but one who’s appeal seems tapped into a very dry geeky humor. We’re talkin’ champagne dry here.

So Hellboy’s been added to the mix, except he’s with Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR!). It would have been nice if they made a Hancock toy and he could have shown up all drunk and then it would have featured every superhero from this summer, excluding Wall-E of course. Maybe the creators of this could work on that.

Yowzers! I think it’s safe to say that Zack Snyder at least partially nailed it. He held nothing back in this trailer and it looks exactly like I’d want it to. Salient point: he even made Billy Corgan seem cool again, which, given his last few albums, almost felt impossible. The song used was actually “The Beginning is the End is Beginning” from the Batman and Robin soundtrack. Yup, that shitty George Clooney Batman movie. Much better used here.

Also, I’m a bit surprised that they showed Dr. Manhattan and featured him prominently as he’s the only character with super powers, but again he looks fantastic and that was always thought to be the most difficult thing to accomplish.

Also: EW has The Watchmen on their cover this week and they have a few new photos and an decent article about the movie. By the by it comes out on March 6, 2009.

The first teaser trailer for McG’s Terminator Salvation is choppy, hard to watch and a bit annoying. But, it’s nice to see a freshly sheared Christian Bale as John Connor. Hopefully, Connor will be able to save the humans from Skynet, though, in this teaser he thinks that might be impossible.

The early footage looks okay, but if this is supposed to be an apocalyptic war movie, with robots!, then why are producers going for the PG-13 rating? Why not just say screw it and go for the hard R.

Regardless, it looks like McG, who hasn’t really made a good movie yet, might step up and deliver a movie that we should have gotten instead of the useless Terminator 3. Also, it might be nice to see a movie without Arnold in it.

I know lots of people are heeeyuge Stephen King fans. One would think that I fall squarely into that camp, however, for some reason I missed the Stephen King boat. It’s not that I don’t like him, actually what I have read by him (his short stories, The Gunslinger series, and his book on writing) I’ve really enjoyed.

It’s just that, well, there is no excuse really. His oeuvre is massive and it’s difficult to jump into the King pool when he seemingly writes a new book every six-months. Still, I’ve watched the movies based on his books and have enjoyed them a lot, even the crappy made for television movies.

So where should I begin? Some suggest The Stand, but it’s nearly 1,000 pages. Others have suggested The Talisman, a book he wrote with Peter Straub. A Canadian filmmaker named Mathieu Ratthe has loved that book so much he’s been dying to make it into a movie.

But the movie rights for The Talisman were bought by Steven Spielberg back in 1984 and he has never really made a move to direct or produce a film version of that story. So what’s a Canadian filmmaker to do? He ponies up some funding and puts together a four-minute scene from the movie in hopes of attracting attention.

“My main objective for creating this piece,” Ratthe says “is to demonstrate my directing ability and my vision to the producers who own the rights to the story: STEVEN SPIELBERG & KATHLEEN KENNEDY.”

And attention he’s got. For a low budget effort, this is pretty good. He called in some favors and was able to get actor Cameron Bright (Birth, X-Men: Last Stand) to play the lead and even got an FX company that worked on 300 to do the effects.

Several efforts have been made to make this a movie, most recently in 2003 by screenwriter Ehren Kruger, but most who have read that script thought it was shoddy. TNT was going to make a six-part miniseries based on a retooled version of Kruger’s script, but that was scrapped due to budgetary concerns.

It’s doubtful if this will get the filmmaker a meeting, but if there is justice or karma or whatever makes the world go round, Ratthe will be rewarded for his efforts here.

Should Spielberg take a chance on an unknown filmmaker? Sometimes passion is all it takes. Well, passion and talent. You have to have talent. Based on his other film, Mathieu Ratthe has some good chops, as they say.

The Talisman tells the story of a twelve years old kid who must go on a fantastic quest in search of the Talisman, in order to save his dying mother. I should also say that Whitney was the first to find this story and since then it’s simply blown up appearing on just about every major movie website. Thanks Whit!

The LA Times has a follow up on the success of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. We got to watch it early yesterday morning and found it rather charming.  Anyway, lots of people ended up wanting to watch it and Whedon didn’t have enough bandwidth to cover the amount of traffic the short generated.  Hopefully, before part two they address those issues.  “The things that have hit on the Internet have almost all had that quality,” Whedon wrote to me. “From ‘Star Wars’ kid, to ‘The Landlord,’ to 1,500 prisoners doing ‘Thriller.’ Not just the I-made-it-myself aesthetic, but the truly, transcendently goofy. The absurd (which is important to me, as an Absurdist) is part of the Internet’s identity.”  And Dr. Horrible is absurdly goofy and def. worth your time.

Finally!  Joss Whedon’s internet only musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and some other people (who cares about them right?) has finally gone live.  Well, part one anyways.  So far we’re enjoying the hell out of it.  Look for Part II and III to go live on July 17 and 19, respectively.  Head here for part one, you won’t be sorry.

Vermont’s senior Senator Patrick Leahy was so enamored with Batman as a child, that he’s turned his love into a mini side-career.  The 68-year-old six-term senator has gone from a non-speaking role in 1997’s Batman and Robin, writing introductions for various comic serials, voice work in animated renditions of the character, to a full-blown speaking role in The Dark Knight.

“We tried it two different ways — one was authoritative, the other one was with a lot of fear in my voice,” Mr. Leahy said, of his speaking role.  His scene is one where he confronts Heath Ledger’s Joker at a fancy dinner.

The senator donates all of his Batman proceeds to the children’s wing of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier.

Batman became his favorite superhero because “he has no superpowers,” Mr. Leahy said. “He had to use his own brains and his own knowledge. He could have had an entirely different life. As a billionaire, he could have done anything.”

You can watch the scene here.  Sen. Leahy is at the end, the one who stands up and says, “We’re not intimidated by thugs.”

This is one filthy trailer.  Thrown off-guard by just how much nudity, language, and sexual situations are involved with this movie - or at least in how much they are using that to sell the movie.  To young teenage boys or adolescent men?  Hard to say.  But, I’m not sure this makes me want to see the movie any more or less than previously.

I was under the impression the movie was about something more than the main character’s sex addiction, but now I’m not so sure.  MORE »

Hopefully, by now you’ve gone out and seen Hellboy II. We might offer up our full review tonight, but suffice it to say, this was a work that could serve to inspire future filmmakers everywhere.  Which is to say, that young kids everywhere will be reenacting this movie in their basement or backyards for years to come.  The flip side of that is that the movie is trifling - a sumptuous summer concoction that amounts to a fun romp.  Fun to look at, fun to watch, but of little import.  If you’re still scratching your head and saying, “what the F is Hellboy?”, then io9 has a nice look at the character’s past and possible future in both comics and the movies.

Something that no one seems to be mentioning in regards to the shower of love Wall-E has received, which in many ways was warranted and in many other ways seems slightly overblown, is that the Pixar short that played in front of the animated classic was also top notch. Presto was also the best short film that Pixar has produced.

There is no debating this.

The short’s obvious comparison point is the wacky Looney Tunes of yesteryear, where the clever animal manages to upstage the vial human after much back and forth. In Presto we have an elegant magician and his wascally wabbit attempting to outbid one another. The rabbit wants a carrot because he is hungry and the magician justs wants to finish his performance in one piece.

That’s it. That’s the entire premise and it works because the story telling has a clearly defined protagonist, antagonist and dramatic heave that drives the entire plot, with each act to secure the carrot upping the ante. A finger stuck in a mouse trap, an egg splattered face, then an electrocution, and finally a dangerous high wire showdown. There are other bits in between.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed Presto a lot more than I did Wall-E, simply because this is one of the better screwball comedy bits that has come down the pipe in quite sometime. Pixar has truly outdone themselves on both accounts, just another example of them raising the bar and then clearing it with ease.

At some point they have to crash back to reality, right? Would you want to be the director or animator who delivers the turd? Talk about pressure.