Oh man, I cannot WAIT for the fourth (and final) installment of the Indiana Jones series - “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”! Here is a preview trailer that was just released today:

At least the movie will be better than Star Wars Episode I.

There is a McDonalds near my work that is participating in the RedBox trial run. RedBox is a kiosk that allows you to rent “new release” movies for $1/night. I stopped by last night to try it out.

Even though the selection was small I can not see how this won’t be widely successful. It took me less than a minute to walk away with a DVD, and at a buck/night it competes well with chain rental stores and even NetFlix.

A few suggestions for the company in the future:

• Fix the kiosk interface. Making all of the buttons the same shape and color might have made your fresh-from-design-school intern happy, but it sure as hell makes navigating difficult - who wants to be forced to READ what each button does.
• Have the kiosk create it’s own DVDs. There are several benefits: each kiosk only needs to be replenished with writable DVDs and movies could be distributed across the web (eliminating the cost of manually updating the selection and guaranteeing fresh titles).
• Provide the option to buy “older” DVDs so that more room can be made for new releases.

So apparently I missed a decade-old controversy about Disney stealing ideas from other stories and claiming them as their own: The Lion King is accused of being stolen from a Japanese series about Kimbo the White Lion.

I could cite all of the scenes similarities or even delve into the plot similarities, but I think the visual evidence is interesting enough:

As you may already know I am really looking forward to Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny. I recently stumbled across a new clip and, god willing, the rest of the movie will be this pee-in-my-pants funny:

I love Conan O’Brien, and from what I can tell based on the trailers I may love Borat too. He certainly is entertaining in this little clip:

Holy crap: Tenacious D, the greatest rock-and-roll band in all of history, are coming out with a movie! Two things:

• Watch the Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny trailer, if you dare.
• Check out the (slightly lame) Access Hollywood clip about the movie.

(via Centripetal Notion)

So, Samuel L. Jackson gave me a call on my cellphone tonight. He had a lot of interesting things to say and was quite entertaining. Want to have him call you (or a friend)? Just go here and fill out the necessary information. It’s a very slick way to spread the word about an upcoming movie - viral marketing at it’s best!

Shannon and I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest while on vacation. It sucked. It really really sucked. I can’t get back those two and a half hours of my life, but if I could I would spend it outside the theater warning others to avoid this heaping pile of crap. The only redeeming part of the entire movie was the cinematography; it was a beautiful movie set in interesting places. But everything else was extraordinarily bad.

As always, Ask A Ninja’s resident ninja has some funny things to say about the movie and how much it sucks.

I hope you don’t have much work to do today because once you visit RetroJunk you’ll be occupied for hours. The site presents nuggets of pop culture, from television opening credits to movie trailers to commercials, all free of charge. The shows mostly aired between 1970 and the late 1990s. Some of my favorites:

• Transformers
• Thunder Cats
• Voltron
• Inspector Gadget
• The Muppet Show
• Saved by the Bell
• MacGyver
• 3-2-1 Contact

And this list is only a taste of their 80’s collection; there are two more decades of television and movies to wade through… amazing! Watching these old clips really takes me back to my youth, stirring up memories I didn’t even know I had. Thanks go to Sarah for showing me this impressive addictive crack-cocaine-based site.