I had to post a link on this because the posters are just so dang cool.

PW Beat: “Up” retro posters

Fan fiction.

Seriously, there really should not be any argument here. And this is coming from a person, by the way, who sees fantasy footballers run off to do errands, then run back to work late in the day because they can’t miss their dumb little fantasy draft before opening day (after which I strike them with my withering glare). Fantasy football is stupid, even from my perspective as a rabid Seahawks fan.

Plus, I, in fact, am guilty of writing fan faction, so I can attest to at least partaking in that hobby.

Still, fan fiction is much, much stupider.

There’s been some talk that fan fiction and fantasy football are equal on a geekiness scale. To that, I offer the following retort:

1. Had a bad fantasy football campaign? No problem. There’s always next year. Wrote bad fan fiction? Reading it is like getting all of your teeth pulled out by a jackhammer.
2. The fan fiction community is way too supportive. I have to say 99% of fan fiction ever written is an abomination to the English language. However, it is guaranteed that 70% of the comments section will be filled by people who loved the story, with a 50% percent chance that some of them will say that it’s the best story they’ve ever read. On the other hand, people will make fun of you if you picked Reggie Bush and he as a subpar year. And they would be right in doing so.
3. At no point in fantasy football does anyone create a player who is a pale representation of themselves except that they are some sort of anthropomorphic fox and has perfect stats. You know why no one does that? Because it’s LAME.
4. Writing fan fiction takes up approximately 40 hours to write something that will, in all likelihood be utter garbage. Now, no matter how your fantasy football league turns out, it really only takes up one draft day, and that’s it. You don’t even have to sit through games. ESPN.com tracks the stats for you. It is infinitely less time-intensive.
5. On the other hand, fantasy football players are actually more knowledgeable. Look, people, Bones does not have a 14-year-old genius kid sister who’s kinda shy and is totally crushing on Seely Booth. THAT CHARACTER DOES NOT EXIST. And it’s not just the Mary Sues. Quality control in fan fiction is very, very poor. You’d think with the internet that House fan fiction writers could google up a credible disease, but it’s always some made-up portmanteau of a word combining some animal with “flu” or “cold.”

   I don’t know if football fan knowledge can match, really, but I do know that Terrell Owens has a Twitter and just the other day, dude was quoting Psalms 50:23. That’s way more character development than your typical fan fiction.

6. And finally, there’s the nature of the beast: writing demands quality. Picking people from a list doesn’t. Given than the quality of the writing in fan fiction is very, very low and downright embarassing, fantasy football wins just for fulfilling its list-picking abilities.

So there you go.

Fantasy football: lame.

Fan fiction: lamer than the lamest lame that ever lamed.

Found this on Cracked.com. As if “Goof Troop” didn’t make Goofy enough of a sadsack.

Basically, for you over 30 types, this is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Which means, check your brain at the door.

Yeah, I understand that some of you will interpret this as shorthand for “so what if I want to feel stupid, I hate to be challenged, and I am inexplicably attracted to shiny objects.” But hear me out. From Transformers to Batman to Bond, the latest Hollywood trend has been to turn formerly campy properties into joyless angst-fests. The trend has only been recently reversed with the success of Iron Man and Star Trek.

“GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra” actually goes beyond that and elevates the stupid cartoon plots to motion picture status. All weekend, I’ve been posting, on my Twitter, some of the goofiest moments in GI Joe. Flint, Lady Jaye, Baroness, and Cobra Commander are stuck on a desert island that has a giant lawnmower. The Joes are turned into kids. Zartan gets to play heavy metal. Dr. Mindbender walks around without a shirt and sports a monocle.

Holy crap, but was Joe ridiculous. I remember reading a review about the GI Joe comic book, which turned Cobra into an actual ruthless terrorist organization, mass murderers and all. The reviewer mentioned that by making Cobra competent, it actually took away some of the original charm. And I agree. My greatest fear was that the movie would take the joy out of GI Joe, but Sommers took a really hare-brained plot and ran with it.

Plus, the Joe standard of really dumb military inventions gets replicated here. Is there a chair with wings that obviously just a life-sized version of a toy they packaged with an action figure? Yup. And the movie delivered on the one scene guaranteed to make every old school GI Joe fan happy, no matter what: the ninja battle between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow.

Other things I liked: I loved Arnold Vosloo as Zartan. The guy’s supposed to give the rest of the Cobras the creeps, and he pulled it off just fine. Sienna Miller filled out Baroness’ uniform nicely (though I wish she’d kept the accent). And Marlon Wayans proved, once again, that when he’s not doing full comedy, he’s a decent actor (e.g. “Requiem of a Dream”).

Unfortunately, the action does get confusing at the end. Sommers mentioned that the ending was a tribute to “Thunderball.” True: in the sense that you couldn’t make out what was happening at the end of that movie, either. And everyone ends up being related to everyone else, which — and light spoilers here — makes you wonder why Cobra Commander was OK with sending the Baroness to be with every guy in the globe, if you know what I mean.

Next Joe movie suggestions: take the focus off Channing Tatum, as he has no charisma whatsoever. Put the focus on, say, a new Joe like Shipwreck, or Alpine, or Roadblock, or even Flint (and yes I’m talking about Brendan Fraser here).

And how about getting Josh Holloway for the role of Shipwreck? Just because the Joes seem to be partially made of “Lost” actors.

And now that Fraser is Flint, how about Rachel Weisz as Lady Jaye? “Mummy” cast domination!

So if you take Roger Ebert’s word for it, Transformers 2 probably signals the end of Western civilization. It’s so bloated that the blockbuster model will surely collapse on itself. I wouldn’t go quite that far, since the AV Club made the same assessment of the first movie and somehow the sequel managed to be bigger, louder, and more mindless.

However, I also wouldn’t say that TF2 a very good movie. Here are my pros and cons list:

CONS:

• Let’s get it out of the way: Skids & Mudflap were disturbing. It’s almost like Michael Bay was daring us to stir up controversy. I mean, every other robot looks like their faces are a bunch of random metal parts. Why do these two look and talk exactly like racist caricatures that went out of style 50 years ago? In TF3, will we see these two guys eating watermelons and fried chicken, too?
• And, including Wheelie, there where a whopping THREE Jar-Jar Binks type characters in this movie.
• The way the camera lingers on Megan Fox and … um … certain parts of her is pretty creepy. Ditto Alice and the unnecessary fanservice.
• OK, I understand The Fallen was sorta canon in the comic books, but anyone who’s followed the old cartoon and the toys had never heard of him. And why does he look like a Bionocle?
• Bay’s obsession with dog-humping is pretty dumb. This is what kids find funny these days? Maybe we need to go back in time and give everyone courses on animal husbandry.
• Boy, and I thought the whole masturbation talk from the previous movie was pretty uncomfortable. Try explaining the pot brownies to your kids.
• The terribly shoe-horned “I love you” subplot. You know better, Michael Bay: you totally suck at portraying human emotions. We’re here to watch things blow up, dammit!
• Professor McSexy. I mean, God, what was the point of that guy?
• Too frigging long.
• Frankly, if you thought the ‘bots didn’t have enough screen time in the first movie, they seem to even have less here. The banner shows that I’m a Ratchet fan. He had, like, one line in the entire movie!
• Somehow everyone I know thinks this was as good as the first movie. I loved the first movie, and this movie was a cut below. This makes me realize that I am surrounded by people who have no taste, and I must resist the urge to go on a big nerd lecture.

PROS (and there are some!):

• The banner above also says I’m an Arcee fan. Guess which Transformer to be onscreen finally? And three, in fact!
• Jetfire was kinda goofy… but they managed to do the backstory justice! In the G1 cartoon, they guy was a former Decepticon who crashlanded on Earth several eons past. That’s who he is here, but with a pretty clever twist.
• As much as the Pretenders were the darkest nadir of the G1 line, I was a bit happy that one managed to make its way into this movie. You know what would’ve been even better? If Sam Witwicky turned into a Headmaster.
• Wheelie was dumb, but somehow not as dumb as Wheelie from Transformers: The Movie.
• Finally, the Megatron-Starscream back-and-forth makes it front and center! I can finally accept that their weird star-shaped Decepticon in the football helmet is the real Starscream. He even managed to sound like him, too, i.e. a cross between a snake and Spongebob Squarepants.
• I can’t complain too much about either Soundwave or Ravage, who were as true to form as a big screen adaptation could make them. Now give us Laserbeak!
• Turning Devastator into a big Gozilla beastie was actually a pretty inspired development. You already have big robots wreaking havoc everywhere. What distinguishes Devastator beyond scale, which, at times, is not too easy to perceive?
• Odious comic relief not so odious; I admit I laughed like a slack-jawed moron at Leo and that Sector 7 dude.
• All in all, decent special effects and nice locales. You can’t go wrong with a giant robot whaling on the top of the Great Pyramid. You just can’t.

So, basically the same big, dumb movie that’s been made since Hollywood discovered color. And it did well, so you can expect these spectacles to go on and on forever. Plus, what so wrong about turning off your mind for three hours if most moviegoers ultimately went home happy?

However, no way in hell I’m buying the DVD like I did the first movie. Sorry, guys… I DO have my limitations.

Ludacris. Awesome explosions and photoshop art. And Tom Cruise bald, fat, and dancing? Can this be the best ending credit sequence ever? I think yes.

Is the King of Pop still alive? Observe the facts:

• Michael Jackson was clearly an Elvis man. Observe his short lived yet highly publicized marriage to Elvis’ daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. observe how he seemed to live to anger the Beatles — Elvis’ rivals in American consciousness — with the purchase of their music rights. Why not disappear like Elvis? Rumors persist to this day that Elvis did not die, but instead disappeared into a private life free of the publicity. Jackson, being a private man, longed for the same thing. Did he disappear like his idol?
• After spending his life transforming his appearance from a young black man into what looks like a facsimile of a white woman, I think we can safely say that Jackson was a master of biological transformations. And he did this in a few short years. The Jackson of “Bad” looks nothing like the Jackson of “Beat It.” Do we even know what the real Michael Jackson looks like today? The man kept his face hidden under veils, sunglasses, and handkerchiefs for the last three years. Could it be he was hiding yet another transformation?
• And wouldn’t someone with his resources and ties to the plastic surgery industry have to capacity to alter a corpse to at least look similar to a person we might identify as Michael Jackson?
• Jackson was to go touring in London in July 13 this year for his comeback tour. It’s well known that Jackson was also a fan of Peter Pan, which is set in London. If you were to disappear, wouldn’t it be very convenient to disappear to Neverland rather than going to boring, mundane London (no offense to the Londoners)?
• It was reported Jackson was in dire financial straits, having just recently lost Neverland Ranch. However, from Wikipedia: “Less than four months before Jackson’s death one of his biographers, Ian Halperin, revealed that Jackson had a secret library of over 100 unreleased songs which he planned to release after his death to support his children.” So Jackson would have a motive for disappearing, but is it enough to kill yourself? What if you faked death, left your kids a huge windfall from people who are now grieving over your death, while you hide out in the Bahamas?

Needless to say, if you’ve seen someone who you think might be Michael Jackson hiding out from the paparazzi, please post your findings here!