I absolutely fell for that, and absolutely thought it was intended—basically, that fake-out, plus the implication that once Lila Mae is in Johnny Shush's dungeon, she too may be tortured or killed, is the only purpose of Urich's character. I agree that we could use more of him, given that he's basically a device…

John Z DeLorean: According to BoxOfficeMojo, at least, the film only made $4 million overseas theatrically. I'd need to see a reputable source for that IMDB trivia before buying into it. In particular, the idea of withholding a slick action film from the American market because it had already made too much money…

There's an awful lot of guilty pleasure to "Equilibrium," honestly. I still think the gun kata scenes are pretty excellent, and that the cinematography in particular is terrific. But as a $20 million movie that made $1.2 million, it's a definite CTOTD candidate. They have to be giant theatrical flops or irredeemably…

Took me a while to figure out where all the "that's not an Uzi" comments were coming from. I didn't write the film-page tagline; I'm not taking the fall for this one. Though Mirren does use many, many other guns over the course of the film; maybe one of them is an Uzi. One of them is certainly a .50 cal machine gun,…

The review should be coming in next week, so we'll try to get it online as soon as possible after that.

You're welcome to request reviews, but the Winslow book came out in July, so it's much too late for us to cover it. We shoot for reviewing things within four weeks of release.

I interviewed John Malkovich for this, too. That goes up next week.

Yes.

Snyder told me that everyone working on this movie had one of those "Owls are assholes" Onion shirts, and that after two years of animating owls, I would probably think they were assholes too.

Sadly, there were no squid — and no owls either. There was supposed to be a barn owl there for him to pose with, but I had a late-afternoon interview slot, and I was told the owl had gotten "cranky" and had to be returned to its cage.

Caveat #2 came from Patton himself, so I'm a bit curious as to why it contradicts his answer as well.

"The review doesn't seem to jibe with the B grade."

I took it at face value while I was watching it. So did Roger Ebert, clearly, from his review. I was more than a little surprised when Scott and Josh thought it was obviously a hoax, in such an obvious way that it wasn't even worth debating. I'm slowly edging in their direction, though. The way the Affleck camp is…

"Almost everyone" questions whether it's a hoax, but no one knows for sure. Every media outlet I've checked is still on the fence.

Scott gave it a C+ in his Twitter review. Nobody here who's seen it loathes it, they just question its validity and entertainment value. Full debate on AV Talk tomorrow.

No one in the media wants to risk looking like a fool either way, so there's a lot of noncommittal reaction. But it's pretty clear from reading general viewer commentary online, in reaction to events, to the Letterman appearance, to YouTube videos of Phoenix rapping and falling off a stage, to the trailer for the…

As far as I'm concerned, nothing Phoenix does in the film is beyond the realm of plausibility — it's actually pretty standard bad celebrity behavior, it's just astonishing that it was all caught on film so well, generally from multiple angles and with good audio, and there's certainly the question of why his…

Scott and Josh don't think it's impossible to tell, by the way. They both saw the movie with me, and they both think it's an outright, obvious, easily seen through hoax. We talk about this a bunch in the AV Talk going up tomorrow.

Cache
Google has it cached. It's pretty fascinating, albeit crazy as manifestos tend to be:

I agree completely. In this film, what bothered me most was that he changed the sharks, which were genuinely frightening in the book, into this bizarro mechanical monster that fired missiles and a grappling hook. The animation is pretty impressive, particularly the rotating knife-teeth, but it never felt like a real…