Wilnervision!

… viewable here.

1. Burma? I thought he was going after The Evil Terrorists in this one.

2. Hey, that’s Julie Benz from “Angel”! Bet she never thought she’d end up here …

3. Watching Ken Howard pray makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as though I’ve stumbled upon a grandparent in the bathroom.

4. HOLY CRAP HE JUST CHAIN-GUNNED THAT GUY INTO VISCERA OMGWTFBBQ!

5. Wow, this is incredibly violent. Like, just spectacularly bloody.

6. Stallone directed it. He’s always let someone else direct his action movies. Does this mean no one else wanted it, or that his success with “Rocky Balboa” has spurred him to greater challenges?

7. Did I just refer to “Rambo IV” as a challenge?

8. “Attacking Soon”. Yup, feeling vaguely uncomfortable again.

The new Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, and because it was just too unpleasant to imagine giving any more virtual ink to “Hannibal Rising” or “Blood and Chocolate”, I rolled back up the schedule a bit and went with “Old Joy”.

I’m told the Sympatico/MSN site gets four million unique viewers. And if even a tiny fraction of them decide to take a chance on Kelly Reichardt’s marvelous little picture — available for rental or sale at a video store near you! — I’ll be very, very happy.

Not as happy as I would be to have this, but still.

I’d heard about this a few months ago, but only just found the video: Werner Herzog is shot with an air rifle or a BB gun during an interview by some off-camera jackass, and handles the incident with something that can only be described as panache.

Great footage — particularly the second half of the piece, when the interviewer tries to play up the shooting and Herzog genially refuses to go along with him (”It was not a significant bullet”), finally laughing it off to change the subject.

Here is a man I would happily stalk through a film festival, just for the off-chance he’d start telling me stories. The guys at the Onion AV Club seem to have felt the same way, posting an entertaining interview with him despite the utter absence of a news peg.

Well, I guess “Rescue Dawn” is coming out in a month or so …

The timbers, they do shiver:”Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” — which, due to a whole bunch of intervening circumstances, I still haven’t managed to see — grossed an estimated $126.5 million over the weekend. (Technically, that weekend is still in progress, since it’s Memorial Day in the US.)

Not a bad take for a movie that runs two and three-quarter hours and therefore can’t be screened as often as, say, “Shrek the Third”. Disney made up for that by booking the picture into 4,362 theaters, the widest release yet attempted.

And yet, some outlets are spinning it downward; David Germain of the Associated Press frames the movie’s failure to beat “Spider-Man 3″ as a disappointment. Never mind that “Spider-Man 3″ is half an hour shorter and was the year’s most rabidly anticipated film, which virtually guaranteed it would have a monster opening weekend.

But hey, whatever. I’m sure Disney’s pretty happy with a $332 million worldwide gross over three days.

Johnny Depp gets a piece of that, right?

Well, happy blogoversary to me.

It’s been a year since I launched wilnervision.com — a pretty miserable year, all things considered, but with some bright spots as well. If you were here at the start, thanks for sticking with me through all the drama; it’s appreciated.

And if you’re one of the fifty or so “unique visitors” who’ve only discovered this in the new year, well … hi! Hope you’re enjoying the posts, too.

I am not sure what the etiquette is for something like this, but props are due to the inestimable Michael O’Connor Clarke for his guidance in getting this whole thing up and online, and for his grace in announcing my new gig with Sympatico/MSN back in February.

Heading out to CTV’s rural studio to shoot that Newsnet hit; again, if you’re near a TV around 1 pmish and want to see me bloviate about the state of them blockbusters, that’s where I’ll be.

So I spent most of the day yesterday disconnected from the interwebs — my high-speed line was unsynchronized with the central node, or some such techspeak.

I did sign on through a dial-up connection, but that’s maddening; with a baud rate of about 44.2K, I was tearing out what little hair I have left while waiting for even the simplest pages to load. How did we ever survive this way? How did we live?

Fortunately, Fridays are the one day of the week that I don’t strictly need ‘net access; my major deadlines fall on Thursday, so I’d already filed everything I needed to file, including this fun little piece for Sympatico/MSN about the fortunes of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” cast.

Oh, and speaking of “Pirates” and all things summer-blockbustery, CTV Newsnet is having me on again tomorrow to discuss the current fortunes of the Great Big Movie. So if you happen to be near a television set on Sunday during the 1 pm hour, flip it to channel 62 and watch me explain, once again, why it isn’t really so weird that millions of people go to see the most exhaustively hyped movies.

As it happens, Adam Nayman and Steve Gravestock made essentially the same case yesterday on CBC Radio’s “The Current”; you can listen to them patiently try to explain the difference between film criticism and entertainment journalism to a strangely uncomprehending Jane Hawtin here.

Not recommended for dial-up users, obviously.

Now that Metro’s new Movies section is up and running, I finally get a little help with the coverage; Chris Atchison and Rick McGinnis will be reviewing a couple of titles every week.

The upside is, when two screening are scheduled opposite one another I no longer have to freak out until someone sends me a DVD (or schedules another screening); the downside is, being a gentleman and all, I wound up seeing “Bug” instead of “Pirates of the Caribbean” on Wednesday morning.

Phooey.

Anyway, here are the movies I did see this week:

“Bug“: Despite strong work from both Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, the essence of Tracy Letts’ claustrophobic stage play doesn’t quite survive the transition to film. (It also doesn’t help that Shannon is a dead ringer for Dwight Schrute from “The Office”.) But in that first creepy hour, William Friedkin does manage to recapture the sense of gathering disquiet we remember from “The Exorcist” — that awful realization that, however things work out, they’re not going to work out well.

“Once“: You say “low-budget DV musical”, I say, “thanks, I’ll go see ‘Norbit’ again”. But John Carney, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova have put together something truly wonderful — a shaggy, genre-busting study of two strangers who forge a marvelous and potentially life-changing connection over a few days, and a few songs, in Dublin.

“Revolucion“: Radio-Canada documentarian Charles Gervais goes to Venezuela and just, like, hangs out and stuff. The result is a rather clumsy look at the Chavez revolution that’s supposedly clear-eyed and balanced, but plays an awful lot like an infomercial.

Also opening this week: “Fay Grim”, “Scenes of a Sexual Nature” and that pirate movie. You can find Chris and Rick’s coverage at the Metro Movies main page.

Today’s post was created on a dial-up connection, by the way. I barely made it.

It’s not like an “Underdog” movie is in itself a terrible idea. The character is interesting (if somewhat one-dimensional) and there’s distinct kiddie appeal.

Leaving out the rhyming, well, that’s just good sense these days.

And getting Jason Lee to supply his voice? Not the worst idea in the world.

But … this is what they came up with? Someone has got to be fracking kidding.

I was going to spend a few paragraphs debunking Sharon Waxman’s New York Times column yesterday, which stitched together a bizarre collection of industry assertions and half-truths to suggest that In the Future, All Movies Will Be Exhibited in 3D … but then I noticed Dave Kehr already has, so you should probably read that instead. He’s much more eloquent than I would have been in taking Waxman’s piece apart.

(UPDATE: Canadian readers will note that the Globe and Mail has reprinted it today, though it’s not included in the paper’s online edition.)

Instead, I will take a moment to bask in the equally bizarre but entirely pleasurable sensation of having been used to debunk The Guardian’s misreading of the failure of “Grindhouse” in John Harkness’ Cannes coverage of the expanded “Death Proof” over at Now.

Did that sentence make sense? I’m not sure that sentence made sense. Kinda giggly from all the link-love.

If you’ve been considering an HD-DVD player in Canada, you’ve probably brought home a few of those Toshiba discs-by-mail coupons … you know, just to take a closer look at the list and play mental Tetris with the list of available Warner, Paramount and Universal titles.

Well, that promotion appears to have expired, but Toshiba’s made it simpler: For a limited time, all three of the company’s HD-DVD players are shipping with three HD-DVD titles right in the box: “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”, “Black Rain” and “The Perfect Storm”.

So, just to recap: That’s six three free HD-DVDs with the purchase of any Toshiba player. But one of them is “The Perfect Storm”.

I suspect this latest giveaway is designed to counter Panasonic’s recent announcement that its new, lower-priced DMP-BD10A player will be bundled with five Blu-ray discs. And I’m obliged to point out that Panasonic’s discs — the first two “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, “Crash”, “The Transporter” and “Fantastic Four” — are rather bigger deals, at least in terms of overall appeal.

I mean … “Black Rain”? Really? You couldn’t have talked Paramount into “Dreamgirls” or “Babel”?

Okay, maybe not “Babel”.