Some website or another said that The Objective was pretty good, and since I’m left with the dregs of a once mighty Netflix queue, I gave it a shot. The one thing I wish I’d noticed going in was the top line of that poster, “from the co-creator of The Blair Witch Project,” because then I could’ve been more prepared for how the movie went. Spoilers to follow:

Maybe if I were familiar with the residents of Staten Island or Gossip Girl, this sketch would’ve been really funny, but as it was, the only thing notable about it was Blake Lively’s ridiculously hot body in that outfit.

Random videos:

I normally hate when news/sports gets polluted by who’s-dating-who gossip, but in this case it worked out well.  Because some athlete is dating her, I was linked to one of si.com’s cheerleader of the week from last year.

Bleeding Cool points out the ingenious sport of Chess Boxing. 4 minute chess periods alternate with 3 minute boxing rounds. It’s speed chess with 12 minutes on the clock for each player. You can win by checkmate, knockout, your opponent’s time expiring, or judge’s decision.

Cla$$war is about a Superman-ish hero who declares war on his own government (and his former teammates) after learning the true extent of its corruption. Which sounds exactly like Black Summer, but Cla$$war came quite a bit earlier. It also bears some similarity to stuff like The Authority and The Ultimates, and maybe if I’d read it in 2002 it would’ve seemed revolutionary. But while it may have been on the leading edge of the trend of overt politics and brutal violence in comics, I just didn’t catch it at the right time for it to feel fresh.

Caught Fantastic Mr. Fox Thanksgiving night with some cousins. I was pleased to see Wes Anderson back to making movies with at least some sense of humor, but while it was generally just fine, I still felt somewhat disappointed.

The animation style was an odd choice. The hair on the animals was so real that it’s presumably impossible to do in stop motion without it getting moved in one direction or another, so despite the tremendous effort put in to giving these things human facial expressions, my eyes were drawn to the way the hairs on their faces jumped around with every passing frame. And Mr. Fox’s trademark whistle seemed really forced.

But it was a pretty decent story, had some amusing moments, and had a good soundtrack (particularly Let Her Dance).

For me, the typical experience of a mediocre comedy movie is that it’s not especially memorable, but there are at least a few places with big laughs.  And that’s exactly how Year One went. The story was fairly generic, at least in terms of the “two losers want to impress some ladies, hijinks happen, and in the end they get the girls” structure, but it’s about cavemen for 15-20 minutes, then it takes a tour through some of the old testament (Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham and Isaac). I think it would’ve worked better as a Kentucky Fried Movie-type thing with no real plot. But that might’ve invited too many comparisons to the obviously superior History of the World Part I.

Jack Black has lost his appeal almost entirely to me, Michael Cera plays the caveman version of the same character he always plays*, but David Cross was absolutely great as Cain. It was surprising to see all the notable actors in small parts (Olivia Wilde, Oliver Platt, Vinnie Jones, Hank Azaria, Xander Berkeley, Bill Hader, Paul Rudd), especially considering how the main characters’ love interests were two nobodies.

* – It looks like he’s trying something different in Youth in Revolt, and I have high hopes for Scott Pilgrim, but he’s played George Michael Bluth in like 7 different movies now.

Of interest to probably no one but me, I discovered that you can get a feed for a hash tag on twitter. Clicking on, for example, the #CoverThemeGame tag brings you to http://twitter.com/search?q=%23CoverThemeGame. Change “twitter.com/search?” to “search.twitter.com/search.atom?” and you get http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23CoverThemeGame, which you can then subscribe to in your reader of choice.

The cover theme game is impossibly hard, but I’m determined to one day know the answer to one.

Not many people watched VH1’s Acceptable TV when it was on (which would explain why it never had a second season), but I thought it was fairly funny and had a fascinating concept. So in another rant about how I’d run a tv network, I’d borrow from that show’s concept.