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Show Diversions 01 Pre-Emgtive v) Critics '300' "300" is what other movies wish they could be. Last week I did a pre-emptive review of "Wild Hogs" which outlined every reason why "Wild Hogs" is everything that is wrong with the film industry. On the other end of the spectrum, "300" is everything that is right about the film industry. After seeing "Sin City", 1 thought nothing could top this movie in visuals, but boy was 1 wrong. "300" looks like a visual feast, taking everything that made "Sin City" look amazing, and adding vibrant colors. What else could you want? The visuals aren't the only thing that is breathtaking about this movie. Imagine 300 soldiers facing countless armies, essentially sacrificing themselves tor the city they so dearly love. Now that's an underdog story, and we all love those. I am more excited to see this movie than I was for "Sin City," and I was extremely excited for "Sin City." I pre-emptively love this movie. By Aaron Peck/aaronpeck@cc.usu.edu 'Premonition ''Dead Silence' iT l; like David Letterman. And there's nothing I like more about David Letterman than Ventriloquist Week. It's as simple as it sounds: David Letterman, a week of ventriloquists, and more fun than you can shake a stick at. "Dead Silence" ruins that like halitosis ruins a first date. I can imagine a few people that I'd like better tongueless, but the dolls who are doing the de-tonguing in "Dead Silence" don't seem to discriminate much. Of course, with wooden eyes, who can blame them? The idea of a dead ventriloquist with a vendetta is pretty scary, but this movie has a serious issue at its root. Who came up with the idea of 100 dolls buried with their ventriloquist who "come back to life" to kill people? Things that were never living can't come back to life. The dolls don't seem to appreciate that little bit of irony, however, because they still claw themselves out of their little doll coffins and start ripping tongues out. Of course, with wooden brains, maybe they just can't figure it out? 1 like a scary movie as much as the next guy, but for ruining Ventriloquist Week and for the forest that was undoubtedly cut down to make the wooden eyes-, brains and horror, I pre-emptively hate "Dead Silence." By Zach Pendleton/zpendlton@cc.usu.edu Monday: Sandra Bullock wakes up to a normal day of trying to restore her career. She decides to make a deeply emotional movie full of dramatic acting, smart writing and award nominations. She will finally have the chance to truly show her acting talents. There will also be a scene at a beach. Tuesday : The director comes to a hard realization that Bullock will never look as good in a bikini as she did in "The Net." Instead he makes a trite pseudo-thriller about how Sandra gets tossed through time trying to stop her husband from being killed. • Wednesday: A monkey will go to the dentist. Nobody is really sure if it's related to anything, but we have a feeling it might be. Thursday: Sandra Bullock's career officially dies. Friday: The film opens. The average American who can't follow the plot of a normal thriller will have no chance to understand one that messes with time. On the way out of the theater they will all claim the ending was obvious. Saturday: No one will every speak of this movie or a fully clothed Sandra Bullock ever again. Sunday: The monkey gets the bill. Today: I preemptively hate this movie. • -by Steve Shinney/steveshinney@cc.usu.edu The pre-emptive critics write knee-jerk analyses of upcoming films based solely on hearsay, advance publicity and — most importantly — movie trailers. They have not seen the movies. HEROIC TV From page 5 Hustle & Flow' writer hits nerve with new film BY TERHY LAWSON mysterious connection to many of the show's key players, provides the series with an emotional core and some of the first season's most heartbreaking moments. But while "Heroes" represents the finest comic-to-television outing on the tube right now, it's not the only showcase of small screen superheroics worth watching. When it premiered on the WB in the fall of 2001, "Smallville" achieved the highest ratings that the teen-oriented network had yet to receive, a feat that was recently bested by the premiere of the show's fifth season. While the series that reimagined Clark Kent's teenaged adventures in the rural Kansas town started out strong by incorporating elements from Kent's Silver Age origin story, including his childhood friendship with Lex Luthor, it soon became clear that the Teen of Steel's on-and-off-again relationship with doe-eyed crush Lana Lang and the constant recurrence of "freak-of-the-week" villainy would become the show's Krypton ite. After a fourth season that was mired by an especially weak seasonal arc with witches, the series started to get back on track during a mythos-building fifth season, and the show is currently in its most thrilling and creatively inspired incarnation yet. With the addition Jimmy Olsen (played to quirky perfection by Aaron Ashmore, the brother of Shawn "Iceman" Ashmore) as fanfavorite gal pal Chloe Sullivan's love interest, the assembly of a prototype Justice League thanks to Errol Flynn-inspired, semi-regular Oliver Queen, and Lex Lutnor's actual transformation into the most iconic supervillain around, season six has certainly put the "super" back in the show. —mackp@cc. usu. edu KRT "Have you ever been publicly called a racist and misogynist?" asks film writer and director Craig Brewer. "It's hurtful because you think the work speaks for itself. But some people just don't want to see it." Brewer, a white man from Memphis, went through this with his 2005 movie "Hustle & Flow," starring Terrence Howard as a pimp we root for as he tries to get off the streets and into a rap career. But if that film brought charges of exploitation, they may seem minor compared with what's coming with his follow-up, "Black Snake Moan," which opens Friday. "Black Snake Moan" stars Samuel L. Jackson as an embittered ex-bluesman who finds a busted up, half-naked white girl unconscious near his home in a small, rural Tennessee town. He takes her home, cleans her up _ and chains her to a radiator. "Black Snake Moan" is, in part, an homage to the Southern exploitation movies of the 1950s and "60s, and that's played up in the lurid and intentionally provocative advertising. But Brewer says it also,is about the same things "Hustle & Flow" and his earlier, little-seen movies have been about, which is the real relationships that develop between whites and blacks in Memphis, and the role music plays in bringing people together. The genesis of "Black Snake Moan," says Brewer, a hefty man with a shaved head digging into a hefty man's meal at Birmingham's Rugby Grill, was a panic attack. "I thought I was having a heart attack on an airplane. The stewardess was so cool, she calmed me down. She told me I was probably just having an anxiety attack. "Anyway, I went to the doctor, and he prescribed some antianxiety meds, and when you first take them, you get a little buzzed, you know. And I had this old blues record playing at the house, like I usually do, and I had this vision, just an image I guess. And it was of this girl in this house attached by this long piece of chain to a radiator. And that was the movie." Brewer was already in preproduction on "Black Snake Moan" when "Hustle & Flow" was released in 2005, having become part of the biggest deal ever made at that year's Sundance Film Festival. The project had been shopped to every major studio in Hollywood. A studio that could have financed the digitally shot film for less than a million dollars outright ended up paying $27 million to acquire the finished product as part of a three-film deal with producer John Singleton. The film's star, Terrance Howard, would be nominated for a best actor Oscar. And to the surprise of everyone _ except Brewer _ the film's theme song, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," won the best song Oscar. "I had made a bet they would win," Brewer says of Three 6 Mafia. "When we were trying to sell the film, everyone told us we would have to get somebody better known to do the music. I was like, 'No, you don't get it; this is about Memphis. These guys are Memphis/" The success of "Hustle & Flow" would seem to have made it easier to attract the talent he wanted for "Black Snake Moan," which Brewer conceived as a kind of deep blues parable, about the power of music to heal wounds and repair the damaged spirit. So Brewer had little problem getting the script to "the only guy I thought has the presence, the authority to truly pull this off," which was Samuel L. Jackson. "Thank God Sam got it immediately. He completely understood what I was after. He also loved blues and shared my belief in blues as the real outlaw music. But he had never played guitar. And I thought I really needed that authenticity of seeing someone playing this music they so deeply feel. So did Sam. He learned all the fingering, all the chord positions for every song he plays. The movie is a fable, but for it to work, it has to feel real." To Brewers surprise, there was no shortage of A-list young actresses who wanted the role of the white junkie that Jackson's bluesman enslaves. But he says he was not inclined to argue when Christina Ricci showed up dressed in this teeny top and wearing blue-green eye shadow. KRT photo DIRECTOR CRAIG BREWER and Justin Timberlake on the set of "Black Snake Moan." Where are you going to spend your Summer and School Year? EARN LOTS OF MONEY LIVING IN LOGAN THIS HAVE YOU SOLO SATELLITE, PEST CONTROL OR HOME SECURITY SYSTEMS! 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