Giant Freakin Robot

If any of you readers want to get in touch with me to team up in creating a high-concept short film, let’s get it started. Making shorts and writing post-apocalyptic young adult fiction seem to be the surest ways to get a feature made nowadays. I’ll now remove my hyperbole hat and get on with this story.

Back in 2010, Universal acquired the rights to Ricardo de Montreuil’s sci-fi chase short The Raven, and once had Liam Hemsworth attached to star. But we’re in the future now, Hemsworth has moved on, and Gerard Butler is now in negotiations as the titular Raven, though that appears to just be a code name. Production company Gold Circle has stepped in to co-finance the feature, and de Montreuil will be directing it himself. The script was written by Michael Gilio (Kwik-Stop) based on the short’s story, which came from de Montreuil and Antonio Perez.

Butler will always be Leonidas from 300, and never any of the beyond-shitty romantic comedy roles he’s taken, so it’s refreshing to see him adding yet another action film to his slate. He was just in Antoine Fuqua’s White House thriller Olympus Has Fallen, and has the war drama Thunder Run and Hunter Killer as possible future projects.

I’m not comparing lens flare jokes to bullying on a grand level or anything here, because morals don’t come into this. From a purely creative standpoint, bullies are aggravating because the things they use to antagonize their victims are repetitive, trite, and stick to the surface. You want to be a more impressive douchebag? Get some better material. The same goes for people who batter J.J. Abrams for his rampant use of lens flares. Most of whom take their residence here on the Internet, usually in comment sections. I seriously doubt anybody is having vocal conversations with other people about this artistic choice more than they are about the subject matter. But that’s just my take on it. Simon Pegg had a lot more to say.

Star Trek Into Darkness finally opened here last night, and it’s already got some positive reviews out there. People will be talking about the film for quite some time because it’s full of action sequences and Benedict Cumberbatch. There are more interesting things to pick apart than lens flares. But for those still hung up on them, Pegg has a few choice words, given in an interview with Collider. Check out the entire quote below, because it’s too good to edit. He’s answering the question, “Who made the first joke about lens flares?”

Probably some film student who wanted to demonstrate his or her knowledge of film terminology, thus elevating themselves to an assumed level of critical superiority, which gave them the kind of smug, knowing smile that indicates a festering sour grape, fizzing in the pit of their own ambition. It’s become a sort of communal stick to have a crack at JJ with, mostly by people who didn’t know what the fuck lens flare was, until someone started sneering the term all over their blog. It demonstrates JJ’s supreme talent as a film maker that the main means of knocking him is to magnify a throw away artistic choice, into some sort of hilarious failing. Lens flare is essentially an anomaly caused by light hitting the lens and creating refracted shapes. Because it draws attention to the fact that we are looking at a filmed event, it actually creates a subliminal sense of documentary realism and makes the moment more vital and immediate. In the same way Spielberg spattered his shots with bloody seawater in Saving Private Ryan, JJ suggests that the moment we are in is so real and alive, there just isn’t time to frame out all the light and activity. The irony is by acknowledging the film’s artifice, you are enhancing the reality of the moment. It’s clever and I love it. On set we call it ‘best in show’ and our amazing director of photography, Dan Mindel has a special technique to achieve it. To the detractors, I offer a polite fuck you and suggest you find a new stick to beat us with, if being a huge, boring neggyballs is necessary for your personal happiness.

Of course, you may not agree with either Pegg or my views, and I’m not calling anyone a huge, boring neggyballs. Let’s just go back to bashing everything but the children in Abrams’ Super 8, can we?

You know what’s better about writing for the masses than speaking to the masses? N-no h-hesitating, and you can’t smell me. Not that I’m worried about you smelling me. I smell fine, don’t get me wrong. But I also don’t want to smell you.

Leave it up to a goddamned robot to give me the self-conscious heebie jeebies about breathing in front of one. The Kitakyushu National College of Technology and CrazyLabo have come up with a couple of ‘bots that detect odors and tell you what those odors say about you as a person. What the ‘bot says is beyond hilarious, and I hope they don’t adjustment the translations should the device go widespread.

There’s a girl’s head with a nose you can breathe into, or whatever else you want to do, and whatever bits of technological sniffery are embedded inside can tell you “I no problem at all smell. Good sweet and sour.” Even if you don’t have any fried food about you. Or maybe things are “Intolerable. No good anymore.” You might need one of those metaphorical “soap baths” that people talk about. Or a “tooth washing.” But then if things get too ridiculous, “It is over. Limit value occurrence of an emergency situation.” Fuck, dude! I left all my Axe Bodyspray in my other…no wait, it’s right here.

One day, we will be in the future, obviously. And somebody will look into an almanac, probably an electronic version of one. (It will be called Financially Irresponsible Richard’s Almanac then.) What that person will probably not find is any information about the upcoming Platinum Dunes release Almanac. The company is responsible for some truly non-non-non-heinous remakes of horror movies in the past 10 years, and it’s a Michael Bay company. Dots connected. But they’re also putting out The Purge and were part of the not-hated, Bay-directed Pain and Gain. And the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Whatever. Paramount picked Almanac up. And this is a Dean Israelite movie, people! Dean Israelite!

No sense in talking down upon the director or the film’s new cast, however, for they may set the future on a different path. Almanac has found two leads in Jonny Weston and Sofia Black-D’Elia, who are both in negotiations to star. You may not be fully familiar with them, and that’s perfectly fine, as this film is hitting the $12 million range, which limits its star power. Especially if there are any special effects to deliver.

Weston was in last year’s surfer drama Chasing Mavericks, and will be in the upcoming comedy Any Tom, Dick, or Harry with Gossip Girl‘s Leighton Meester. Black-D’Elia was in MTV’s version of the British series Skins before classing it up for the CW’s Gossip Girl.