Batson's Blog

I recently brushed up on the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot (now renamed Alien Turtles ). Turns out I haven’t been keeping up on the news very well. Michael Bay (director of the Transformers franchise) is the director and he broke the news on his blog that Megan Fox (the woman he booted from the Transformers franchise) has a spot in the TMNT movie. One has to assume she'll be playing April O’Neil, the dedicated and fearless TV reporter who always manages to get captured. It’s actually not a bad choice. I’m not sure she would have been my first choice, but I can see it working – in an updated, not-like-the-cartoon kind of way. I was watching the first two Transformers movies last week and Fox is a decent enough actress. She may not win awards, but she can get the job done in an action movie. If Bay can revive the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the way he did the Transformers, then Fox may have a couple of box office hits coming her way. Fox being cast as O’N...

They say not to judge a book by its cover. To that, I say: hogwash. Fair or not, if a book doesn’t have some interesting cover art, I usually pass on picking it up for a read. I gotta’ say, from my experience, it usually works. I recently learned the hard way, however, that the same can’t be said for DVD covers. While going through the $5 bin at Best Buy, I saw the Planet of the Apes (the Mark Wahlberg version). The cover art looks pretty epic. A few days and a Netflix DVD later, it was in my mailbox. My initial reaction was surprise. I was kind of surprised at how limited the special effects seemed. Since the movie was made in 2001, I was expecting more. Anything that’s post-2000, I kind of automatically assume it will have some realistic special effects. Then again, it’s a story that is about talking apes. I suppose no amount of special effects will make that look completely convincing. Still, based on the picture quality, it seemed like it was filmed in the 197...