May is going to be one hell of a month for big blockbuster movies! I can’t wait – I’ll definitely be going to the movie theatre three times that month. Check out what’s coming…

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1st)
• Star Trek (May 8th)
• Terminator Salvation (May 22nd)

I lost count of the number of movies that they pulled from – someone should host a contest where you have to figure out how many movies they used…but since they listed them in the YouTube sidebar, I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun contest. Among the many I saw were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Troy, Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Aliens, and more. They used frame by frame Photoshop retouching to overlay Thundercats “faces” onto the actors. I can’t imagine how long this would have taken – go check out the high-quality version.

I’ve been a big fan of the X-Men since I was in my early teens, collecting several variations of the X-Men comics for about a decade. I no longer actively follow the comic books, but I remain a big kid at heart where comic book super heroes are concerned. On May 1st, X-Men Origins: Wolverine comes out, and they’ve just released the trailer for it. One word: awesome! I’m tempted to go to the IMDB listing and see who’s in the movie – the characters I mean – but I want to be surprised. Gambit is in the trailer, but beyond that I was unable to identify the other heroes and villans (I think that big guy is supposed to be The Blob). May can’t come soon enough!

I don’t know how I managed to miss this, but the new, and first real movie trailer, for the new Star Trek movie is up over on Apple.com. I just watched the 720p version a couple of times, and it looks freakin’ amazing! I still have some lingering fears over this movie, and what it means for the Star Trek franchise as a whole, but if the movie is as entertaining as the trailer, it should be a great movie (boy, have I said that a lot of times in the past!). I’ve never watched Lost, but I think Fringe is mighty good, so I have hopes that ol’ JJ Abrams can pull this off…we’ll see.

I’ve been a fan of CSI, in all its forms, since the very beginning. I’ve enjoyed each show as they’ve spun off from the original, but I’ve watched CSI Miami go downhill for so long now that I just can’t take it anymore. It’s a combination of things I just couldn’t take any longer: Horatio Cane’s penchant for standing sideways, appearing out of thin air, wearing his sunglasses indoors, and spouting idiotic one-liners. And poor writing that made CSI Miami into more of a wannabe cop action drama than something that relied on forensics and science.

And speaking of science and technology, all the CSI shows have gone overboard when it comes to one-upping each other with who can have the coolest animations for Codis DNA lookups. But CSI Miami somehow traveled a decade into the future and gained access to 9th generation Microsoft Surface computing workstations – you know, the ones with 120 inch wide-screen displays, the ability to place any phone on the surface and immediately pull data off of it, and 3D projection displays. It’s like each member of the special effects department working on CSI Miami takes a hit of acid before they work on an episode and they come up with increasingly crazier technologies that don’t yet exist. Every year the show gets more and more unrealistic, likely to compensate for the increasingly poor writing.

CSI Miami, you are dead to me. There are better things to watch on TV, like The Mentalist.

Never having played the Max Payne games, or knowing anything about them, I went into this movie purely based on the strength of the movie trailer, which I thought looked cool. All those dark angel-type-creatures, and the dialogue (”The devil is building his army…”) gave me the impression that this movie would have a Constantine vibe to it. I don’t want to ruin the movie for anyone, but let’s just say that the trailer gave me a false impression and as a result I was kind of disappointed in the movie. It wasn’t bad by any means, but in my opinion it wasn’t worth seeing in the movie theatre – it’s more of a $5 investment than a $25+ investment.

Beyond my usual fare of The Daily Show, Smallville, and all the CSI shows (even the oft-mockworthy CSI Miami), I’m enjoying a new show called Fringe. It’s sort of like X-Files for the 2008 era, only with better special effects and a broader paranormal scope. This time instead of a red-headed hot FBI agent, they’re using hot blond Australian import (Anna Torv)…as an FBI agnet. I think she looks shockingly like Poppy Montgomery from Without A Trace…whom I’ve just discovered is also from Australia. Something in the water perhaps?

I’m also enjoying Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles with Summer Glau, who channels some Sigourney Weaver ass-kicking vibes. What are you watching this TV season?

The Watchmen was an absolutely superb 12-part comic book series that ran from 1986 to 1987, and I had no idea they were making it into a movie until I was in the movie theatres watching The Dark Knight and the trailer came on. The trailer gave me shivers – the cinematography is breathtaking, and the music they picked (Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins) sent shivers up my spine. No surprises there: it’s from the director of 300. The comic book series was a wild, sprawling tale that had great depth, so I’m really interested to see if they can condense it into a two-hour movie and have it still make sense.

There’s not much up at the official movie site, but they do offer HD downloads of the trailer. I downloaded the 1080p WMV trailer, put it on my Windows Home Server, and played it back on my Xbox 360 attached to my TV. One word: wow. It looked fantastic! There’s also a 720p trailer if your computer chokes on the 1080p.

Now this is a great movie. Released in 2004, it’s perhaps my favourite Denzel Washington movie (Glory is right up there with it). Great action, believable acting, and a storyline that centres on the very un-Hollywood concept of sacrifice. Well worth watching!

I’m so angry at wasting my time watching this movie, it’s hard for me to put into words how pathetic I think it is. I watched it purely based on the cast involved – I figured with an ensemble cast, it must be decent, even if I’d never heard of it before. And I happen to like sci-fi movies, even the not-so-great ones.

What a huge mistake I made. To call this movie “bad” is an insult to every “bad” movie ever made (and that includes the worst, cheesy sci-fi and fantasy “B” movies I’ve ever seen). This movie is horrible. If I could think of a word worse than horrible I’d use it.

It’s like everyone in the cast thought “Hey, it’s that Donnie Darko guy, let’s not even read the script, let’s just say yes and go for it!”. Each actor involved with this project should immediately fire their manager for not slapping some sense into them. I don’t think this movie was released in theatres – it probably caused riots in testing. It’s not worth the plastic it’s pressed upon. I want to find each of the actors involved and ask them what kind of crack they were on when they signed up for this project.

*Maybe*, just *maybe* if you watched this movie while high on acid you might be able to make some sense of it. Not being the acid-dropping type, I can only report that that watching this movie sober only made my head hurt.

I want to find the “visionary” writer/director, Richard Kelley, and demand that he give me back the 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life that I wasted on his self-fellating opus of idiocy.

I’ll leave you with a quote I found online that sums up my feelings quite nicely:

“For anyone to associate any possible positivity to this absolute colon blow of a movie is insane. This is the worst movie of all time and will be forever disappointed with anyone associated with its making. I would have preferred to have stuck a red hot needle in my pupil and slammed my face repeatedly into a slab of concrete, then to have seen this movie. All movie making is a form of artistic design and expression but some stuff is best kept to ones self.”

Do not rent this movie if you value your time or sanity. This movie, all by itself, has made me re-think my policy of always watching a movie to the very end, to give it a chance. I should have stopped this movie after the first 15 minutes.