Best Cross Promotion Ever?

The blood drive will coincide with the Halloween premiere of the latest title in Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures' "Saw" franchise, Saw IV, which opens nationwide on October 26, 2007.

The Saw "Give Til It Hurts" blood drive has become a key element of the "Saw" franchise, as much a part of the horror hit's annual rituals as its Halloween premiere date. Since the first SAW blood drive in 2004, "Saw" filmgoers have donated nearly 38,000 pints of blood to help save as many as 112,500 lives.

The Saw films are dropping off in quality exponentially, and I found Saw III mostly unwatchable. But this certainly demonstrates that marketing schemes can have a little social conscience.

Seth Rogen + Simon Pegg = Sparkgrass Post

h/t to the Pot. Feel free to mock my mancrushes, but I guess it's okay if my wife is directing me to the links.

Actor Seth Rogen is in awe of British funnyman Simon Pegg - because he can't believe how good his movie Shaun Of The Dead is. The Knocked Up comedian had a similar movie idea to Pegg's 2004 zombie comedy, but was pleasantly surprised when he found out he had been beaten to the big screen by the Hot Fuzz star. He says, "When I first saw Shaun Of The Dead, I thought, 'F**k! F**k those guys!' I'd been thinking of writing a zombie movie about two dudes, and then that came along. I couldn't believe it! Not only are these guys quicker, they're better than me, too!"

I wish Hot Fuzz would come off the LONG WAIT list on my Netflix queue.

Is Ratatouille the best animated movie ever?

Check out Metacritic's top movies. Ratatouille falls right between Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate.

1.	Godfather, The	1972	100
2.	Superman II	1981	99
3.	Army of Shadows	2006	99
4.	Pan's Labyrinth	2006	98
5.	Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb	1964	96
6.	Ratatouille	2007	95
7.	Manchurian Candidate, The	1962	94
8.	Pulp Fiction	1994	94
9.	Spirited Away	2002	94
10.	Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The	2003	94

Even grumpy A.O. Scott gushes:

A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

Courtney made lots of fun of me for being so excited to see this thing. But it's really that good.

Cosmic blogging coincidences

Back in September of last year, I declared I would never go back to the Briarwood Dollar Movies after a series of terrible experiences with rude employees, disgusting bathrooms, and just general poor quality. But I never got around to seeing 300 on a large screen (and that seemed like the sort of movie that would benefit from being seen in a theater), so today Courtney and I sucked up and decided to give the place another try. We stayed away from the folks at the concession stand, held our urine in our bladders, and beside having to strain to understand some of the dialogue, overall we got our two bucks worth.

And then I come home to get the first comment on said post from back in 2006:

GO WIPE YOUR ASS WITH YOUR 9 DOLLAR TICKETS
DUSCHEBAG!

Awesome. Mr "IP Address 76.226.104.83" thoroughly made my day with that one, and wins the "best alternate spelling of a mainstream cutdown" Award.

Ezra on the politics of Knocked Up

Apparently a few bloggers on either side have deemed Knocked Up to be a pro-life movie since Katherine Heigl's character makes a choice not to have an abortion. Ezra volleys masterfully:

The flick is pro-choice in the most literal sense of the term. Katherine Heigl's character receives advice in both directions, and then makes a decision -- a decision the audience may very well conclude is the wrong one. But she has a choice; nothing is forced on her, and the most explicit scene on abortion features an eloquent speech by her mother advising her to end the pregnancy because, at this point, she's not ready, and these are not the right circumstances. Heigl, it turns out, disagrees, but that's a perfectly allowable, and indeed respectable, decision within the choice framework.

Due to my eerily busy travel schedule, it'll probably take a week or two to get to the twilight showing at Quality 16 (the only theater in Ann Arbor I step foot in, for appropriately complicated reasons), but I'm pumped. You see, as my wife can embarrassingly confirm, I was a massively strange fan of Seth Rogen's character on Freaks and Geeks. His appearance in The 40-Year Old Virgin made the movie for me, and now, Judd Apatow gives him his own movie? Beyond my wildest Freaks and Geeks dreams.

I had a huge crush on the quasi-nerd version of Linda Cardellini, completely unable to predict that she'd turn into the hot nurse on ER, the sort of neo-Abby of emergency resident dreams. Lindsay Weir was the archetypal cute high school brunette smart-girl nobody noticed in their apoplectic fit of adolescent tunnelvision, not the Ennis-seducing blonde saloon girl from Brokeback Mountain. So Cardellini's ascent into mainstream hotness makes me uncomfortable in that pimply, meso-pubescent sort of way. I might have been able to manage a coffee date with Lindsay Weir, but Samantha Taggart would be making fun of the awkward medical student to her fellow nurses by the fridge in the conference room. So that paves the clear path for Seth Rogen to be my official favorite Freaks and Geeks alum (a venerable position, indeed). All hail Seth Rogen!

Kumar comes home from White Castle

Dana Stevens seems convinced that the film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's really shitty novel The Namesake won't suck nearly as bad as the book did. Is there nothing that a little bit of Kal Penn idiocy can't save?

To be clear, there are very few books that I love, and very few books that I loathe. Any book within two standard deviations of my personal mean, I generally like a lot, even if I don't love it. The Namesake, I loathed. Maybe it's just from hanging around with too many Indian kids in high school. Maybe it's how Lahiri managed to create a stock character from second generation Indian-Americans, when no stock character really existed to my knowledge. Besides an interesting name, Gogol (whom Kal Penn must desperately save from lameness) is completely uninteresting. If you've ever met a single person whose parents immigrated from India, no matter how boring a person that person might be, that person is more interesting than Gogol.