UPDATE – JANUARY 3, 2012
MTV has backed off its use of “Movie Smackdown” after we made it clear that it was our trademarked name through this post and by official means. They have changed the name of their tournament competition to “Movie Brawl.” Still not sure how they could have let this happen, but at least they’ve done the right thing when their mistake was pointed out to them. […]
You know that here at The Smack we’re all about looking at movies through different filters. You’ve got your basic Smackdown, where we review two films in competition with each other; then you’ve got your […]
Since the Emmy Awards came into existence in 1949, they had never been postponed or canceled until 2001. In that year it happened twice.
I was elected Chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in August 2001, almost a month to the day before 9/11. The Emmy broadcast was scheduled for September 16 of that year. Five days from the worst act of terrorism in history to a walk down the red carpet with Hollywood celebs was simply impossible to imagine.
As everyone re-plays the “Where were you?” moment that the horrific events became for all of us, my own memories combine the moral outrage at such a hideous act of mass murder with the POV of show business struggling to cope with this new reality of terrorism. It was a terrible time for the nation, one that I still think about often, and the most challenging professional moment in my career. […]
In 1992, writer/producer/director/editor Robert Rodriguez became a household name thanks to the carnage asada of El Mariachi. It was an auspicious debut. Now, almost 20 years later, Mr. Rodriguez has decided that 3-D is passé, so […]
You probably knew G.D. Spradlin best as Senator Pat Geary from The Godfather, Part II, where he played the corrupt politician blackmailed by by Michael Corleone after he wakes up and finds himself drenched in a dead prostitute’s blood.
I knew him as Elliot P. Grantham, the Idaho farmer who was Patient Zero, the first official victim of the alien Hive’s infestation in the NBC series Dark Skies.
My co-creator Brent Friedman and I knew we’d gotten lucky in casting. Who didn’t cringe a little in The Godfather, Part II when Spradlin’s Senator Geary treats Michael Corleone with contempt early in the film? You knew it wouldn’t go well. We had gotten lucky early on by offering a series lead role to J.T. Walsh to play Frank Bach and he said yes. We tried again with Spradlin, wondering if he would find the part too small or, given the alien angle, too silly. But he said yes, too. We were thrilled. As it turned out, Dark Skies was the last television he ever did and the second to last acting job (he also appeared in the feature film, Dick). […]
Thirteen years ago, J. K. Rowling captured lightning in a bottle and stamped it across Harry’s forehead as his signature scar.
The success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was unexpected, came out of nowhere, and swept across the world in a feeding frenzy. Momentum gathered, and the first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was released three short years later. What followed was a phenomenon both the publishing and the film industries will be hard-pressed to duplicate.
This week’s release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has been ten years in coming, and we’ve journeyed far with the characters. From the first movie to the last, change drove the franchise forward. There was nothing stagnant about the characters or the films. […]
This week, Horrible Bosses comes to theaters. Movies about the workplace are as old as the art of cinema. And while we usually go to the movies to escape the real world, sometimes reality can’t help but leak through. We often see characters we recognize, and that even includes bosses.
In Horrible Bosses, Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman), Dale Arbus (Charlie Day) and Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis) have had it with their bosses. But what can you do when your boss is a psycho, a man-eater, or a total tool? Quitting is not an option. So, the guys devise a convoluted but foolproof plan to rid the world of their respective employers… permanently.
We’re not recommending that our readers end bad workplace relationships so drastically. The truth is, no matter how bad your boss is, it could be worse.
We wouldn’t wish these bosses on anyone. These are the baddest of the bad. So the next time your boss is hounding you about missed deadlines or asking you to help him download Angry Birds on his iPhone, remember that it could be worse. You could have one of these cinematic horrible VIPs. […]
Doppel-what? Doppelganger, as in, a tangible double or look-alike of a living person. Last year millions of people used their celebrity Doppelgangers as their Facebook photos, remember?
Here at the Smack, we use Doppelganger to refer to a specific style of content collision in the film industry.
Dop*pel*gang*er [dop-ul-gang-er] n. 1) an event that happens when two different studios both release nearly identical films within the period of a single year 2) a Hollywood box office game of chicken
We’re about to see it happen with competing Sleeping Beauty projects, but it’s happened many times before.
Two of our most popular posts are Doppelgangers — Without Limits -vs- Prefontaine; and Armageddon -vs- Deep Impact.
We’re going to look at seven Doppelgangers this week to see if, like the Doublemint twins of yesterday, if we can double our pleasure and double our fun. […]
When I was young, summer always heralded some of the best science fiction films. All year long, I would wait to see what to would come next to the local theaters: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Alien — to name a few.
These were the films that made me glad to be a kid. I would walk out of a movie theater into the summer night, look up into the sky, and wonder what was out there among the stars… or what horrors awaited us here on Earth.
This year, the Summer of Smackdown includes some pretty original entries. Green Lantern could rightly be called science fiction. But we covered it — and other comic book heroes — in the spotlight we did on superhero movies. So I won’t repeat them here. […]
Starting in the ’60s, we began to meet the kind, benevolent aliens waiting to usher us into their interstellar version of the brotherhood of man in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
The past couple of decades have brought the aggression closer to home with stories of alien abduction. Bordering on horror, films like Communion, Fire in the Sky, and The Fourth Kind suggest something sinister (or at least coldly detached and clinical) in these encounters.
And there have also been films like District 9 and Alien Nation that sought to use alien contact as a metaphor for immigration issues and the devaluation of the Other as a second-class citizen. […]
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