This arrived. What makes it special? It’s widescreen, not the pan-and-scan that was released in the US.

Audio is English, with Japanese subtitles.

While watching The Wolverine with friends on Saturday, I caught a bit of Hello!Project music in the background about an hour in. When Logan tracks down Noburo to question him, he finds him partying with two European girls, and this is their sexy party music:

(for a brief moment, I misidentified it as Sade; I really hadn’t noticed the stylistic similarity before)

Oh, by the way, this being an H!P group (the 2005 shuffle unit Sexy Otonajan (“Sexy Grownups?”)), two of the girls are 12 years old, with heavily padded bras.

Like most people, I skipped the theatrical release of Disney’s John Carter. Watching it for free last night confirmed that this was the correct decision. The story’s a mess; either I dozed off during key plot points, or they left them out. I suspect the latter, but have no desire to go back through it again and find out. Odd pacing, too, and perhaps the worst-integrated flashback I’ve ever seen; it really felt like a few seconds from a completely different movie, and I briefly wondered if it was a glitch in the playback.

I’m glad it tanked, because I really wouldn’t want to see what they’d do to the rest of the novels if they made a sequel. There are plenty of flaws in the original stories, and things that wouldn’t translate well to a modern film, but the choices they made for this one just didn’t work. It felt like they deleted about twenty minutes of story-telling to get the runtime down to “way too long”.

Okay, I agree they’re both Blu-ray discs, but other than that, I don’t see how you got from Casablanca and African Queen to this.

According to Gene Wilder, Harrison Ford’s part in The Frisco Kid was originally intended for John Wayne.

I really want to see that movie.

“​…even in the Eighties!”

Back in June, I expressed my envy of the fact that Japan got a DVD release of Megaforce, and we didn’t. So, guess what finally came out in September in the US?

Timerider is coming out on Blu-ray in March. Does this mean that we may see an HD release of Fred Ward’s finest movie, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins?

Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution links, apparently approvingly, to someone’s list of the 200 best action movies of all time.

I could eat a pile of VHS tapes and puke a better list than this. Some of the movies do belong on the list, but in wildly different positions; others are, um, kinda sorta not action movies, or kinda sorta not good.