It stands for Re-Volting

As problematic as the "urban remake" trend is in Hollywood, there's one thing worse: when the urban remakes subsequently get made again with white people back in the leading roles. Okay, the new Robin Williams vehicle R.V. may not be a direct remake of Johnson Family Vacation; it will probably rip off Vacation as much as the latter did, but it's not like Hollywood couldn't come up with two independent ideas that shitty. Incidentally, didn't you think we'd passed the point in time where the words "Robin Williams vehicle" could still be used in that order and make any sense? Though we've certainly passed the point where such words would be considered appealing - right around Patch Adams, I think.

When I first saw that this film existed I thought, "Great, an excuse for Robin Williams to mug like a maniac." That might actually be preferable to the real film; Williams' insanity is occasionally amusing, whereas the trailer is a black hole from which no comedy is allowed to escape. Williams' last starring role in a full-out comedy was in 1997's Flubber, so it may just be that he's forgotten how exactly one makes other people laugh (not that Flubber made anyone over the age of eleven laugh); the comedy here is apparently supposed to be "This family doesn't like each other, and look at their huge RV!" Gold. I'd almost guess it was intended as an inspirational family dramedy if not for the redneck jokes and the scene where the RV's waste system turns into a literal geyser of shit. As opposed to the film, which will be merely a figurative geyser of shit.

R.V. trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

Ocean's 13 prepares to dive

George Clooney wouldn't be a newly-crowned Oscar winner if he didn't almost immediately take up making a movie far below his new station, and I'll be damned if the just-officially-announced Ocean's 13 isn't that film. Obviously it's not surprising that a successful film would have a sequel, even though Ocean's 11 didn't call for one, nor is it surprising that the success of that sequel would generate a third film. The confines of the genre film, however - in this case the "heist picture" - require that the films' plots are all rather similar. Either that or Clooney and company are just trying to make the same film three times and hoping no one will notice, even though the quality is bound to deteriorate each time. If getting Ocean's 12 from Ocean's 11 was like taking a color plate and making a black-and-white copy of it, I expect Ocean's 13 will be like taking that copy and sending it via fax, and then the fax machine on the receiving end is located under a two-ton pile of horse manure.

Ocean's 11 was actually a fun movie, but the worst thing that could have happened was that its stars enjoyed working together. That made the second movie awful because everyone was just going through the motions, probably to avoid getting too tired to attend various all-night poker parties. It's okay to make a movie about how much cooler you are than the general populace if you're actually the Rat Pack, but I thought that kind of gin-soaked lounge-act machismo went out of vogue when the mob stopped owning so many casinos.

Source: Clooney, Pitt to resume scheming for "Ocean's 13" (Reuters)

My basic instinct is not to see this film

I know that Basic Instinct 2 was stuck in neutral in Hollywood for a long time before finally getting made, but has it really been around since the last time "Sharon Stone gets naked" was enough to sell a movie? In the 14 years since the first film was released, Stone has gone from "hottest woman in Hollywood" to "still pretty attractive" to "barely even shows up in anything these days" to "getting older and kind of crazy." Considering how little marketability she seems to have left, it's amazing how desperate the producers were to get her, but I guess you need something to sell the film if you're going to have no other connection to the original; look what severing 99.9% of all ties to the original film did for the sequel to The Blair Witch Project.

Perhaps more troubling is the fact that the plot of Basic Instinct 2 seems remarkably similar to the plot of the first Basic Instinct, except this time it's set in London, the male lead is played by a total nobody, he's a psychiatrist instead of a detective, and Stone is almost 50 years old and has to be shot through three filters and a layer of wax paper smeared with Vaseline. Also, the script is written not by trash-master Joe Eszterhas but rather, based on the trailer, by the James Bond franchise's old innuendo generator, which I think the Basic Instinct producers bought at a yard sale after the Broccolis retired it.

Basic Instinct 2 trailer (Yahoo! Movies)

Scary Movie 4 will be an unholy terror

In what appears to be a continuing quest to force the Guinness Book of World Records to create a category for "Most Absolutely Horrible Movie Ever Made," the Scary Movie franchise is back for more. Including cameos by Dr. Phil, Shaq, and Chingy does seem like a pretty good recipe for utter pain, and just to make sure that this film will make absolutely no sense to anyone within five years at the most, the plot features giant alien iPods and Tom Cruise surrogate Craig Bierko re-enacting Cruise's Oprah shenanigans. The trailer is so bad and the film as depicted within so poorly-done that I initially thought it was one of those "Don't forget to turn off your cell phone" fake trailers they're running these days, but then I realized that the movies invented for those ads all look way better than this piece of shit.

Scary Movie 4 Trailer (Yahoo! Movies)