Scream 2009 Awards Nominations

Is it really worthy of its own blog? Well, yeah, I'd like to think so. I didn't just sit here for 10 minutes voting on their '32 Fan Approved Categories' (where was I when these were approved??) and I think I might let you in on who I picked with a few of them and maybe some other thoughts I have within this annual Spike TV Awards show.

The Ultimate Scream Award - I voted for Drag Me To Hell, mainly because besides Up and Star Trek in that list, everything else was pretty much asinine. I really don't get this category though. The ultimate scream? Out of all those films, Sam Raimi's fantastic horror film is the only one which made me jump. Well, Transformers made me want to jump into a brick wall face first.

Best Horror Film - That was a hard one. It really was. I truly enjoyed Splinter, got a little kick out of Dead Snow, Let the Right One In was beautiful, thought Derek Mears is the new Jason for this millenium in Friday the 13th. But I ulitmately went with the PG-13 stylings of Mr. Raimi's Drag Me To Hell. It deserves more credit than it has gotten.

Best Breakout Performance Female - Eh. Looking at this list, I only saw two names that meant anything to me. Lorna Raver from Drag Me To Hell and Lina Leandersson from Let the Right One In. Between those two, it was a tough choice. The rest are laughable at best.  Malin Akerman, although pretty to look at, was the worst part of Watchmen, the same goes for Zoe Saldana as Uhura in the new fangled Star Trek. And let's not speak about anything else from Revenge of the Fallen. Please.

Best Breakout Performane Male - Oh god. What a fucking list here. Two names sprang up, yet again, but again it was a little tough. Saw Worthington was probably the best part (besides Anton Yelchin's young rebel Reese) of Terminator: Salvation (which I didn't hate... I just thought it was bland and Bale had too much control over the script) and Chris Pine's pitch perfect young brat Captain Kirk from Star Trek. I went with Pine, even though the first time I noticed him was when he played the smallest of the Tremor Brothers in the underappreciate nutzoid action film Smokin' Aces. And any category which has two actors by the name of Taylor makes me laugh a bit.

Best Director - This one was one of the hardest for me to choose. Well, scratch Michael Bay off the list for the turdfest that raped my childhood. But the rest were all worthy choices. JJ Abrams took a decent script with tons of plotholes and made a fum Star Trek film from it. Tomas Alfredson made a creepy yet beautiful film with two of the best child actors I've ever seen with Let the Right One In. Bob Peterson and Pete Doctor worked the usual Pixar magic and made a heartwarming tribute to remembrance and redemption with Up. And Sam Raimi returned to the world of horror where we all fell in love with him in the first place with Drag Me to Hell. But I chose first timer Duncan Jones who crafted a low budget sci-fi film with one of my favorite actors (Sam Rockwell) and made a claustrophobic mind trip called Moon that I can't wait to own on DVD so I can show it to all my friends. Over and over again.

Best Sequel - You know it's a bad category when the only film I enjoyed was Punisher: War Zone. That's all I really have to say about this one.

Fight to the Death Scene - This is when they put their 'extreme' edge to the categories. It's okay, but I've seen it occur on the MTV Movie Awards already. But out of the scenes listed, I had to pick the car fight scene from Drag Me To Hell. Haven't seen it? Well, you're the reason the movie didn't do so well. Assholes.

The Holy S***! Scene of the Year - Oh, and S*** is SHIT, for all you noobs out there. Do they really need to block that word out still? Didn't South Park make the joke about this word and profanity in general 7 years ago? I still find it funny. Slightly tough, but Drag Me To Hell's seance scene takes the cake. And there's no way I would vote for anything in general from Knowing. Unless it asked for best hairpiece. And only if Jeremy Piven and Brendan Fraser were not in the running again Nicolas Cage.

I think I'm going to stop there. You can just go to Scream 2009's site to vote for all the categories. Let's vote for the good movies and kick out the Twilight's and Revenge of the Fallen's in these categories and make sure some good genre films are noticed. But who am I kidding? Robert Pattinson signed with the devil himself. It's the only way it makes sense that he's famous.

Marvel is consumed by Disney?

Well, not exactly. They were bought out by Disney for $4 billion dollars. Not too shabby of a deal, when you think about the 5000 characters they can play around with in the future.

But sadly Spider-Man, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider and Daredevil are still in their respective studios right now (be it Sony or Fox) and now, with this huge deal, those studios aren't going to give back their film making rights for small change. So Disney instead will be helping distribution and whatnot. Are people worried? Some are, and I can see their concern.

Some people worry about Disney overusing the Marvel characters in horrible childish ways. I'll direct you to the picture below.

As Stan Lee would say, 'Nuff Said.

So I'm not worried about that. I'm not worried about that at all. What was the first thing that came to mind when I heard of this extraordinary news? One word. One name.

Pixar.

The possibilities are endless with Pixar in the game now. Supposedly John Lassetter visited Marvel before the deal was done and they all geeked it up big time. Which bodes well for any future CG animated Marvel movie that will be coming down the pipeline. There's a ton of characters most people don't even know about that they can exploit in the best way possible.

Devin Faraci has a great little list of 10 properties Pixar should make ASAP.  I have to say, it's a great list with some forgotten treasures. Especially Ka-Zar and The Squadron Supreme. I always loved Mark Gruenwald's unheralded classic. Sadly, The Watchmen got all the credit for being the dark and brooding super hero team comic book, even though Squadron had come out a year before. But I was surprised about Sleepwalker. I always hated that character but he makes some good points as to how it could work. Where's my Darkhawk movie?

But the first thing I thought of for Pixar to do was a storyline from Marvel that was so epic and amazing that when I read it when it first came out, I was shell shocked with the beautiful art by George Perez and Ron Lim and the stellar writing by Jim Starlin. Of course I'm speaking of The Infinity Gauntlet.

 

Ahh memories. I just hate that Thanos hasn't been done the way he should have been done so far in film or cartoons. I mean, in the Silver Surfer cartoon they made his love Chaos, not Death, because that would scare the kiddies. I hate playing down to children. They can take more than we give them credit for. I mean, I grew up on Terry Gilliam films and wasn't scare whatsoever. 

So I welcome this new deal of Marvel being partnered up with Disney. Well, it's not really a partnership, is it? They make it out to be but Disney bought them up, so let's cross our fingers that Disney won't put Marvel to work for pennies in a factory somewhere. It would probably be right next to the Muppets.

A first blog again?

This will be the new home of my writing. I was sick of Combinations Follow, mainly because the people wanted to charge me a shit ton of money to keep it going. I said fuck that to all that noise and decided to own another site instead of paying these thieves their supposed 'penance'.

So this is the new home of James McCormick, The Media Guru himself. I'll be attempting to fix this site up, just like my friend Frank made the last site look like a real site and not some bootleg blogger like it looks like right now.

I have a Donate button to the left (might change to the right soon) to get my ass to Austin, TX. Why do I want to go there? Many reasons. For film. For my career choice. To meet a wonderful gal. Get some fantastic food. Maybe even have the chance to drink a beer while watching a double feature. Legally!

Like I said, many reasons there.

Looking for writers as well who would like to contribute again. I want this to become a new haven for film aficionados, like some of my favorite sites are right now. Let's try to break our way through and start a new witty, intelligent and opinionated site.

One can only hope.

Email me at James@fistfulofmedia.com if you're interested.