Saturday Gray
Gray skies, drizzle to rain and back again. It's been slow-going and sticking to indoors today so far. There's no shortage of work to be done inside anyway, and with the price of gasoline these days it's just as well I'm not driving around on impulse. More laundry's rolling (a never-ending battle) and barely imaginable clutter is waiting to be cleared.
If anyone's looking for schlock tv this weekend and has cable or a satellite system, might I suggest the premiere of Man-Thing on the SciFi channel tonight? Everything I've seen about this has been less than complimentary.
Intended for theatrical release, it was done a year ago, I'm told. They looked at the end product and apparently found it wanting. They framed the decision in a way that said they thought the movie was good, but would require too large a promotional fund. It's so thickly cast from actors in Australian TV series that it would likely be star-filled from their perspective, but mean nothing to the audience almost anywhere else in the world. They very well might have sat on it for most of a year in the hope that someone in the cast would have a breakthrough moment into world fame and they could use that as a promotional point.
The Brit crime thriller Layer Cake was a 2004 film having that sort of a second coming launch onto the world stage due both to the director (Matthew Vaughn) getting to take over from Bryan Singer as the next X-Men director, and Cake's star, Daniel Craig, being offered the role of James Bond for a three-picture deal. That, and the success the film enjoyed last year in the UK, enabled them to market it to the US theatre system; when we saw Kung Fu Hustle (a fun, live-action cartoon that's ultimately a morality tale even if star/director Stephen Chow presents his character unevenly) last week that was one of the previews we saw.
Getting back to Man-Thing, this deal, where they sell first-broadcast rights to a cable station and then follow up with a video release a couple months later is something I've seen at least once before, several months ago when USA ran a Stephen King-penned movie called Riding The Bullet. That was another R-rated film, prompting some really clumsy dropping of expletives, giving it a strange audio track with sharp silences between acceptable words. Maybe they'll do that with Man-Thing, too, if they don't do the often more entertaining substitution of nonsense words.
All of that's taking more time than the movie's worth, but I thought I'd mention it for possible laughs.
Time to grab an umbrella and take a walk up to the supermarket for some things.
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