I'm going out tonight to find a hot chick or two uggos

Ghosts of Mars was originally written as a Snake Pliskin outing, but the studio didn't want another Pliskin movie after Escape From Los Angeles bombed, so Pliskin was changed to "Desolation Jones" and the studio cast Ice Cube in the role because they wanted "an A list actor" to draw the crowds.  Crazy times...  The actress playing the main character in the film wasn't even considered for the part until the original actress who was cast in the role (the fifth choice for the part) injured herself and one of the male cast mentioned his girlfriend was free, so yes, you can go ahead and call this one as an utter car crash of a project, I nonetheless love it to bits.  It's just such a wonderfully trashy b-movie, although reminiscent of other John Carpenter outings like The Fog and Assault On precinct 13.  I'm actually on a bit of a Mars kick at the minute, and this seems like it's a huge homage to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles canon, though the influence of Nigel Kneale can be felt on the edges, too.

The thought of seeing your unwaxed lady parts gave me superhuman strength

From the original novel, the latest film adaptation of Z For Zachariah changes the setting, the age of the protagonists, the personalities and relationship between characters (and thus the story), adds another character, discards the ending - I imagine there's a good chance at this point you're thinking "in which case why adapt the book at all?  Why not make your own entirely unrelated film?" and I have no answers for you there, beyond perhaps the observation that director Jake Paltrow already made this movie a couple of years back and putting the name of a property that predates that movie on this one helps avoid uncomfortable questions.
The whole thing goes absolutely nowhere, seeming to set up multiple strands of narrative that remain both unexplored and unresolved.  It reminds me most of all of one of those admirably competent fan movies based upon Hunger Games or the like that have no resolution, they merely depict some events occurring within the fictional world and then end.  That, I think, adequately sums up the experience of watching Z For Zachariah.  The acting is a bit over the place, with Chris Pine's Caleb - yes, there is a character called Caleb in Z For Zachariah now - eliciting actual laughter from me on two occasions, and I suppose it's nice to see Margot Robbie in something before she becomes overexposed as the sexed-up version of Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad movie and I can never look at her in anything else ever again without my teeth grinding together.

I'm very sorry but I just caught two of my friends doing drugs off this picture of your parents

I suppose I do have an opinion on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, seeing as I have - like many - been waiting the better part of three decades to see it, and it certainly looks like a JJ Abrams entry in an existing sci-fi franchise going by the trailer alone, as what can be gleaned from it simply by looking seems to include a youngish person on a desert planet joining up with an old man from the previous trilogy to go on an adventure in the Millenium Falcon before running afoul of white-armored  stormtroopers who can't hit a barn door led by a black-clad evil Jedi, then some general stuff like X-wings in a battle with TIE Fighters against a backdrop of some kind of huge trench, the youngish person crying over what looks like one of the older characters taking a nap in the dirt in the same locale as we see them encounter the evil Jedi character - I mean, it's all very grandiose-sounding, and as you would hope of something that cost 200 million dollars to make it looks very nice, but is also very familiar and self-referential in the same way JJA's work on the Star Trek reboot was, and we know how that ended up.  Say what you will about the prequel trilogy, but they went their own way for as long as they could before everything had to connect back into the original films.
I am sure it will be just fine and dandy, mind.  I'm sure this will be at least as good as JJ Abrams' Star Trek, and not in any way as terrible as JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness.

A small-headed man of limited means who lost a fight with a chicken

Continuing the Halloween horror marathon, been watching:
The Pack - initially promising b-movie monster flick about a pack of wolves menacing a family - who are also a pack, so it's got levels - that lost me when it descended into predictable jump-scare cliche and the only unexpected moments came when characters or the script did things that were monumentally stupid and illogical even in the context of a slasher flick.  Shot in Rivendell and Parth Galen, it certainly looks nice, but in this day and age this means little in and of itself and the script fails to do anything interesting in the long run.
Lake Placid vs Anaconda - a mash-up of two different monster movie franchises, both of which started out as trashy-but-fun cinema-releases with bankable stars but which of late have been SyFy-funded, becoming increasingly tedious and aggressively poorer viewing experiences the longer they endure.  There are a great many attractive young women in this, in various states of undress, but any enjoyment you might hope to glean from this element is somewhat undermined by their being bumped-off in gruesome but not very inventive ways, making this a continuation of the popular trend of horror fantasy that doesn't seem to like women very much despite plastering their forms everywhere.  There's a bit where two characters sit around talking about teenage girls and laughing at how they like to get tattoos of butterflies on their ankles and pierce their navels and then they laugh at how vacuous such people are, and all I could think of was those teenage girls who cut themselves when their favorite boy bands break up and Twitterati laugh at them for doing so, responding to the confused pain of other human beings with a misplaced sense of superiority.  This is a paradigm for Lake Placid vs Anaconda's problems, in that it likes to pretend that its making fun of the shallow, characterless, unimaginative filmic and televisual landfill that comprises SyFy's output, but it would be a step up if it could only be as bad as that.  This is poorly-made, cheap, and lacking in even a single moment of wit, the equivalent of a sneering yob arguing with you by repeating your words back at you but garbling them a bit when they do so before announcing that they are doing this "because you're retarded."
I'm not saying Lake Placid vs Anaconda is shit, I'm saying if shit could shit, Lake Placid vs Anaconda wouldn't even be as good as that.
Live and Let Die - WHEN YOU WERE YOUUUUNG AND YOUR HEARRRRRT WAS AN OPENNNN BUWUK... an always-enjoyable warhorse of a 007 outing this one, despite featuring the best Bond YES YOU HEARD ME caps lock sticking a lot today it's often derided for the decision for the franchise to appropriate blaxploitation much as it had other genres, the wisdom being that if you have blaxpolitation with a white lead, you basically have racism.  Particularly in its excesses and casual sexism, blaxploitation as a genre actually shares a great deal with the Bond movies - just watch something like Black Samurai or Black Belt Jones to see what I mean - and so it's actually a more natural fit than many would like to admit.  Eight year old me took it deadly seriously even if viewing it as an anachronistic cartoon was probably the only sensible approach for the eight year old me who watched it earlier today.  Great fun, and I suspect as of this viewing that it may have contributed to my enduring love of wacky chase setpieces, too.

Can't a man eat a giant cheese wheel in peace?

Watching The Twilight Zone, I must say that I quite miss short stories that don't end with a punchline that's a black joke upon the lead player.  Whatever was so terrible about happy endings or lessons being learned that they became so rare, I wonder?  Almost every short story I draw seems to be one of those OH NO THE MONSTER IS ME type things - not that this is a criticism of any scripts I have worked upon in case you're reading this, depressingly long list of writers with whom I have collaborated over the years.
At the sketching/concept art stage of several projects before they all kick off in the near future, probably next week, so back to more waffling about the atterly shackin volume of television I watch in the average week and more bafflingly obtuse screen grabs of which you most likely never see anything of the end product.  Oh lordy I do so need to make a plan...

...when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure

And with today's entry, I clock up my 1000th post on the blog!
I have wasted my life.

Watching: because it's Halloween at the end of the month...
Extreme Ghostbusters Back In The Saddle parts 1 and 2 - I don't think I've ever seen any of Extreme Ghostbusters until this point, but the episodes where they team up with the original characters from the 1980s cartoon-of-the-film seemed to be the ones to check out.  Seems a bit anemic compared to other 1990s cartoons like Batman, Superman, Gargoyles, Invasion America, or even the shallow but eventful Spider-Man and X-Men offerings, with the characters rather thin and the plots a bit messy.  I think it relies on familiarity with storytelling tropes alongside stereotypical characters so the audience can fill in the odd blank in the script from their own viewing experience, and the overall effect is quite charmless.  The visual design also lacks consistency, not helped by cheap animation.
The Snow Creature - a 1954 b-movie picture about some blokes finding an abominable snowman and trying to cash in by returning it to civilization - things go downhill from there.  You can find this on Youtube if you fancy, but it's not really worth it, lacking any nuance or charm and being a cheapo riff on the basic plot of King Kong.
Dark Moon Rising - "I am Dance.  We have literature together."  A film about werewolves with superpowers, including one who shouts out the name of every kung fu move he's about to bust on someone's ass, the most ridiculous thing about it nevertheless remains to be that that it stars Eric Roberts and I still thought it might be good.  When Roberts' character has a Vietnam War flashback in which he is attacked by werewolves, I decided that this may very well be one of the most amazing(ly terrible) films I have ever seen, elevating creative incompetence to levels I would not have thought possible when I awoke this morning.

A 2AM dance-off? There are no winners.

I'm blogging again, which is a mixed blessing because it means that the paying/indie press work has dried up - kind of like that parable in the Bible about how when you masturbate it makes Jesus so angry he strangles a kitten?  It's give and take is what I am saying.  Possibly I should just have said that instead of the masturbating Jesus kitten strangling metaphor.  I don't know.
Watching: Falling Skies WHY AM I STILL WATCHING THIS?  Jesus kittystrangling Christ, it is just terrible - every time I try to review it, I just end up citing tropes it has recycled from decades-old sci-fi shows, and it makes me sad that all I can bring to the table is negativity, because this is still a significant creative undertaking for which a lot of talented people have made a considerable effort to construct sets, assemble the cast and film the story, and yet it is all for naught because so little has been invested in terms of effort or respect for the audience when it comes to the stinking, lowbrowed mess of a script, and rather than commend those that realised this edifice of popular culture for their efforts, all I can say is that I think that all involved deserve to be pissed upon and then set alight.
Graceland - a moronic, infantile show that I have never watched sober, I fear Graceland - a tale of hot undercover twentysomethings infiltrating the glossy world of organised Los Angeles crime - may not be an entirely accurate portrayal of law enforcement, but its dedication to glossiness and thin, easy-to-comprehend characters and motivations does at least have the advantage of distracting me from thinking about death.
Scorpion is a show about an elite team of crimesolving geniuses led by the incredibly unlikeable Walter O'Brien, a fictionalised version of a real-world (self-proclaimed) genius, and while the premise oozes a retro charm tying it to many televised forebears, the modern presentation and reliance on cynicism without self-awareness tends to make me think that (1) the makers are not quite as confident about their television product as they would have us believe and a significant portion of what we are viewing is rote act-mandated plotting resulting in it rarely - if ever - peeking above the parapets of competence, and (2) that we are but a conflation of the preserved thoughts of others, housed within a temporary material frame.