Yeah, we like to talk about movies. But secretly…or not so much…we want to be in them. Well, Mr. Todd Robert Anderson stars in Fuzz Track City, premiering at Dances With Films on June 4th at 7:15pm (which takes place this year at the Mann Chinese Six.)

Please help Todd spread the word, and if you are in Los Angeles come to the movie! We’ll post a notification when tickets go on sale!

Here’s the trailer: http://vimeo.com/41979658

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:01:02 – Movie News
• 0:05:17 - Host Stephen Falk presents this episode’s theme: College Movies
• 0:18:43 - Movie Jail
• 0:27:13 - The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:30:36 - A Cold Reading from OLEANNA
• 0:39:39 - Trivia!
• 0:09:10 - The Bottom 5: Worst Things That Happened To Falk At College
• 1:10:23 - A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:13:39 - Outro

The Pigs are back! With a vengeance! After being scared away from the multiplexes by Nic Cage and his Ghost Rider 2, the boys finally got up the guts to go to a movie theater to see The Avengers. True to their cranky nature, they had their reservations…but turns out everybody is right about this picture. It’s a good time! The Pigs return to cinematic bliss…which we’re sure will last at least until they take in Battleship.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Really Long Musical Intro
• 0:01:01 - The Bacon: SCARY ANIMAL MOVIES
• 0:28:51 - Outro

Sent to us by @Glark and @extraThursday (via Sly Oyster, High Definite). See the original with more info at Pop Chart Lab.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 - Intro
• 0:01:44 - The Bacon: ROAD HOUSE
• 0:44:10 - Outro

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 - Intro
• 0:00:47 – Where’s Falk?
• 0:03:05 - The Bacon: Todd Robert Anderson
• 0:38:12 - Outro

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:00:31 – Movie News
• 0:06:33 – NEW SEGMENT: Comments On Comments!
• 0:11:28 – Host Todd Robert Anderson presents this episode’s theme: Movies About Movies
• 0:30:26 – Movie Jail
• 0:46:13 – The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:51:08 – A Cold Reading from THE LAST SHOT
• 0:56:05 – The Chronology Game!
• 1:07:05 - The Bottom 5: Worst Movies About Movies
• 1:09:00 - A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:12:39 – Outro

A fan asked us via a passionate email to go see the new Ghost Rider film, he felt it was perfect synergy given our love of Nic Cage line readings. And while there were two very bizarre and lovely moments of Cagey acting, there was another eighty-eight minutes of movie around them. Needless to say, Steve Falk got very, very fussy.

Here are the 11 synopses I wrote for the game in their complete run-on sentence glory. Add your titles to the comments below to complete this BLOG FOR JUSTICE! (1 point)

1. Steven Seagal is Jackson Steele, a retired CIA “wetworks” operative, who is brought out of retirement to hunt down the team he trained after they go rouge and steal a shipment of weapons-grade anthrax.
2. Steven Seagal is Markus Blaze, a former Navy SEAL turned veterinarian in the Colorado mountains, he seeks only the quiet life when his best friend’s daughter, Seagal’s veterinarian assistant, is kidnapped by a meth-addled biker gang.
3. Steven Seagal is Professor Nick Champion, a former FBI forensic scientist, who is brought out of retirement to investigate the assassination of the vice president, which leads to a conspiracy inside the government to kill the president as well.
4. Steven Seagal is Brock Mountain, a former Marine sniper living the quiet life on an Indian reservation, he suddenly finds himself the target of a nationwide manhunt: he’s been framed for the assassination of a visiting foreign dignitary from a country suspected of harboring terrorists.
5. Steven Seagal is Detective Lars Tanner, a maverick cop two weeks from retirement, who finds himself chasing his one unsolved case: a serial killer not active in years, but who now returns to taunt Det. Tanner with fresh victims.
6. Steven Seagal is Chris Stark, a former Green Beret turned environmentalist, who finds himself in conflict with a huge pharmaceutical company and its army of mercenaries when he uncovers a plot to dump waste chemicals into a neighboring small town’s water supply.
7. Steven Seagal is Bubba Drake, a disillusioned private military contractor turned blues musician, brought in for one last job in Eastern Europe to recover an escapee from a secret CIA prison who may or may not be a vampire.
8. Steven Seagal is Carson Thorpe, a tough-as-nails cop who loves coaching his nephew’s soccer team, he sets his sights on revenge after a botched mob hit leaves his nephew clinging to life in intensive care while the criminals go free on a technicality.
9. Steven Segal is Doctor Ron Striker, a former Air Force Pararescue Jumper suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he’s forced to confront his demons when a group of domestic terrorists bring their war to the quiet dude ranch Striker has converted into a free health care clinic.
10. Steven Segal is Diego Vartan, a Marine captain sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, he’s given a chance for freedom by the man who put him there – as long as Vartan goes on one last mission: supporting a conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.
11. Steven Seagal is Detective Sam “Two Fists” Thunder, a former mixed martial artist and government agent, he now spends his days cleaning up the mean streets of Los Angeles, until his investigation of a new highly-lethal and environmentally dangerous synthetic drug leads him to a CIA conspiracy and the very people he used to work for.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:00:33 – Movie News
• 0:05:21 – Host Stephen Skelton presents this episode’s theme: Steven Seagal
• 0:27:26 – Movie Jail
• 0:35:44 – The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:40:04 - Straight to DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog
• 0:44:23 – A Cold Reading from a medley of Seagal movies
• 0:49:56 – Three Word Seagal! You can play, too!
• 1:04:53 – The Bottom 5: Worst Things Steven Seagal’s Done
• 1:05:45 – A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:06:56 – Outro

Aykroyd hinted that Bill Murray may not return as Peter Venkman, and that the character could be played by a different actor, a la Jack Ryan. (via Empire)

This is obviously a cry for help. At this point, Murray’s willingness to do Ghostbusters 3 is probably the best indicator of whether or not Ghostbusters 3 should actually be made. We can only hope Dan’s friends and family intervene.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:00:52 - Movie News
• 0:05:34 – Host Stephen Falk presents this episode’s theme: The Coen Brothers
• 0:36:24 – Movie Jail
• 0:42:00 – The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:45:18 – Straight to DVD Corner with Tonn Slingdog
• 0:51:38 - A Cold Reading from RAISING ARIZONA
• 0:57:22 - Trivia!
• 1:11:25 - The Bottom 5: Worst Coen Brothers Movies
• 1:12:21 - A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:12:55 - Outro

Three Pigs went into Haywire…but only two came out. Forced by fanatics to see two more January releases, Todd and Skelton brave the endurance test of the year in an effort to rescue Falk from his captors. Liam Neeson was unavailable to rescue Falk, due to a problem with wolves, leaving two Pigs standing tall in the fight of their lives!

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:00:50 - Movie News
• 0:04:39 - Host Todd Robert Anderson presents this episode’s theme: Zombies!
• 0:29:33 - Movie Jail
• 0:42:34 - The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:47:27 - A Cold Reading from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
• 0:52:16 - What’s Your Opinion?!
• 1:01:53 - The Bottom 5: Worst Zombie Movies Todd’s Ever Seen
• 1:04:58 - A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:05:59 - Outro

(Side note: why are DVDs ejected from a Redbox machine all warm? It feels dirty.)

Like I figured, the entire movie is a long version of the disjointed trailer. Considering there are SIX writers credited on the script (God knows how many there really were) this isn’t much of a surprise. It ends up being one old western movie cliche after another with an occasional alien attack. This is what I took away:

• I enjoyed the opening scene where an amnesiac Daniel Craig shoots three dirty bounty hunters. Movie kinda goes downhill after that.
• Harrison Ford’s character is introduced as a ruthless sonofabitch who has a stranglehold on the local town and draws and quarters his own employees when he thinks they’ve blown up an entire herd of his cattle. Even though that’s something clearly impossible for one drunk guy to do and was obviously an alien attack.
• Later, Harrison Ford’s character is portrayed as a loving father and understanding businessman. The town doesn’t seem to care how shitty he was to them before the aliens. This town is very cool about stuff like that, apparently.
• Daniel Craig has three flashbacks that tell us the exact same information: he was abducted by aliens, which is where he got his awesome laser blasting wristwatch. I personally believe if you use more than one flashback, and the story structure isn’t playing with the flashback convention, you’ve sort of screwed up. Especially if you use your multiple flashbacks to convey the same information over and over again.
• I missed all the Olivia Wilde backstory because I fell asleep for a bit and woke up in the middle of the scene where they’re around a campfire with the Indian tribe. But that’s cool, the trailers had already made it pretty clear that she was an alien. You know, the “good” one. Barf.
• I ate two cupcakes during the playback of this movie. One before I fell asleep and one after.
• Olivia Wilde tells Daniel Craig that in order to remove the alien wrist weapon he has to “stop thinking”. Then she makes out with him and the weapon falls off. Ha ha. This means the aliens design their weaponry to malfunction when they get boners.
• The alien physiology is what I can only describe as anti-natural selection. They have two arms but can open up their chests to extend a second set of arms (I guess the really nice ones) to grab at stuff, but doing so EXPOSES THEIR BEATING HEART SO IT’S REALLY EASY TO STAB AND KILL THEM. Also, I would imagine it makes them susceptible to lots of infections. Instead of traveling from planet to planet to steal gold they really should be hunting for antibiotics.
• Harrison Ford actually speaks the line “I wish I had a son like you” as his Indian ward dies in his arms during an extended death scene. The movie is full of stuff like this. Is there an Insert Cliche macro in Final Draft I’m not aware of?
• Lots of underused actors that I normally love to see: Sam Rockwell, Walton Goggins, Keith Carradine, Clancy Brown.
• This was a movie that had absolutely no surprises and almost zero character growth. Pretty much every plot point developed exactly as you thought it was going to. It felt like the script had become so screwed up by multiple rewrites that they just gave up and did what they could to smooth out the structure and started shooting.

Via BoingBoing

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 – Intro
• 0:00:40 – Movie News
• 0:07:18 – Host Stephen J. Skelton presents this episode’s theme: War Movies
• 0:30:48 – Movie Jail
• 0:37:20 – The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:42:48 – A Cold Reading from FULL METAL JACKET
• 0:48:02 – Movie/Character/Actor!*
• 1:07:26 - The Bottom 5: Worst Moments In War Movies
• 1:08:56 - A Moment Of Positivity
• 1:10:09 - Outro

* Once again, Skelton proves to be an incompetent scorekeeper, but at least this time it didn’t affect the actual winner.

PLEASE NOTE: you may wish to put the kids to bed before screening, unless you want to expose your precious little ones to William Sadler’s inexplicably naked Tai chi routine. You’ve been warned.

The Pigs see two summer blockbuster sequels and don’t hate them! Plus, this time they somehow lure a woman into their car. Poor woman.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 - Intro
• 0:00:46 - The Bacon: Stephen Skelton
• 0:38:12 - Outro

• This new Muppets movie is strangely segregated. There are large portions of the movie that have either humans or Muppets, but not both. Previous Muppet movies always depicted a world where Muppets were a part of the general population, always mixed in with human characters. This made me feel strange, mostly because I don’t know what the word is for being prejudiced against Muppets (Muppcist?).
• The tone early on is aggressively sad. There’s so much weepy nostalgia slathered on the front-end of this picture (the Muppets used to be great, now we’re not even friends anymore) that it might bum you out.
• The script spent way too much time on the relationship between humans Jason Segel and Amy Adams. This is a Muppet movie. I do not care about Jason Segel or Amy Adams. I care about Muppets.
• Musical numbers felt oddly paced and generally went on too long. Especially the excruciating Amy-Adams-Singing-Alone-In-A-Diner-With-No-Muppets number (which later became an awkward sort-of duet with Miss Piggy). The exception is the Chris Cooper rapping number (mercifully short). I felt the movie could have used more original songs, in shorter numbers spaced throughout the running time.
• Strange choices for popular song covers. Although not outside the realm of the original Muppet Show, Nirvana and Cee Lo Green were odd selections. And “We Built This City” during the theater cleaning montage was just a bad idea (an original song was needed here).
• Frank Oz is a cranky old man.  He’s quoted as saying “I don’t think they respected the characters.” (Wired) which is total bullshit. Despite my complaints, I think it’s clear in the movie that there’s a lot of love for the Muppets from the filmmakers. Some questionable choices, sure, but it was hardly disrespectful.

This time, on a very special episode of The Film Pigs Podcast:

• 0:00:00 - Intro
• 0:00:40 - Movie News
• 0:05:11 - Host Stephen Falk presents this episode’s theme: Female-Driven Action Movies
• 0:22:53 - Movie Jail
• 0:33:15 - The Nic Cage Memorial Bizarre Line Reading
• 0:06:24 – Taglines!
• 1:02:25 - The Bottom Five: Worst Female Action Characters
• 1:03:24 - A Moment of Positivity
• 1:04:16 - Outro

You see, while you can hijack a concept, you can’t hijack an entire medium. And maybe horror concepts can’t sustain themselves when you are dealing with an open-ended series. If you are talking the BBC, then it can work because those series are finite. Even if you have to stretch your story a little thin in the middle to fill up time, you can get more forgiveness from me, Tonn. Because the storytellers know where they are going. Now, a lot of people Stateside wear rose-colored glasses when something is exciting when it first starts, and they never take them off. But I don’t wear rose-colored glasses because they give me a headache. So I see where the shit is already going off the rails. And it’s pretty simple.

Take The Walking Dead, for example. It was fun at first because there has never, ever been a zombie-themed horror series. But this season, and I’m sorry if you are one of these people who loves it no matter what, there is a serious lack of zombies on the show. And if a show is about a zombie apocolypse, then the only threat that matters is zombies. This was the case in the first half of the first season, but now halfway through the second season the show is about young romance, the difficulty of raising children, and hassling with unhinged human beings. I often forget from act to act that there are even zombies…somewhere. And nothing will get me turning to the Twitter feed on my iPhone in the middle of a show faster than fifteen to twenty minutes or more without a single zombie sighting. Remember Night of the Living Dead? That’s the movie that launched the modern concept of a “zombie” which aren’t really zombies at all but ghouls if you understand the origins of the zombie myth. (It’s a Haitian thing, you see, and zombies were just drugged and enslaved people without thought, they had no interest in eating flesh…or brains. The brains thing, by the way, was an invention of the eighties, introduced in Return of the Living Dead, a horror comedy.) Night of the Living Dead was about people trapped in a farmhouse surrounded by an infinite amount of ghouls, or “zombies” as they are now called, that wanted to eat them alive. Very scary, indeed. The second season of The Walking Dead has been about a small number of zombies locked in a barn, surrounded by a bunch of people bickering with each other outside. Not so scary? Why? Because the zombies are not constantly growing in numbers, and are fairly well contained. Maybe they will turn it around, make the zombies a bigger threat as the series progresses, and I will of course keep watching it because THERE ARE NO ZOMBIE SHOW ALTERNATIVES. (Well, that’s not true. MTV’s Death Valley features zombies as well as vampires and werewolves, and it is a way more entertaining show than The Walking Dead. But it is meant to be a very silly comedy, and while I personally think it is hilarious, I have always preferred the serious zombie tale to the comic ones, however slightly.)

Then there is Terra Nova, a Spielberg produced show about people living in dinosaur times (which is scientifically ridiculous given the changes in our atmosphere that have occured since dino times, but whatever. There’s dinosaurs. Or at least there’s supposed to be.) In addition to having a similar problem to The Walking Dead, namely that there aren’t very many dinosaurs, it tends toward schmaltz, but that is what you get in Spielberg land. I don’t mind the schmaltz, really (I didn’t mind it so much on the Spielberg produced “Falling Skies” either, but that show had more encounters with the evil aliens.) My big problem is the severe lack of dinosaurs. I know the show is called “Terra Nova” and not “The Walking Dinos” so I guess you could give it a pass, but really the main selling point of the series is people trying to survive in a dinosaur infested land. On the rare occasions that the show has featured dinosaurs, which are CGI creations only a couple steps above those on the SyFy Channel’s saturday night junk features, it has been fun. I can forgive the effects, as long as people are fighting them. However, most of the show is about spies from a neighboring camp and families struggling with their little relationship nonsense as opposed to struggling with the only thing that matters in a dinosaur infested land: dinosaurs. And I’m sure that’s because despite the giant budget of the show, they can’t afford a lot of dinosaurs. (Well, they could have spent less on the cheesy sets and the talent, if you ask me, leaving more room for monster fights.) But if you can’t afford dinosaurs and you want to make a dinosaur show…should you be making a dinosaur show at all? With a contained story like Jurassic Park, you can make the whole damn thing about dinosaurs, you see. And that’s why it works. Of course, I’ll keep watching Terra Nova. BECAUSE THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVE DINOSAUR SHOWS. (And no, the crap on the SyFy Channel does not count. It does not, it does not, it does not.)

Finally, I’d like to talk about American Horror Story. This is the most entertaining of the three horror shows I’m currently watching, mostly because it is completely bananas, entirely inappropriate, and Connie Britton often rubs lotion on her gorgeous legs. (Stephen Skelton, whose trash I enjoy picking through as well, is a particular fan of this last element.) But I have to say, after having suffered through the last seasons of Lost just to find out that it was all in purgatory which is what I assumed from the beginning, and suffering through the last season of Battlestar Galactica only to find out “it was because of god,” I can’t imagine a series like this will reach any kind of satisfying conclusion. Any of these examples would have been better served by a more finite and cinematic running time. Because if you know you can wrap something up soon, then you can decide from the get-go where the story is going. If you want to keep the damn thing going for seven years and make as much money as possible, you can’t help but leave your audience wanting. And that is why, even in its first season, the last couple episodes of American Horror Story have really dragged, because they are already recycling the elements of the story that made it interesting in the beginning. The last episode in particular was (SPOILER ALERT, which is a stupid thing to have to write because if you are reading about a show you haven’t watched and you don’t want spoiled you are most likely a complete idiot) basically a rather obvious reveal at the beginning followed by an hour of cannibalizing its own story lines, and ending with Connie Britton going to a loony bin which doesn’t bode well for the moisurizing of the legs. There are of course a lot of ghost show alternatives, but I don’t care about a doctor having to treat people for free because his dead wife is giving him shit or anything like that, so this will be the only one I watch. But THERE IS NO OTHER SHOW with Connie Britton having sex with a guy in a rubber suit, so I can’t stop looking at it.

Anyway. I’m Tonn.