(As recently viewed on home video. Yes, by choice. Yes, I am a sad, sad man.)

A few months ago I got my first HDTV, a nice big 50-inch Samsung plasma.  It's only 720p but it was on sale (since plasmas are being discontinued).

Until recently I didn't have any true HD sources.  I have my PC hooked up to it and it does some silly resolution like 1600x1200 or something, but it's run through the analog VGA port and so not really true HD.  It looks lovely, but it's not as good as it can get.  Also, I don't have a remote control for the damned thing.

Last week I finally went ahead and sprung for a TiVo HD and Verizon FiOS.  Now I have true HD through the HDMI port.  Even at only 720p, it's still excellent.

I saw Harry Potter and the Endless Franchise the other day.  (Can you remember a time when we weren't watching Harry Potter movies?  Can you imagine a time when we won't be?)  I don't want to review the movie, really, except to note that it's one of those middle-of-a-series movies where plot threads are mainly carried forward and nothing is really resolved; if you haven't been paying attention to the whole series none of it will make the slightest sense; and even though I'd read and enjoyed the book I spent most of the movie slightly bewildered and confused anyway.

I may have been more addled than usual, though, thanks to the movie trailers preceding the main film.  The previews were for some remarkably adult, violent movies, including 2012, the upcoming end-of-the-world flick starring John Cusack (was Nicolas Cage too busy doing Knowing?) from the overwrought forge of Roland Emmerich; and also a version of Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. as the great detective and Jude Law as Watson, which casting makes it sound awesome, except judging by the trailer someone decided, for reasons entirely unclear to me, to make Sherlock (not to mention Downey) into a martial arts action hero.

All of which is bad enough, honestly.  But what really got to me is this new style of trailer I've been seeing far too much of lately.  I'm guessing that, in a world where the In a World Guy is dead, and anyway where he spent the last decade or so satirizing himself (and being satirized), in that world we need some new movie trailer cliche we can have beat into our foreheads, and this is it:  The Blink BOOM Trailer.

That's where we get a quick shot, usually of something supposedly unspeakable happening, and then a rapid fade to black while the soundtrack goes BOOM!  This is followed by another quick shot, rapid fade, BOOM!  Over and over.  It's like being hit in the head with a bat repeatedly.

I'd rather the movie studios just hire a really big scary guy to come into the theater and say, "If you don't go see Roland Emmerich's latest masterpiece I'M GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS!"  Because, whether I did or didn't go see it, the experience would be less painful than the Blink BOOM Trailer.

I love film music. Love it. One of the first LPs I ever bought with my own money was a John Williams soundtrack (although I'm embarrassed to admit which one.) I'll often buy soundtracks to movies I haven't seen or have no plans of seeing anytime soon. Carter Burwell's score to Twilight, for example. 

So it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before my collaborator Joel Mathis and I did a podcast about movies and their soundtracks. We had a lively and wide-ranging discussion this weekend with Washington Times critic/Denver film maven Christian Toto and Fistful of Soundtracks host, blogger and fledgling comics writer Jimmy J. Aquino. I read Toto's reviews religiously and I've been a fan of Aquino's Internet radio show for years, and so it was a real treat to talk to them both. Among the topics we discussed:

• Whether Drag Me to Hell is suitable for toddlers and why Sam Raimi should be admitted to the Overrated Artiste Club;
• How the symphonic tradition up and moved to Hollywood and whether soundtracks deserve more respect than they get;
• Why Ed Asner should be made into an action figure and Walter Matthau was a great if unlikely action hero;
• Who deserved to get the Matthau role in the upcoming Taking of Pelham One Two Three remake;
• "And much, much more!"

Alas, none of us had seen UP when we recorded this episode, but if we had, I might have confessed to bawling through half the movie. Because I'm a sap. But I would also have made the point -- as if it really needed to be made -- that much of what makes UP so memorable and poignant, especially in the film's opening scenes, is Michael Giacchino's score. Giacchino, of course, gave us the music to the Star Trek reboot. And he also did the soundtrack for the upcoming Land of the Lost. (Ah well, two out of three ain't bad.)

After you've listened to the podcast, I hope you'll visit What Would Toto Watch and A Fistful of Soundtracks. And graphic novel fans may want to check out Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, which feature's Aquino's story, "Sampler."

Up is really, really good.  Go see it.  I cried.

So I saw this fan trailer for “Green Lantern” on YouTube, which is basically an “Oh, Nathan Fillion, you’re so heroic!” love letter, and to each their own, but man, oh man, please do not make “Green Lantern” as the cult of Hal Jordan’s personality.

Comic movies as origin stories are played out and boring, and I really think any Green Lantern movie should take a cue from J.J. Abrams’ rebooting of the “Star Trek” franchise, toss all eleventy-billion decades of backstory out the window — fanboys, simply knowing all this minutiae is reward enough — and make a straight-up action flick. Call it “Lantern Corps” And make it thusly:

Hal Jordan (Dennis Quaid) and Guy Gardner (Bruce Campbell, playing the comic relief for sure) are tasked with training Earth’s two newest Lanterns, Kyle Rainer (Josh Hartnett) and Jon Stewart (Tristan Wilds). Kyle is, of course, an artiste and super-sensitive and oh, how he sees Hal Jordan as a respected father figure. Jon is straight out of the stint in the Marine Corps he planned on using to pay for architecture school. He is not so jazzed to be a Lantern, and unfortunately, Hal doesn’t know how to get through to him.

Even more unfortunately, Hal doesn’t get a chance to figure it out, because Sinestro (Clive Owen) kills him. All the new recruits know is that Sinestro was the guy who trained Hal. And if Hal couldn’t take his old teacher what chance do they — incompletely trained by the perpetually hung-over Guy — stand?

And so the movie unfolds. Extraterrestrial Lanterns come in to help out (including Kilowogg, as played by Duane Johnson), Kyle keeps his girlfriend from getting stuffed in a fridge, Jon eventually comes around because he’s secretly one hell of a guy, there’s a big battle with Sinestro, and at the very end — we have two new Earth Lanterns who have managed to hold off Sinestro Corps. Perhaps there’s an Easter egg at the very end of the movie where we see both Lanterns walking into a Justice League meeting.

(The sequel gets called “Green Lantern” and it tracks Kyle and John’s falling out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

My main point here: a movie is not a comic book. It’s not a validation of years of fandom and storytelling, it’s not a multimillion-dollar valentine to the fewer than one million people who read comics in the U.S., it’s not a chance for the self-reinforcing nature of fandom to impose its taste on a wider audience. It’s not repeating the same old story over and over again. A movie is a chance to pick up some of the best beloved aspects of a story from another medium, and to make them dance within the confines of a finite running time, gilded by the sheer gigantic scope of special effects.

So let go of the past. You have nothing to lose but your inherently contradictory continuity.

I used to watch “Siskel & Ebert,” and later “Ebert & Roeper,” religiously. Not because I was ever a heavy moviegoer, but because I was curious about what what going on in the popular culture and I wanted to know what movies to rent when they came to video. Later, after welcoming two babies into my family, watching a show about movies became a nice escape from the cold reality of many years without any movie-theater viewing whatsoever.

When Ebert left the balcony due to surgery complications that robbed him of his ability to speak (but not write — he’s still reviewing movies and even blogging), I kept on watching. Ebert’s partner, Richard Roeper, had grown on me. And I still needed to know about the movies that were arriving in theaters.

Recently the Ebert & Roeper train came to an end, their program altered by its distributor into a movie-slash-entertainment plugfest hosted by two gibbons. As I removed the show from my Season Pass list, I mourned a little bit.

So here’s the good news: I’ve found a replacement. “The Rotten Tomatoes Show” on Current TV isn’t the same show as Ebert and Roeper’s show, not by a mile. It only covers a handful of movies a week, and it’s a week late in covering them. And yet, I love it.

Here’s how “The Rotten Tomatoes Show” fulfills me: It’s an half-hour show about movies that fills me with knowledge about the latest releases while keeping me entertained. Hosts Ellen Fox and Brett Erlich are smart and funny — and Erlich’s penchant for wearing classic “Real Genius” t-shirts suggests that he is a man with impeccable movie taste. (That’s International Order for Gorillas up there.)

The show itself works like this: The hosts watch three new movies, and solicit video comments from the users of RottenTomatoes.com and Current TV. Each review, a montage of the hosts’ and viewers’ comments, encapsulates the movie pretty well, and many are laugh-out-loud funny. When all is said and done, the show also reveals the movie’s final Tomatometer score, indicating the critical consensus for the flick. In addition, there are reviews of new DVDs, reviews in haiku and DVD form, and a weekly list on silly topics like the best monsters or best car chases in the history of film.

So… smart and funny people talking about movies? I’m sold. Is “The Rotten Tomatoes Show” going to change the world? No, no it’s not. But as a replacement for the late, lamented “Ebert & Roeper,” It’ll do nicely.

(“The Rotten Tomatoes Show” premieres Thursdays at 10:30 on Current TV, located on DirecTV 358, Dish Network 196, and Comcast 107, and then repeats endlessly throughout the week.)

As if there aren't enough reasons to worry for the state of civilization, Fast & Furious managed to have the best opening weekend of 2009 despite being such an obvious retread of the first not very good movie Universal couldn't even invent a new name for it. It beat out the equally obviously mediocre Monsters vs. Aliens, the main purpose of which seemed to be furthering the experiment to calculate, to the third decimal place, how quickly Seth Rogen can wear out his welcome. And that film topped Watchmen's opening weekend. At least one movie's strong opening makes some kind of sense: Who didn't want to see Billy Crudup naked?

All of this horror pales, however, if you give in to your curiosity and visit Box Office Mojo to see that the top domestic gross taken by any film this year so far is $143 million or so for Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Which can only mean there's more Kevin James in our future.

Unfortunately, Kevin James' particular brand of mediocrity has been found to penetrate even the most robust bomb shelter, so this Apocalypse will be unpleasantly complete.

Speaking of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I found out that the Blob is being played by Kevin Durand. You probably remember Durand as the bad-ass mercenary from the fourth season of Lost. What you probably don't remember is Durand being enormously fat. (He's apparently really tall, though.)

This bothers me. Couldn't the producers find an authentically fat actor to play the Blob? I can't believe no one was available. Having a mesomorph play one of the few superpowered ectomorphs is insulting to fat people everywhere; they might as well get Sylvester Stallone to play Luke Cage in blackface.

It's the sad fate of fat actors in Hollywood: Sure, they're fine to play the bodies of fat characters in movies like Shallow Hal and Norbit, but as soon as we need a face, we're getting a real thin actor in there, like Gwyneth Paltrow or Eddie Murphy. How crappy must that be, to have your body used as the cellulite-ridden jiggly butt of a movie full of jokes with someone else's head stuck on it? Your thighs and gut put on a great performance, but keep your fatty face to yourself, meatball! Then there's Simon Pegg starring in a movie called Run Fatboy Run. Simon Pegg is not a fat boy. How did he sit next to Nick Frost for at least two movies and still think he qualified for the fat guy role?

And does anyone besides me remember Dom DeLuise in Fatso? I saw a few minutes of that movie on some obscure satellite channel a few months ago and was horrified to discover that I'm at least twice the size DeLuise was then, and that I'd kill to be as small as he was. He'd probably kill, too, considering he's about nine hundred pounds these days. Did DeLuise retire or did his craft services costs get too high?

Is that why they didn't get him to play the Blob?

Yesterday I was in the studio I share with Reilly Brown, erstwhile Cable & Deadpool penciller, and Chris Irving, comic book writer. Reilly said something about the upcoming movie Wolverine having been pirated and already released online, and both Chris and he were saying things like "What kind of jerk would do such a thing?"

I jumped in because, with these guys, I'm not afraid of sounding like an idiot. They already know I'm an idiot. "Who cares?" I asked.

Reilly's opinion is that now the movie's box office will be ruined. "Most comic fans have seen the trailers already and know it's going to suck, so they're only going to go so they can see how bad it is. And now they won't have to, they can just download it."

"And think of all the creators who worked on the movie, what about them?" added Chris.

As far as that goes, I'm pretty sure all the gaffers and best boys and hot-gluers got paid already.

As far as Reilly's point, though, I think it's amusing, because I'm a comic fan, and an old-time X-Men collector, and this is the first X-movie I've actually been interested in seeing. Comic fans of my acquaintance really liked the first X-movie, and the director Bryan Singer gained a lot of cred in comic circles -- where he was even forgiven for the aggressively mediocre Superman Returns -- but about the best I could say about it was it was better than I expected. Since I expected it to be the worst superhero movie of all time, this isn't saying much. The second X-movie was less good, and I never bothered with the third one. I just didn't need another two hours or so of underlit cranky mutant angst and blurry CGI, not even for brief shots of Rebecca Romijn essentially naked.

But Wolverine looks pretty cool. Not, you know, great or anything. I mean, isn't Liev Schreiber just too limp-wristed and sensitive an actor to pull off a feral villain named for a giant prehistoric carnivore? Maybe part of why it looks good to me is none of the characters aside from Wolverine had really gained prominence before I stopped collecting. Chris said, "I really want to see them do Gambit well." Who? Name rings a bell. Wasn't he one of the New Mutants or something Art Adams used to draw? Do we give a crap about him now?

In any case, I can't imagine the pirated version making a difference to the movie's bottom line. If anything it might help by generating even more buzz, although the damned thing's being marketed so strongly I can't imagine squeezing any more out of it. Still, Reilly eventually became sanguine about the financial damage: "Fox deserves whatever it gets for how the movie ruins Deadpool."

Who?

You may have heard that in March, the movie “Watchmen” came out. And comic book geeks everywhere had a great, big freak-out. As did the unsuspecting public who walked into the film expecting to see a quirky romantic comedy about night watchmen.

We’re on the geeky side. Which is why we ended up debating the merits of “Watchmen,” in film and in graphic-novel form, on our little private mailing list that you aren’t invited to. Here’s a glimpse into the discussion.