A lot of people ask me how I have a popular twitter account without being a celebrity. It’s really not that difficult, provided you having something to say. So here are some simple tips for being a noteworthy tweeter.

1) You have to be WORTH following. People ask me all the time how they can get a lot of followers. Why would ANYONE want to follow you? Are you interesting? Funny? Are you an expert in any particular field? No one wants to follow you to hear how awesome your weekend was (and let’s be honest, it probably wasn’t that awesome), or to read your conversations with friends. Be worthy.

2) Quality over quantity. If someone follows you it’s because they’re interested in you, not obsessed with you. Don’t tweet nonstop. Five or less tweets a day is a good rule of thumb (and a rule I just made up!)

3) Engage with other users who are similar to you. Follow each other and encourage one another. I know a lot of people like to have a clean timeline (myself included) and don’t like to have a bunch of “@” replies. This is fine, but if you are new to twitter I would definitely take the time to reach out via replies. They can always be deleted later. You can also direct message and/or “fav” tweets. Bottom line, be social!

4) Lastly, if you want people to follow you, you have to tweet regularly. Always stick to quality over quantity, but don’t go multiple days without tweeting either. This sounds easy but is actually the hardest one. I have personally helped numerous people set up twitter accounts and blogs where they are excited to start and then abandon the process a week later. No one wants to follow someone with little content who only tweets sporadically.

So to recap: Be Worthy. Quality over Quantity. Engage. Commit.

And if you have any other tweet-related questions (or any questions for that matter), just ask me!

And of course, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

Anjeanette’s BLOG

Anjeanette’s TWITTER

Work Associates

You gave the girl at work with the emotionally distant, but hot and rich boyfriend a somewhat expensive bracelet. Why did you neglect the other girl who holds your coffee and keeps a lookout for your boss while you serve the copy machine a hot dish of kicking? You don’t want to screw this up. She’s prevented you from getting fired for dicking around on the job. At the very least, she enjoys your company. She may not be beautiful, but that doesn’t make her any less important. Shame on you. It’s not her fault she has three hairs on her lip that stick out like Rich Uncle Pennybags at an Occupy Rally. It’s not her fault chocolate chip bagels are so good or her periods are irregular. It’s not her fault, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help. Get her a book she will love: “The Hormonally Vulnerable Woman.”

You do this every year, ya ding-head. The company hires a temp for the extra holiday workload and you never give him (or her — I don’t want to create a sexist image on here.) a damn thing. Not anymore. Time to value their assistance before it’s too late. Get them “The Secret” so they can get their pathetic life back in order.

I hope you didn’t forget your boss. A gift basket won’t fix that. Only the perfect present. Something that says I was too busy doing important things at my desk to be distracted by anything. Something that says “I work for you because I love the fulfillment work gives me,” and “I respect your company’s time.” Buy them Skyrim.

Friends

If you have friends who are dog owners, your work is cut out for you. Just get them plastic baggies, dummy. They go through them like crazy. You could wait until June to give them bags. They’ll be so happy they don’t have to waste their time and money on purchasing bags that you’ll be forgiven instantly. Shoot, I bet you could give them old grocery store bags and they’ll still go bonkers.

Everyone has those friends we only talk to a few times a year. Get them a phone card. The important friends are the ones you see more often than the ones you actually like. This needs to be a gift fitting for any of them. You never know when you’ll see them, but you see them often. Get a case of these and two cases of these. Now you’re covered.

But Matthew, what about my lover’s bestie? Get your significant other’s best friend something. Being late is no excuse. Let them know you think about them too. Buy them condoms. They’ll be overjoyed that someone, you, has a heart big enough to concern themselves with the sexual appetites (and safety) of their partner and their partner’s closest friend. Make sure they know it’s a secret between you and them. It’s a selfless act, gift-giving is. Attention only cheapens it.

Loved Ones

Even if you gave your mother a present, she deserves another one. She carried your gross fetus inside her for nine months. I’m sorry. I didn’t need to be like that. You know how pregnancy works. But don’t lose sight of the fact that you ruined her sex-hole! Make up for it. And after that meal she cooked for the family, I know exactly what you should buy: Paula Deen’s The Deen Family Cookbook. Yum!

Dads are easy. Print off a list of your favorite porn site URLs and snail mail it. Links and other computer stuff hurts his aging brain.

If you forgot your boyfriend or girlfriend, it may be hard to fix this. You don’t have time to think about it. Rush out and buy what I say. Ladies or gay dudes, buy your boyfriend a fucking sword! He won’t not love it! Fellas and lesbians, I’m not in a position to give you advice on this subject. However, experience tells me that girls don’t appreciate allergy medication for me to use to put up with her stupid cat.

Follow Matthew on Twitter, not the movie Twister. That’s not how it works and it’s frustrating that I need to explain that to you.

Follow Jenny Fine on Twitter and at her website because she made that awesome illustration.

It’s October now, and that’s when people like myself watch more horror movies than normal (and I normally watch a lot). Everybody has his or her favorites, and most people know about the major players — your Halloweens, your Dawn of the Deads, your The Shinings.  I’ve watched a ton of weird, obscure, or just plain awesome horror movies, and I’ve got five such oddities here to recommend to you for this All Hallows Eve season.

5) City of the Living Dead

Horror great Lucio Fulci made several zombie movies in the late 70s and early 80s, and probably his best known are Zombie and The Beyond, both of which are absolutely great. One that gets sort of overlooked is his 1980 outing, City of the Living Dead, very clearly named to invoke a connection to Romero. City is actually the first in a very loosely connected trilogy of films, followed by the aforementioned The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

Two reasons City is so awesome: First, it has one of the best premises in zombie horror, with a priest losing his faith and hanging himself in the churchyard, opening one of the fabled seven gates of hell. It’s such a neat idea and it allows for occult and pseudo-religious imagery along with the usual zombie shuffling around. The second reason is that it is incredibly, if not excessively, gory. Fulci was famous for his very graphic, lengthy gore scenes, and some of those here are among his best. You saw in the trailer the scene where a zombie squeezes the brain out of the back of somebody’s head, as well as a guy getting a power drill through his skull. (SPOILER: It’s not even a zombie who does that to him) While the movie goes super weird and ethereal the longer it goes on, it’s still one of the strongest films in Fulci’s blood-soaked canon.

4) The Devil Rides Out

I adore Hammer Films’ output in the 50s and 60s. They were a movie-making machine for a time, putting out several films a year. Though low-budget, they all had a definite style and feel that, for some reason, though the things depicted within are horrifying, put me at ease. What? I’m a weirdo. I’m aware of that.

While it’s tempting to recommend any of the Dracula or Frankenstein films for which Hammer is best known, I’ve decided to show you The Devil Rides Out, made in 1968. It’s a much more interesting film than I had initially expected. The film initially caused some controversy given its overt occult themes and depiction of the Devil. It also features Satan worshipers performing pagan rituals and sacrifices and nightmarish imagery.

Christopher Lee, known for playing villain after villain for Hammer, gets to play the hero in a role similar to Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing from the Dracula films. Charles Gray, known for playing stodgy types or Blofeld in that one crappy James Bond movie, is similarly excellent as the cult leader Mocata, clearly relishing, with sinister glee, drawing young women to the dark side. The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson of I Am Legend fame and directed by Hammer Films’ A-Number 1, Terence Fisher. An interesting and enjoyable romp into the weird.

3) Frontier(s)

Now, I am no fan of the torture porn genre, but I am a fan of well-made films, regardless of the subject matter. This 2008 flick could easily have been called “The France Chainsaw Massacre.” It’s the story of a bunch of punk French kids on the run from the law who end up in a rural area and cross paths with a bloodthirsty cannibal family, led by a former Nazi officer. As you can probably tell from the trailer, the deaths are gruesome and unflinching, and what happens to these kids, especially the Final Girl, is incredibly horrendous, but ultimately, Frontier(s) is worth a watch because of the relentless sense of dread and terror the film has throughout. It also ends with a Peckinpah-inspired shootout, which seems to come out of nowhere but is right in keeping with the balls-out nature of the film. If you get squeamish at scenes of torture, this might not be your cup of tea, but if you can stomach it, you’re in for a real icky-feeling treat.

2) Martin

Before Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero had not yet been saddled with the King of the Zombies moniker and was trying some new and different things. His 1976 post-modern vampire film, Martin is one of his best and weirdest.

Martin is a young man who claims to be a 90-some year old vampire. Whether he is or is not, he still goes out at night and kills women with razor blades and drinks their blood. He goes to live with his elderly cousin, a priest of some sort, who tries to reform Martin and expel the evil within him. It turns the vampire genre on its ear as Martin openly mocks the traditional lore of the cross and the garlic and even the fangs. The ambiguity of the circumstances is what makes the movie so intriguing, and the differing opinions about Martin’s nature alternately appear correct. There’s a great series of scenes where he calls into a local radio station to anonymously discuss his nightly escapades and it becomes the most popular segment on the show. The film is much more reflective and contemplative than the bulk of Romero’s films, though not short on the blood, and paints a very interesting portrait of a character who is either a remorseful undead creature or a very disturbed youngster. And the biggest bonus: he doesn’t shimmer.

1) Who Can Kill a Child?

I wrote a review of this movie about a year ago, but I’m going to recommend it again. This Spanish film from 1976 is the most startling and effective horror movies I’ve seen in a very long time. The idea behind it is just so ballsy, and the way they address the subject matter is fearless. It concerns an English couple on holiday in coastal Spain who decide to get away from the crowds and rent a boat to go to a small island in the middle of the sea. The island, though there is a town, seems totally deserted. But it isn’t, of course. Some evil force (it’s never explained) has turned all the children into murderers, and they revel in chasing and trying to brutally slay any passing adult. This puts the couple, parents themselves with another on the way, in a horrific position to either allow themselves to be killed by these seemingly adorable kids or to do the unthinkable.

The film, though slow to start, keeps up the terror once it begins and does make you fear children, culminating in one of the most apocalyptic endings in all of horror. It’s surprising how chilling this movie is and even more chilling that it’s not more widely hailed. I’ll say it again: If you like horror, watch Who Can Kill a Child?

And there you have it, fans of things: five movies to send a tingle up your collective spines this scarytime season. Enjoy!

-Kanderson loves hearing people’s opinions. Follow him on TWITTER and tell him about what you think of these movies.

Like many of my fellow nerds, I have anxiety problems, and while I’m able to manage them throughout the day with a rigid schedule of Portal 2, hot baths, exercise (ugh), and historical romance novels, when I lie down to sleep at night the panic can be overwhelming and insomnia inducing. And that is when I turn to the internet… to YouTube, to be precise. Watching videos of ladies doing their hair or showing me their collection of Nars blushes is well – mind-numbing, and that is what I need in order to stop myself from spiraling into crazy time land. Soon, however, watching beauty tutorials isn’t enough, like when you watch too much of one kind of porn and you need to up the stakes, amirite? What? Nothing.

So I began watching massage videos. NOT IN A SEX WAY. GEEZ. Videos of cranial massages, Swedish massages, all kinds of above board massages. And even though I felt kind of weird and a little creepy, it worked. Boom! Asleep. But when I had watched all the massage videos ever on YouTube and was seriously considering an Ambien/Xanax/whiskey cocktail, in desperation, I fell down the rabbit hole of the “related videos” little side bar area of YouTube. I watched some weird, yelling Russian massages, some Japanese hair massages, and even one thing called a sacroiliac massage which I don’t want to talk about. And then I hit bottom (PUN) with a “whispering video” like the one in the video above.

OH, GOD, IT WAS TERRIFYING.

A “whispering video” is where a person with a little scary dead baby voice talks about whatever, anything, and makes mouth noises into the microphone and, in general, is so gross and disturbing I can’t imagine why anyone would voluntarily want to listen to it. But people do. They fucking love it. There’s a whole market for it and, let’s face it, these people are fetishists. They find it soothing in the same way I find watching a gentle, quiet back massage soothing. It’s weird. IT IS WEIRD. I thought I was weird, but that shit? That shit is weird.

And that’s when I found out about SootheTube. It’s a real THING, you guys. People go to there and watch videos in order to relax, or get straight, or not kill their partners or whatever, and everyone is a little self-deprecating, like, “yeah, I know this is weird, but you like it too, so we’re all weird”. And there are the aforementioned whispering videos (ACK KILL IT WITH FIRE), but also massage videos and some other relaxation videos and even a few hair tutorials sprinkled about for good measure.

So that is what I learned about the Internet yesterday. Now, please go about judging my crazy on a scale of Sheen-Salinger because I would expect nothing less of you.

Now, given the fact that I’ve been utterly burned out on Facebook for at least a year and a half, this ad doesn’t particularly speak to me anyway. But any hope it had of luring me in with social media convenience flew right out the window with homeboy’s little snarky line about stopping “me” from admitting to owning an action figure collection.

You know, I know there are certain sociological trends to indicate the whole “geeks have inherited the earth” phenomenon, and certainly we get treated like a valuable commodity by marketing suits in many ways we didn’t before. But then I see an ad like this and think, hmm… nope, we’re not quite there yet. Not “world domination” level, at least. And maybe that’s for the best, because it reinforces our sense of community. A community that can still collectively roll our eyes at an ad which is mildly annoying for its disdain for our nerdy proclivites, yet is particularly annoying in that it has no concept of the fact that we might not be interested in anyone who found our action figure collection to be an embarrassment in the first place!

In conclusion: I’d like to present Bing with the universally recognized symbol for “Live Long and Fuck Off”:

And as a grace note, I’d like to show any and all available nerd fellas out there my BSG Minimates collection:

*throws down mic* *kicks over amp* *struts off stage*

So. If you’re feeling a lil’ blue or just generally acclimating to the new, frantic week ahead, I’m here to tell you that somewhere between now and 3 minutes & 26 seconds from now, you’ll be joining the euphoric fold of which these three misshapen boogie-nuggets are the supreme lords and masters. Observe and rejoice.

Ah, 2003! How I don’t miss you. I had JUST quit drinking, dyed my hair to establish a departure from my previous identity and was hard at work losing the “20 beers a day and 4am pizza rolls” weight, which amounted to 40lbs that I am thankfully no longer forced to transport around this planet. Fortunately, I cleverly preserved this rock-bottom-proximity snapshot on VH1′s popular I Love the 80s program, on which they reminded people about things that existed in the past. I did several of these shows for no money, so you know things were going well. What you can’t see out of the frame is the globby bag of mayonnaise that was my gut hanging over large, baggy jeans. GOOD. TIMES.

I am grateful for this picture! It reminds how far I’ve come and how you can turn your life around for the better. Honestly. I was at a total dead-end with little hope of resurrecting a decent life. I humbly place my lowpoint at your feet and tell you that if you’re thinking about making improvements in your life, TODAY IS THE DAY TO START. Quitting drinking, starting exercising, eating better, pursuing your passion, hugging more puppies–whatever it is. Don’t think about it. Just do it. Over-thinking the “hows” and “why comes” will put you in a neverending loop of inactivity. You have the power and ability to change the future with a simple “pro-you” decision.

Today is the day you stop beating yourself up and start making those incremental changes that will drastically affect the outcome of your life in wonderful ways you can’t yet imagine!

Happy Sunday! I <3 U!

top pic via @Ness90

Fear is a powerful and important emotion. It sends adrenaline through our bodies and keeps our senses functioning at a high level. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say I like being scared, I will say that there is enjoyment to be had from feeling those nervous feelings in the safe environment of a movie theater. Horror movies play on very simple and primal instincts and phobias and are at their best when they represent the struggle between good and evil. The easiest way to represent this struggle is by using monsters, fictional creatures that can stand in for the deep, dark, primal fears we all have. It’s one of the earliest emotions humans exhibit. From the moment we’re born, we’re afraid of the darkness and the unknown things that may be lurking within it. As children, we give that fear a name which is “monsters.” Horror movies take that fear and manifest into something relatively safe, containing it within the 90 minutes between credits. But now, the monsters are being turned into sympathetic, non-threatening wimps, and it’s bumming me out.

Vampires’ downward spiral goes back quite a while, but I can attribute their largest drop to Anne Rice romanticizing and sexualizing the blood-suckers for horny goth kids and unfulfilled housewives. Post-Rice, vampires were more about pathos and longing than about viciously slaughtering innocent people. This has culminated in the Twilight series and the like, where vampires are friendly, chaste, and sparkly. There’s nothing scary about sad-eyed puppy dog people with pale skin. All the way back to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, while the eponymous Count is indeed a pitiful and wretched, if not tragic, character, he is throughout depicted as a disgusting and despicable creature who brings a plague of rats with him to London. The original Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau portrays Count Orlock (a name used when the rights to Stoker’s novel could not be secured) as a disfigured, nigh-rodential individual who is thoroughly monstrous. Even though they’re based on the same basic folk legend, there’s almost no similarity between Orlock and Edward. Vampires are now nothing more than easily pissed-off preppy-boys.

Werewolves, too, have suffered a sad cinematic fate. While they tend to be more difficult to sexualize given their more bestial appearance, more time is spent with them in their human form than in their snarling lycanthrope guise. This humanizes the monster and makes them sympathetic. The only film I can name offhand that succeeds in making you sympathize and fear the werewolf simultaneously is An American Werewolf in London, which also happens to be the best werewolf movie ever made. You feel bad for the guy, sure, but you wouldn’t wanna be stuck in a dark alley with him on a full moon night. Werewolves are incredibly hard to pull off properly, and the bulk of movies featuring them are stupid, which notable exceptions, of course.

Ghosts are still kicking around, too, I guess. The downfall of the modern haunting movie is that they either become about why the ghosts are there or who the ghosts are haunting. While I’m absolutely terrified of the idea that I’m surrounded by angry spirits who want to attack me with flying toasters and stuff, in films, it’s more than a little passe. They also often fall into the surrealist cinema trope where you see disturbing images or situations supposedly caused by the ghost, but are really a result of the filmmaker thinking he’s more clever than everybody else. These are arguably the most famous and time-tested monsters in the history of the world and are just not scary anymore. In fact, they’re so not scary that I almost can’t watch older movies where they actually ARE scary.

So what’s left to be afraid of? Zombies? I like zombies a lot and, like Jonah Ray, I like to think of them in the way George Romero and Max Brooks depict them, and I think most people would agree. However, zombie movies have been explored to every possible end in the last ten years and there’s really nothing more anyone can say. And now that The Walking Dead is on the air, any attempt to do a zombie movie will seem trite and repetitive, like how The Sopranos all but spelled the end of mob movies. Also, zombies are not the same type of monsters as werewolves and vampires. They aren’t under-the-bed-type monsters. Zombies, generally, are the result of a plague or virus and speak more about our fears of both nuclear and social annihilation and our inherent mistrust of our fellow man. Zombies are more a force of nature that people have to deal with while the real conflict comes in people trying to get along with each other despite coming from different backgrounds.

The new (or again) go-to monster these days seems to be aliens. It feels like a new alien invasion movie comes out every month or so and they all seem to fall into the “global pandemic” mold, not unlike the zombies. John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien both used the idea of a the outer space intruder to tell very simple haunted-house stories. Today, the alien movies are much more about patriotism. They’re less about being afraid of the invaders than they are the world rising up against a common foe. Since we live in a world where no one is banded against a common foe, even within a country, filmmakers attempt to restore some of that brotherhood through the alien, an outside force that will attack and conquer everyone, regardless of race, creed, or political affiliation. These allegories for real-world issues lack the personal fear of the “monsters” of our childhood.

Horror movies are too real now. They all seem to be about crazy individuals gruesomely torturing people over a number of minutes of screen time or are “clever” psychological movies where 9 times out of 10, the trouble is all a manifest of the main character. Living in Los Angeles, I know that crazy people are all too real. Slasher movies in the 80s introduced the idea of the insane, knife-wielding murderer, but they almost all of them reverted to the supernatural to explain them, ala Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger. Things like Saw and Hostel are just sick people doing sick, awful things. These people really exist and could actually get you, and so a movie about them doesn’t make you confront your fears and forget them, but instead just reminds you of how dead you’re going to be.

Maybe, sadly, the time of monsters is over. Folklore about mythical beasts were the early explanations for unexplained events and were the product of people telling the story to each other and having the legend grow. Today, with the internet and technology, everybody sees what the first person saw. There’s no room for it to grow and become it’s own legend. The most we can hope for is that someone will auto-tune a remix that we’ll all find hilarious for twenty minutes. Things like Twilight and Being Human are just our post-postmodern way of rationalizing things that we can no longer explain as unexplained and our desire to be in control of what scares us. After all, if the scariest thing in the world are the people, it might take a nice vampire to make us feel okay.

-Kanderson bids you adieu

Follow him on TWITTER

I'm not happy about it either, Bruce.

When reading the IMDb’s, my eye was immediately drawn to this horribly disheartening headline: “Warners Rebooting Batman Again?” (The article in question, via Empire Online, can be read here). The basic gist of the article is that when Christopher Nolan is finished with The Dark Knight Rises, which is due for release in 2012, Warner Bros. plans to reboot the franchise for a possible relaunch in 2013. Upon reading this, I decided to slam my head repeatedly onto the desk until I swore I could hear colors.  (In case you were wondering, turquoise is particularly melodic) Hopefully, most of you have the same reaction to this news, because this, my friends, is an outrage.  Hollywood has gone reboot mad, and it needs to be stopped.

Anytime now, guys.

It has of late become the policy of the bigwigs in Hollywood to “reboot” anything that has ever made money.  This effectively restarts the story of the franchise and they can build their own continuity and whatnot from there.  Sometimes this can be a good thing. It worked well in 2006 with the release of Casino Royale, one of the best Bond movies, and a story that hadn’t been told within the “official” MGM releases. It reintroduced James Bond as he obtains his Double-O status and follows, quite closely, the plot of Ian Fleming’s first spy novel.  CR works because the previous Bond movie, Die Another Day (2002), was so ridiculous and over-the-top and wrought with clichés that even the most fervent Bond fan (i.e., ME) had lost respect for it.  Now, the Bond franchise has been dormant for a few years, due to the implosion of MGM, and if and when they decide to make a new one, even if Daniel Craig does not star, it should certainly not be a rehash of Casino Royale.

The only other time I can remember this working is when, after eight years, they rebooted the Batman franchise, going from the campy Joel Schumacher world to the realistic Christopher Nolan one. In both cases, time had passed and the public had grown tired of the stories that were being told.  Also, in both cases, the “reboot” resulted in a movie that hadn’t been made yet.  With the exception of the 1960s spoof, Casino Royale and James Bond’s first mission had not been made into a film, and we’d never seen what was essentially Batman: Year One on the big screen.  This point, I think, is integral to the success of reboots, if they must be done at all.  Now, three huge comic book commodities are being rebooted, all but remaking films that are less than ten years old.

He couldn't possibly be any whinier than Tobey Maguire.

Spider-Man 3 was shit, completely and utterly; Sony was content to make a fourth film, but couldn’t agree with writer-director Sam Raimi about anything.  So, instead of just getting a new creative team to make another Spider-Man, they decided it was necessary to do the first film over again, retelling the origin but in a new “film continuity.”  This phrase has become the bane of my existence.  Nobody can just make a movie using popular characters; everything must have its own continuity, which is apparently particular to that director.  The original string of James Bond films simply continued and changed organically over the years, despite changes in lead actor and director several times.  People know who James Bond is; they don’t need to be continually reminded every time the face changes. As for Spider-Man, I don’t need to see him get bitten by the radioactive spider again, especially not when the Raimi/Maguire version is so fresh and so clean-clean in my mind.

It has also recently been announced that they’re rebooting the Superman series helmed by Zack “Slow-Motion-is-Why-I-Exist” Snyder.  Superman is another character that everyone knows. You ask any kid who Superman is and you’ll get very near the complete history of the character from Krypton to Metropolis.  Granted, Snyder will need to distance his film from Bryan Singer’s think-piece of a superhero movie, Superman Returns, but it’s an unnecessary redundancy to include the basics.  There’s also been a goddamn TV show on the air for ten years talking all about the young alien’s formative years.  The subject has really been done to death.

This brings me to the new, weep-inducing announcement involving my beloved Batman.  It was announced back after 2008’s The Dark Knight was such a global phenomenon that Christopher Nolan only wanted to do one more film, rounding out his trilogy and putting his take on the iconic superhero to bed. Great, fine.  The Dark Knight Rises hasn’t even finished being filmed and already Warner Brothers’ exec Jeff Robinov says, “We have the third film, but then we’ll have to reinvent Batman.”  Why!?!?!?! The public knows who Batman is, they’ve just seen two (and will soon see a third) films about the character, and, while Nolan’s series takes place in a “realistic” world, we don’t need to see it all from the beginning again just to establish a new “film continuity.” Start in the middle somewhere. I know it’s difficult for studio executives to believe, but people are smart enough to figure out what’s going on without seeing the beginning every time it looks slightly different.  These are indelible characters who at this point are part of the cultural lexicon; there doesn’t need to be another beginning.

One reason mentioned in Empire’s article is that WB wants to make a Justice League movie, and Bale’s Batman wouldn’t fit in that world. Okay, that’s a good point, he doesn’t, but that doesn’t necessarily precipitate a need for a refresher course on the character’s origins.  I know Warner and DC are trying to capitalize on Marvel’s growing Avengers property, and the main heroes are getting their own origin movie before the team-up flick comes out, but no one knew any of those characters from films prior to the first Iron Man. There doesn’t need to be a young Batman and a young Superman just because all the other characters are young.

For anyone who cares, and I know no one does, here is how I would do Justice League: You have origin movies for Green Lantern (done, out this summer), The Flash, and Wonder Woman which would establish their ethos and backstory, then the actual Justice League film would include the three of them, introduce Martian Manhunter and Green Arrow (and possibly Aquaman… if you wanted), and have older Batman and Superman appear without much mention of their pasts, representing the elder heroes.  Superman could try to recruit the other heroes and the last to join would be Batman because, well, he’s a standoffish dick a lot of the time.  This way, you begin and end the “teaming up” portion with the most well-known of the bunch and leave the bulk of the action to the newbs.  It doesn’t impugn the new characters, nor does it re-hash older characters, unnecessarily bogging down the film.  There; If anybody at WB reads this and likes the idea, I can have a script written in a month.

For fuck’s sake, Hollywood, show some backbone and for once don’t simply rely on retelling already well-tread stories for the sake of the audience you apparently don’t know well at all.  In this age of Netflix, Amazon, and, frankly, movie piracy, the target audience for superhero films is incredibly cine-aware, if not fully cine-literate.  They’ve probably seen all the other films ever made featuring X character and could probably tell the studio more than they ever wanted to know about the history of the franchise.  But, as always, the bottom line is the almighty dollar. I’m sure the studios would remake the same movie every year for ten years if they thought it’d make them some cash. This announcement means that The Dark Knight Rises will be coming out to DVD and Blu-Ray around the time the reboot will hit theaters. Hardly any time to let the thing sink in, is it?  Superhero movies will make money, and retelling an origin is a quick and easy way to make a boatload of cash, even if it means shoveling dirt on something that hasn’t even gone ripe yet.

[TDW via GeeksAreSexy]