Abram Sauer Online

Proving that the new Predator film (Predators?) is missing the point entirely is the sneak peak over at the film’s site. In addition to starring Adrian Brody (?!), producers have gotten creative with the Predators themselves, adding more creatures like what I assume is Predator’s dog Fido, below:

Part of the attraction of the first film was that it was a lone creaturethat was picking off the toughest, most beefed-up American heros ever. And using stealth to do it. Their guns and brawn were pointless in the face of this myserious enemy. And in the end it was intelligence and cunning, not muscle, to defeat it.

Red Box movie rental stations are great. For $1 per day you get a recent release. Unlike Netflix, which appears to have so many users now that the “Long Wait” tag is basically the default setting for any newly released film anyone might even be remotely interested in seeing. Red Box though: It’s fast. Economical. Efficient. Easy. So I expect they will soon be somehow removed by the film industry.

One enjoyable detail of Red Box is the knock-off B films meant to capitalize on popular current releases. Right now there is a film floating around in there titled “Alice.” Alice is no total shitburger though. It stars Tim Curry and Kathy Bates as the Red Queen.  It appears to have been some kind of TV show that was shown on the SyFy (Sci-Fi) channel. So how does it stack up?

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After the Tea Party wins control of the Senate on a platform of education reform, here is what will probably become a historically accurate image of George Washington fighting a tiger.

After the jump, in its full glory:

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Remember when The Wolverines were favorably compared with the mujaheddin? I wonder if after they were victorious and drove the Russians out they instituted some kind of draconian rule based on literal interpretations of ancient religious texts? Guess we need a sequel.

Related: Rambo III has the greatest action film finale ever.

Student newspaper The Badger Herald recently made the very stupid decision to run a Holocaust-denying ad on its website. The editor’s defense? “As much as I hate what I think Bradley Smith [the man who bought the ad] was trying to say in that ad, and as much as I hate what the Holocaust deniers are saying, they do have a right to say it.”

Um… I see a fine future for this Jason Smathers fellow; In the current climate who doesn’t want an EIC who will take any amount of ad money for any crazy thing?

Following last year’s “East Coast Jewish Honeys” rap, the University of Wisconsin-Madison student body is quickly redefining the campus from a hotbed of crunchy hippie liberal idealism to one of cultural intolerance and antisemitism. That’s not going to help property values.

Full Disclosure: I wrote various (terrible) articles for The Herald’s competition “The Cardinal” years ago just before the Cardinal, the “commie” student paper, went bust after a century.

A while ago I took a look at the Righteous Kill watch product placement screw up and noted how watches, in general, make for bad product placements.

It appears Breitling not only seems to not care about this but also, with help from John Travolta, has taken bad watch product placement to a whole new level. And, despite my earlier claims about why watch placements are bad — “The brands don’t show up and even when they do they are onscreen for such a short period that there is just no way an audience is going to leave the theater an hour later remembering if Capt. Awesome wore a Seiko or a Swatch.” — Breitling has engineered a plan to help audiences recall its brand. Too bad the plan sucks.

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Three is a trend, right?

While the health-care debate rages crawls on, one thing seems to be clear: Everyone from “The people” to politicians are in agreement that doctors are a problem. Either they are too greedy or they are too clueless and out of touch with real patient needs or they are incompetent, slowlky killing us all one mistake at a time. So it’s a great time to make shows focused on the real heroes of health-care, nurses.

And to make the nurses look more heroic and competent, doctors are being played off as arrogant, dismissive imbeciles whose lack of knowledge about medicine is killing people left and right. (One line, in response to a patient who asks what the nurses are good for, from the nurses on the show Mercy: “We protect you from the doctors.”

Trailers for the upcoming nurse-centric NBC show Mercy, Edie Falco’s project Nurse Jackie and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Hawthorne all, to some degree (Mercy is the absolute worst), play off the audience’s already-held beliefs about doctors being absolute shits. Part of this doctors-as-the-problem comes from the recent docs-in-pop-culture shows like Grey’s Anatomy, which, working on a CSI-level of misinformation about a profession, lead audiences to see doctors as self-absorbed jerks more concerned with their lack of orgasms than their patients’ mortality.

Gone are the days of ER, when nurses were capable and so were the doctors.

Sick people, and even healthy people, generally fear doctors because they (the doctors) have all the power in the relationship. Meanwhile, nurses seem more “like you and me.” Kind of like how George Bush was, you know, not one of those wonky eggheads; he was a guy’s guy. Nurses, likewise, are the ones you’d like to have a beer with.

Stupid doctors.

You know that scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button where Ben and the girl realize they are at that very second the same age so they take a moment and are all “we’re passing each other exactly right now.” *MEANINGFUL PAUSE*

Well, if you are a 30-something year old father not totally devoted to fitness but also not a slob, there is a moment when your child is about 13 months and you look at his/her body and then at yours and you realize…. *MEANINGFUL PAUSE*

After pouring over literature, message boards and talking with proponents, it’s challenging not to see those who carry a handgun as dweeby 15-year-old kids who carry a condom everywhere. They’re “prepared,” “just in case,” because “you never know,” “it could happen.” Equally, they both seem to fantasize about situations when they might actually use it. It’s this way that some CCWers emphasize rare or unlikely “tactical” scenarios that will never materialize that make it a test for a rational person to take the movement seriously. And yet, the effort should be taken seriously because the driving force behind much of it is a genuine desire to be safe and protect oneself because “the system” is failing at this responsibility…

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You can analyze and meta-enable yourself into a fake tan with MTV’s Jersey Shore for all I care. The appeal of that show is one-dimensional no matter how many three-syllable words used to “understand” it. There is another show on MTV though that is unpredictable, tragic, uplifting, poignant and is appealing in many of the deep ways people pretend Jersey Shore to be: Teen Mom. And there is no more tragic a clown than Teen Mom’s lumpy lover and dunderheaded bad father but good guy, Gary.

Deep down inside I think a lot of guys, maybe myself included, are a little more Gary than we would like to admit. Gary is just the realization of all of those qualities the rest of us dudes manage to repress. He’s a bit of what George Costanza would be in real life and removed from the self-conscious fish tank of New York. Slob. Attention-span-less. Dopey. Easily distracted. Temperamental. Longing.

Ultimately though,  Gary is a decent romantic and probably a good guy at heart. He just desperately needs a tune-up… like so many of us.