For Brazil

And Here's the Twist...

Just for the hell of it last night, I submitted the original M. Night Shyamalan piece, with a new header introducing it, to the Huffington Post. I e-mailed HuffPo God Roy Sekoff and let him know that despite the fact that the column was a few years old, it was mildly entertaining and was available for the site if they felt like they wanted to publish it.

Turns out, they did. And they put it at the top of the entertainment section, no less.

In other words, my four-year-old fight with M. Night is now going big time, baby.

The Huffington Post: Welcome To My M. Nightmare/7.2.10

Listening Post

Yeah, and I might've liked this song's chorus better if Debora Iyall hadn't looked like a sumo wrestler. Still, this ranks as one of those tracks from the 80s that somehow holds up pretty well. It's a damn cool song -- one dripping with Less Than Zero-style nihilism.

Here's Romeo Void's Never Say Never.



And as a bonus, it's the Queens of the Stone Age cover of it.

Bend Over

And now as a service to you, the moviegoing public, Deus Ex Malcontent is pleased to provide a few select excerpts from various reviews of the new M. Night Shyamalan masterpiece, The Last Airbender.

Please, you enjoy:

"Not since Kyle MacLachlan's whispered voice-overs about the worm and the spice and the worm IS the spice in Dune has a fantasy franchise tripped all over itself trying, simply, to please a fan base while creating a new one."

-- Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune

"With (his) formula having reached the point of diminishing returns several movies ago -- certainly by the ludicrous "Lady in the Water," if not all the way back to "Unbreakable" -- Shyamalan has now sought therapy for his addiction, in the form of making the most thoroughly predictable story you can imagine... the results are clunky even by his recent standards.

-- Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

"The Last Airbender is like a Care Bears movie that got waylaid in the fourth dimension. It’s insufferably silly."

-- Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor

"Please, Hollywood, if there's to be another Airbender movie, hand the job to some efficient hack, and not to a once mesmerizing artist who's lost his way."

-- Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

"M. Night Shyamalan's big-screen live-action version of the popular Nickelodeon animated TV series constitutes a form of Chinese water torture."

-- Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

"MacGruber and Jonah Hex can relax. This is without doubt the summer's movie nadir, the grossest waste of somebody's money to create (and people to view) that we'll endure."

-- Steve Persall, The St. Petersburg Times

"If you thought it was bad when writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was channeling Rod Serling, wait till you see him try to be George Lucas."

-- Joe Neumaier, The New York Daily News

"This is bad filmmaking and bad storytelling. It also sounds what should be the death knell to M. Night Shyamalan's career."

-- James Berardinelli, Reelviews

"From the opening moments, you know you are fucking doomed."

-- Brian Prisco, Pajiba

And my personal favorite:

"The current national priorities should be as follows: reduce carbon emissions and stop funding the films of M. Night Shyamalan."

-- Cliff Doerksen, The Chicago Reader

Rotten Tomatoes: The Last Airbender: 8%



And lest we forget where my love affair with M. Night first started -- at what point I first looked into those big, brown eyes and thought, "Jesus, what a raging douche.":

DXM: Welcome To My M. Nightmare/6.12.08

Photoshoplifting

From Tabi, Alert Reader and all-around sweetheart.


And of course from Greg, Sinsei of the Kobra Kai Photoshop Dojo, San Fernando Valley, California.

Quote of the Day

"It's for a psychological effect against our opponent... they will fear that we have come with juju or magical powers.

-- Anson Richards of Ghana, on why he and other supporters of the Ghanaian Black Stars football team often dress like "witch doctors" during World Cup matches

And here I felt bad making jokes about this kind of thing on Facebook and Twitter during the USA game last weekend. Turns out looking like a cliché -- like Baron Samedi from Live and Let Die -- was the idea all along.

Listening Post

An entertaining blast from the past -- from one of the 90s' more worthwhile came-and-went bands.

Here's Eve 6 -- Think Twice.