Stuff We Like This Week: August 28 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: August 28 Edition

Aug 28

erica-durance

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Matt: Will you think less of me if I tell you we watched Knowing the other night and I kinda liked it?

Probably not, as regular readers of AN have no doubt grown accustomed to my idiotic opinions on everything. But yeah, I thought it was decent. It was nearly crippled by an idiotic script full of inane ham-handed dialogue and tons of those little illogical touches that make you spend half a movie talking back at the screen. (“Why are they leaving those kids in the car? why don’t they just get back in the car and drive away? Why did the kid just open the door to get OUT of the car when there’s a creepy dude outside?” and so on.)

Without spoiling it for the three of you who aren’t already in agreement with the majority of the moviegoing public that this is an idiotic film, I will say that the ideas in the movie are pretty wacky, and that when it hunkers down on those ideas and rolls them into the momentum of the plot, it’s pretty compelling. You may have noticed Roger Ebert gushed all over it, which is probably influencing my opinion as I love that man. But whatever. I definitely didn’t hate it, though parts of it were stupid, and there’s way too much CG disaster; I never thought I’d see Alex Proyas taking a page from Roland Emmerich’s directorial handbook, but there it is. When it works, it works well, and makes you think, and I like thinking, just not on Fridays.

Sarah: Oh, me? My turn? I am low on Thoughts this week, in that special Tara-post-Glory-brainsucking way. But, OK, I like that I had a very thorough conversation on Twitter yesterday about why Erica Durance is hot. I have always found Erica Durance hot. She doesn’t really look like my imaginings of a young Lois Lane, but she has the right attitude, the right zippy, confident gal spunk. When she first showed up on Smallville, I had many feverish fantasies wherein she replaced mopey, annoying, non-zippy Lana Lang in the credits. All these years later, my fantasies have come true…but I don’t watch the show anymore. But then I hear that she and Clark are having some S-E-X next season, so should I start watching again? What do you think? Should we talk about it on Twitter?!

Jeff: Man, this week’s issue of Batman and Robin was all kind of awesome, wasn’t it?  Say what you want about Morrison’s drug-addled post-singularity Scotsman brain, but he and Frank Quitely are quite non-literally on fire with this book.  Each issue is like a master class on page layout and pacing.  Damian is the best Robin since Stephanie Brown in the way that he’s so entertainingly bad at it.  Dick is a much more surly, aggressive Batman than Bruce was, and I really dig it.  I know Bruce is coming back and so do you, but this is so much fun it should be being published by Marvel.

Also this week: HORROR MOVIES!  We have TWO of them this weekend, and I. Am. Psyched.  Not so much for the films themselves, which I’m not holding out too high hopes for, but for the time of year when we start getting new, not-abysmal scary movies at the box office. Yay, scary movies!

4 comments

  1. Thea

    Matt – I liked KNOWING too. I actually saw it in the theater. *ducks* Because, you know, I have big love for DARK CITY and ergo anything Alex Proyas directs I will watch in theaters. I agree that it was deeply flawed and moronic and plodding at some parts…but on the whole, I liked it. In a guilty movie, if it’s on cable I will stop channel surfing and watch it kind of way.

    Sarah – I was soooo not into Erica Durance when she first came on the scene for SMALLVILLE (back when I used to watch it)…but I gotta agree that she is spunky and a damn good Lois and, well, hot.

    And Jeff – WOOHOO!!!!! Horror movie season!!! It’s my favorite time of year. There are a ton of great scifi/dystopian movies this year, and I cannot wait to spend all my money on overpriced movie seats and crappy popcorn :p

  2. Has Smallville been completely abandoned by comics fans and is only being watched by those into teen soap operas? I don’t really know anyone who still watches the show on a regular basis. I think the last episode I’ve seen in the past two years was the Legion of Superheroes one, which was actually kind of fun. Of course, that’s because it was written by someone (Geoff Johns, as it happens) who is not part of the regular staff of the show.

  3. I find it entertaining that horror movie season butts right up against Oscar-bait season.

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