Firefall the game official site
Lifetime always ends in tears
A college student decides to serve as a surrogate for a wealthy couple in order to pay for tuition. When the couple is tragically killed in a car crash, the unborn baby’s manipulative grandmother ends up next in line for custody and becomes increasingly more controlling of the pregnant college student’s life.
Sorority Surrogate airs March 22nd on Lifetime!
via MyLifetime
2014
Written by James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller
Directed by James Bobin
The Muppets return again with a new adventure that feels strangely familiar. While it is great to see the Muppets actually being the stars of their movies again, Muppets Most Wanted lacks the emotional depth of some of the prior films to focus instead on a heist caper that features an evil twin and Muppets running wild under no supervision. The center core is buried a bit deeper, showing the Muppets can’t really survive on their own as they need Kermit’s guidance to keep them from drowning in their own excess.
In Muppets Most Wanted a new manager – Dominic Badguy – signs with the group and gets them to go on a world tour that suspiciously is happening in towns needed to get pieces for a jewel heist. More importantly, Constantine, the world’s most dangerous frog, has escaped from his Russian gulag and managed to switch places with Kermit, who finds himself incarcerated while Constantine takes the place of our main frog. Hijinks then ensue.
Muppets Most Wanted shines when it’s doing meta-commentary and breaking the never-present fourth wall. It continues literally from the final seconds of The Muppets, complete with Muppet confusion on what to do next. The opening song will go on to be touted as a manifesto for the film itself, and I particularly like the song Constantine sings as an apology to Miss Piggy, because it summarizes his entire allure to the group and why no one seems to notice anything is wrong. Constantine becomes a Satan character, promising the Muppets whatever they want to keep them happy while he and Dominic Badguy plot to steal the crown jewels of England. The various characters take this to extremes, resulting in increasingly bizarre and disastrous acts. Both Constantine and Dominic use unbridled freedom as a weapon and a distraction, but it soon becomes apparent just why oversight and control is needed. At times Muppets Most Wanted turns into Muppets Needful Things, but luckily things get solved for they start getting Stephen King disturbing.
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Finally Super Mario Bros. gets the RiffTrax parody treatment!
The world, characters, music, even the sound effects of the Mario video games are among the most iconic entertainment creations of the 20th century. So naturally if you made a Mario movie, you’d want to abandon everything that people liked and recognized about them, and then just in case people were still willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, throw in The Happening star John Leguizamo.
Let’s say you went to the cinema hoping to see your favorite character from Mario 3, the red carnivorous fish Big Bertha. Ignoring the fact that you are a moron for your favorite character not being the King of Ice World when he’s been transformed into a seal, you might be disappointed to to learn that in the movie, Big Bertha is instead a large, violent woman with prodigious cleavage who wears S & M-esque garb. (Or maybe you’re into that. In that case, you’re probably not welcome in many of the theaters that were showing Super Mario Bros.)
So Big Bertha isn’t a fish, the goombas aren’t tiny, stompable, sentient mushrooms, and there’s nary a Tanooki suit to be found. No big deal, as long as the Mario Brothers are still brothers, right? What’s that? For no apparent reason Luigi is the adopted ward of Mario? Well, maybe it could still work as long as the movie isn’t an incoherent, hideous mess full of shouting and chaos and cheap sets and… Why are you shaking your head sadly?
Strap on your Kuribo’s shoes and join Mike, Kevin, and Bill up on Jugem’s Cloud for riffing on the best live action Mario property that doesn’t contain Captain Lou Albano.
aka Adventure at the Center of the Earth
1965
Written by José María Fernández Unsáin (as J.M. Fernandez U.)
Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna
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Hug time!
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The mysterious center of the planet Earth has been a tantalizing source of speculative fiction for decades, until a bunch of eggheads determined it’s all magma and rocks. But screw those eggheads, because we’re still about journeying to mysterious underground civilizations. The concept is so universal that even Mexico has an entry, which not only brings to mind the many dryly boring 1950s adventure romps, but even uses stock footage from some of them. Aventura al Centro de la Tierra (Adventure at the Center of the Earth) even has its own boring old professor guys who are twenty years and twenty pounds to late to be trekking around to parts unknown. Luckily they bring guns and all sorts of modern violence on this quest, because it’s full of monsters.
Hey, I’m a lizard with crap glued to my head! And you think you have a bad job…
The real reason to watch Aventura al Centro de la Tierra isn’t all the terrible stuff I’ve been mentioning, but the creature costumes. There is a rather well constructed manbat creature, complete with giant wings and sort of human intelligence and lusts. Despite going on a murder spree, he realizes Kitty de Hoyos is far too attractive to just rip her neck open, and takes her back to his lair to try to woo with bat guts and live rats. The ManBat was joined by a Cyclops, who is also responsible for some of the bodycount in the film, but he’s gunned down rather spectacularly (efforts to drug him end with an impaled Cyclops!)
On the way, the film borrows from classic horror films. Underwater sequences bring to mind similar underwater scenes in Creature of the Black Lagoon. The entire going to the center of the Earth thing is borrowed from so many pulp novels, Jules Verne being the most famous. The ManBat acts like many monsters with crushes by trying to impress the lady he kidnaps (and carries in the required monster carried a lady pose!) Alfredo B. Crevenna would go on to direct Gigantes Planetarios, El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras, and Santo Contra la Invasion de los Marcianos
Ladies and blacks, get out!
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Someone saw the missing King Kong spider pit sequence!
Jem and the Holograms is like a precursor to Hannah Montana, where instead of a wig disguising Miley Cyrus’s identity, Jerrica Benton has a complicated holographic projection system called Synergy that allows her to disguise her identity as Jem, thus becoming a rock superstar. Various plots involve Jem and the Holograms battling against their rival band, The Misfits, who were managed by embittered former label executive Eric Raymond, who used to control the record label that Jerrica took over. Jem and the Holograms also had a pack of orphans dubbed the Starlight Girls, because that meant they could make many more dolls (though I’m not sure if any of the orphans did have dolls! It was also a way to pump the cast full of diverse characters while keeping the main doll line white enough for good toy sales….) Let us never forget Stormer, the good member of the Misfits, and the only one who played the keytar (there was no keytar player in The Holograms, but I like the post title regardless.) Eventually the second rival band The Stingers popped up, and The Misfits often found themselves being forced to team up with Jem to take The Stingers down.
The biggest drama is the love triangle between Jerrica, Jem, and Rio Pacheco. Rio is sort of a jerk chasing after both women (unaware they are the same woman!) There were occasionally people trying to steal the Synergy system to do bad things, and Jem and the Holograms characters would occasionally cameo on GI Joe or Transformers because they were all animated by the same companies and reusing animation models is cheap!
This new version will be live action and produced by Jason Blum, Scooter Braun, and Jon M. Chu. They’ve released a video seeking fan ideas and inspiration and it looks like they are fully embracing social media engagement. I do notice that everyone involved so far is a dude. Maybe get a female director, guys? Because that would be truly outrageous.
UPDATE: Like right after I wrote this Variety came out with more info, Jon M. Chu IS directing, and the plot is:
Project will reimagine Jem for a hyperlinked social media age, the producers say, and revolve around an orphaned teenage girl who becomes an online recording sensation, she and her sisters embark on a music-driven scavenger hunt –- one that sends them on an adventure across Los Angeles in an attempt to unlock a final message left by her father.
As Scooter Braun is the guy who snagged Justin Bieber from YouTube fame, this sort of makes sense, but hopefully it comes together into something cooler than it sounds.
via THR
