“God Bless America” is a film by Bobcat Goldthwait. Coming soon.

Edit: The MeFi thread describes it as “Falling Down meets Juno,” which might be perfect.

This otherwise unremarkable where-are-they-now rundown of Groundhog Day actors included a bit of a shocker: the male half of the engaged couple Phil gifts with Wrestlemania tickets? Played by Michael Shannon, now getting great notice as, among other things, the freakishly stern prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden on Boardwalk Empire.

There’s a Season 2 trailer out for Game of Thrones.

Toys R Me with Lance Reddick.

Hello.

“I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down..”

In theaters May 2012.

Gumbel is a very odd short film about Bryant Gumbel (sort of, by way of Bronson) that I encourage you to watch. NSFW for language.

(h/t MeFi.)

This fantastic holiday commercial remains one of my favorite SNL Christmas skits EVER.

The the first mini-episode of the aforementioned Danger 5 is online! Go enjoy “The Diamond Girls!”

Tiny Fey and Aaron Sorkin: Walk with me.

For once, Slate does good. Includes several iterations of Henson’s bit, from the original Sesame Street version through a “one-off” from the Ed Sullivan show to the more widely seen Muppet Show version.

The Old Murder House Theater in Austin has produced an ice-capade version of Aliens called Aliens on Ice that appears to be made of pure, concentrated comedy gold. One reviewer said it “might have been the single greatest piece of live entertainment ever performed in front of a paying audience,” which may be hyperbole.

Do not miss this excerpt. I’m serious.

More at MeFi.

HBO’s released a production teaser about the upcoming second season of Game of Thrones. Enjoy. (No spoilers.)

Time-lapse footage of the earth, shot from the ISS with a high-sensitivity camera. Fullscreen is best.

Via JWZ, we discover the glory that is Danger 5!. Do NOT miss the video. Or Danger Monthly.

Just what is says on the tin. Brilliant. Via Mefi.

It’s over at Blackbook.

MTV has put all of Liquid Television online.

In this clip from the Kevin Pollack Show, he plays a Pollack Show game called “The Larry King Game” for nearly ten minutes. What’s the game? Simple: Do a bad Larry King impression, and (a) reveal something personal purportedly about King that King probably ought not reveal and (b) go to a caller.

There are, apparently, lots of other clips of other celebs playing the game, but I have a hard time imagining anybody riffs and improve for 8 minutes better than Gould.

H/T: Metafilter, natch.

So you should probably look at both of these. (SFW; Game of Thrones nerdery insidee.)

This long-form post at Metafilter about one of our favorite 80’s movies sent me looking, but it turns out that while Streets of Fire did get the HD-DVD treatment, there’s no BluRay version yet.

Guess I’ll have to buy a reg’lar DVD instead.

Seriously, though, go check out the MeFi post. It’s a great example of the form, calling out the names associated with the film you’ve probably forgotten, such as

• Starring Amy Madigan, Rick Moranis, Michael Pare, Willem Dafoe, and Deborah Van Valkenburgh, with appearances by Bill Paxton and Mykelti Williamson
• Directed by Walter Hill
• Songs by Jim Steinman (i.e., “the dude who makes Meat Loaf sound like Meat Loaf,” and who is really due a Heathen treatment of his own)
• a fucking sledgehammer fight
• and Diane Lane at 18

What’s not to like? Expect a Heathen World HQ Viewing soon.

Right, so, Mrs Heathen and I have been meaning to cancel Netflix for ages. We hung on for a while on the strength of hopes about their streaming options, but the honest truth of the matter is that their streaming selection blows goats.

Our main “unowned movie” outlet is rental via the AppleTV from iTunes. It’s a great solution; it costs more than physical rental, but there’s no going-and-returning aspect to it, and you don’t have to plan like you do with Netflix.

However, we’ve also noticed something else: The promise of Netflix and related endeavors was that we’d get access to a much larger set of films than any video shop could have. And that remains true, but only if you plan and deal with Netflix’s legacy DVD-through-the-post plan. Rights issues (presumably?) have kept this awesome “long tail” of content off streaming servers, so physical DVDs remain the only way to watch most films. Neither Apple nor Amazon nor Netflix Streaming offer anything close to what you can get on DVD.

So somehow, over the last 10 years, the actual set of movies easily rentable by a humans on a Friday night has actually gotten smaller, since Netflix managed to kill Blockbuster after Blockbuster more or less destroyed the local purveyors.

Even so, we never used them. We’ve had one DVD on hand for literally years. It went back last week. But if we want to watch a randomly selected film, odds are we won’t find it online anywhere legal – and we’ll find ourselves back at Netflix. I assume the problem is rights issues, i.e. copyright shenanigans, which means once again Big Content is keeping businesses from providing something people want.

Well, that and the fact that most people are happy if you let them rent one of a dozen blockbusters, and never have a desire to see an old movie, or a small indie film, or a foreign film.

If you watch only one hilariously creepy video starring Dominic Monaghan as a menacing pervert today, make it this one:

Roger Evans loved Jonny Quest, so he made his own stop-motion, action-figure based version of the opening titles. N.B. that, as there were no official action figures, he had to make his own.

Here’s the original, for comparison.

Something I did not know until I wrote this post: in the original ’60s cartoon, Jonny Quest was voiced by Tim Matheson, whom you may remember from later roles such as “Otter” in Animal House and The West Wing‘s VP Hoynes.

FUCK YOU.

It’s sad, but I must accept the fact that it is impossible for me to see the movies I saw in the 70s and early 80s again. They’re gone. Lucas has destroyed them, and made it clear they’ll never be available again. And I’ll be damned if I’ll give that goatfucker any more money for ham-handedly re-edited versions.

Wire Inspire is a collection of “inspirational posters” using images and text from HBO’s The Wire.

It is completely fucking awesome.

(Thanks again to MeFi for pointing this out.)

Here at Heathen HQ, we’re big on algorithms. Years ago, I worked out a very detailed system to help me decide if I should order a crab cake entree in a given restaurant. Here it is:

1. Am I in Baltimore?

If so, proceed. If not, eat something else. Done!

I’ve developed a similarly finely tuned algorithm to determine if a given TV drama is worth watching on first run. It works across the board, but is doubly effective, by the way, for anything with any science fictiony angles.

Here’s the test:

1. Is it running on a network that has commercials?

That’s it. If the answer is yes, it’s probably going to disappoint you or get clobbered very, very quickly. Genuinely good programming that surfaces on advertisement-driven TV is a complete fucking accident (I’m looking at you, Mad Men). On the other hand, can you imagine anyone but a premium channel doing something like The Wire, Carnivale, Deadwood, or Game of Thrones? No chance. How about Dexter or Weeds? Nope. Pay cable’s batting average is seriously solid. Basic cable? Not so much. Legacy broadcast outfits like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox? Pretty much never.

I think of this every year, when some hopeful type from Geek culture will suggest we have reason to be hopeful about any show produced by one of the legacy broadcast networks (verdict: NEVER — Christ, look what they did to Firefly). If something good DOES happen on one of those networks, I’ll happily pick it up online or on DVD later, but there’s just too many examples of shows sucking outright, or starting good but going south, or being actively screwed by the network, for me to make a point of watching them without some real promise of a reasonable story arc or two.

What’s got me talking about this today? Mostly this news, about how AMC — the network that, thus far, hasn’t fucked up Mad Men — is nevertheless going out of its way to ensure the second season of Walking Dead is nowhere nearly as good as the first:

Just days after AMC trotted out [show runner Frank] Darabont at Comic-Con, who not only revved up thousands Walking Dead fans but also delivered one hell of a season two trailer, the studio allegedly fired the director, producer and writer of the most successful show they’ve ever had. What the hell happened?

And from the linked Hollywood Reporter article:

The show shoots for eight days per episode, and the network suggested that half should be indoors. “Four days inside and four days out? That’s not Walking Dead,” says this insider. “This is not a show that takes place around the dinner table.” That was just one of what this person describes as “silly notes” from AMC. Couldn’t the audience hear the zombies sometimes and not see them, to save on makeup? The source says Darabont fought “a constant battle to keep the show big in scope and style.”

This, of course, comes on the heels of SyFy’s decision to cancel Eureka, which was among their highest rated programs, to say nothing of the broad disappointment with various other offerings this year. The legacy networks and their cash-grabby cable cousins are way, way, way too into shitty reality game shows and throwaway sitcoms to bother with quality television. Thank God for pay cable; it’s the only place on the dial anyone is even trying to make something good.

College Humor presents Game of Thrones as an old-school RPG.

The NYTimes has 14 silent moments with 14 different actors up on its site. Each is fairly short, backed by appropriate music, and exquisitely well shot. Participants include Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Jessie Eisenberg, Natalie Portman, Tilda Swinton, and Robert Duvall. Enjoy.

…holding aces and eights, it’s said, Wild Bill Hickok was shot in the back by Garrett Dillahunt. No, wait. I mean Jack McCall.

Rumors that McCall returned to Deadwood in the employ of Mr Hearst and with a fondness for very expensive entertainment are the conjecture at best.

In 1973, Paul Williams made a memorable appearance on the Tonight Show.

Via MeFi.

(Also, how awesome is it that Johnny Carson has an official Youtube channel?)

The aforementioned awesome “LARPers inadvertantly summon a succubus” film — the with True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten, Peter Dinklage, Summer Glau, and Steve Zahn — now has a trailer. The film is called The Knights of Badassdom. Release “soon.”

I, too, am perplexed.

Just trust me and click. Cast includes:

• Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones)
• Ryan Kwanten (True Blood)
• Summer Glau
• Steve Zahn
• Josh Malina

And as if that weren’t enough, we also get Deadwood’s W. Earl Brown. BRING IT.

There’s a new Muppet movie. I view it, as I view all post-1990 Muppet activities, as an abomination. I’m sure Jason Segal is a nice guy, and I’m sure he’s well-intentioned, but it won’t be right.

I’m obviously not the only one who think so. This piece over at the Awl (pointed out by my friend Christina over on Facebook) really, really nails it. A few bits:

From 1955 to 1990, Kermit the Frog was voiced and performed by Jim Henson. After that, Steve Whitmire, known for his smart-mouthed Rizzo the Rat, took over. Whitmire’s Kermit sounded a lot like Henson’s, but his voice was a little thinner, and his singing more rhythmic and less melodic.

Let me preface my next statement by saying that I know it will seem ridiculous to the casual reader, inflammatory to a good many fans, and downright specious to the expert of rhetoric, but for me watching Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is akin to watching someone imitate a mythic and longed-for mother — my mother — wearing a my-mother costume in a my-mother dance routine. This person’s heart is in the right place, which only makes it worse. “You should be happy,” the person pleads with me, “Look, Biddy! Your mother is not gone! She is still here.” Now, no one would ever do that. No one in her right mind would think it would work. A child knows his mother’s voice like he knows whether it’s water or air he’s breathing. One chokes you and one gives you life. Strangely, I feel the same about Kermit. Whitmire is an amazing performer — especially as the lovable dog Sprocket on “Fraggle Rock” — but, when he’s on screen as Kermit, I can feel my body reject it on a cellular level.

And on the Disney-fication of the Muppets, and their ultimate choice to continue with a non-Henson Kermit:

What if, in 1990, instead of recasting Kermit — something that had been done to Mickey and Bugs Bunny before him — the Muppets had continued on Kermit-less, as “The Simpsons” did after Phil Hartman died. […] Someone else could lead the gang of weirdoes. If a bigger part was in the cards for Whitmire, how about as Kermit’s long-lost brother? How about another nephew? Jerry Nelson’s assertive Gobo Fraggle led a Muppet cast that functioned perfectly well without major roles for Henson or Frank Oz.

It would’ve made more artistic sense than what happened. Instead of an organic personnel shift, Whitmire became Kermit, which wasn’t only a disservice to that character, but also a real disservice to Whitmire. There was no place for him to take the role. If he strays too far from Henson, embodying Kermit with the parts of his personality that weren’t in Henson, nostalgic fans will be disappointed. He can only attempt the same impression over and over. It’s not the kind of art Henson produced. It’s very un-Muppet.

What it is, though, is very, very Disney — not in the original spirit of Walt, but in the style of a corporation that runs on licensing. This is “art” defined as mass duplication, not wonderment. It is the art of selling Tigger toys to millions of people all over the country who have houses filled with Tigger toys.

It’s not all about the Kermit re-cast, but that’s definitely a key point in the whole analysis. Go read the whole thing; it’s worth it (as are, I’m finding, many pieces the Awl runs).

What Would Do Draper Do?

Best part: “Make sure Peggy is weeping.”

How “Ollie Klublershturf vs. The Nazis” was so criminally overlooked at Oscar time is completely beyond me. They even have a category for shorts, for the love of pete.

Oh, go watch it. It’s less than 11 minutes long.

Rob Zombie made a Woolite commercial.

There’s a new Captain America trailer out.

Dear Hollywood: I really hope you didn’t fuck this up like did Green Lantern.

Some of you may enjoy knowing that Babyvamp Jessica is blogging again.

This metareview is pretty much everything you need to known about the completely forgettable superhero movie now in theaters.

If you are as annoyed at that little inbred Joffrey punk as we are after Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones, then this video will make your night. It’s ten minutes long, and includes Zeppelin as the backing track.

David Simon was pleased to hear that Attorney General Eric Holder was a fan of The Wire, and that he wished for another season.

So he’s made an offer:

“The attorney general’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated,” Simon said in an email to the Times of London. “I’ve spoken to Ed Burns, and we are prepared to go to work on season six of ‘The Wire’ if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition.”

Your move, Eric.

You may have heard mention of a beer ad so wonderful that people online have been openly declaring it the finest example of the genre ever.

That is because it is:

“She Texted. We Kicked Her Out.”

The second guy to play Gunsmoke‘s Matt Dillon — and the first on TV — was James Arness, also of note for his role in the original Thing, and for being sadly-also-dead Peter Graves‘ brother.

Arness died today, at 88.

(What I didn’t know: the first guy to play Dillon, who worked only on the radio version, was William Conrad, who later appeared in the 70s cop drama Cannon as well as the TV version of Nero Wolfe and as the latter character in Jake and the Fat Man.)

Nerve notes what Heathen have long noticed: He’s an overrated and very lucky hack.

…but it’s important to remember that, back when Sean Young took these candid Polaroids on the Blade Runner set, she was also crazy HOT.

The ones with her and Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford are perhaps the coolest, along with the weirdly incongruous ones of her with her Rachael hairdo, but 1980s street clothes.

Withnail and Star Wars. Do not miss the followup.

It’s nice to see that some theater owners do understand how to compete with better home theater: give the customer a solid experience, including not just a fantastically curated film selection, but also great food, solid fundamentals, and vigilant protection of the whole experience.

It’s even cooler that the guy TechDirt is using as an example is someone we Heathen actually know, at least tangentially. All Hail Alamo and Tim League!