My two most recent COED Magazine articles (“The 8 People You’ll Meet in Your Hometown Bar This Summer” and “The 20 Most Anticipated Movies of 2010“) are getting much kinder responses than some of my previous articles there (people don’t like it when you bash a good movie for the sake of cheap laughs, weirdly).

But two comments posted one right after the other on the “Hometown Bar” article made me laugh:

1. compensary answer says:
   Sat, 13th Jun 2009  12:36 am
   Sublime, bravo.
2. for reals? says:
   Sat, 13th Jun 2009  1:03 am
   “Sublime?” Mediocre, at best.

Thanks guys.

I should mention at some point that yes, a certain bar in Marcellus provided the inspiration for this article.  Still, don’t read too much into it, because some of it I just made up.

I saw Up Friday night and it was terrific.  You know how most family movies are aimed at kids but have a few adult-aimed asides and references so parents don’t get bored?  Up was the exact opposite of that.

Andrea already wrote the review when it came out (she gave it an A); I saw it strictly for pleasure.  You might call it a date night, even, although since my girlfriend and I ate dinner at home, walked to the theater, and used passes to see it, it was a date night that ended up being $0 (which there was much high-fiving over).

A few weeks back, I got to cover the premiere of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian at the National Air and Space Museum.  Got to talk to Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria, Amy Adams, and Ricky Gervais, and I got to stand really close to Robin Williams and Owen Wilson.  It was fun.  Check out the pictures/article here.

-The muzzle was taken off on Friday and I finally wrote my review of Wolverine.  The first half of it is a rebuke to some of the negative reviews it’s gotten, but this time, unlike in my ranty review of Knowing, I actually have a point.

-You’ll notice I’ve tweaked the design here at Screenlancer slightly; I opened things up a bit with more white and consolidated the top-right menu.  I like the minimalism of white.  Every time I try to go fancy with a dark background, I end up thinking it looks too stifled.

-CC2K, a pop culture site I’m friendly with, asked me if I wanted to review an old script treatment for Transformers 2.  I said sure.  It was fun — the treatment bears very little resemblance to the actual movie coming out in a few months, but it was an interesting look at the process.  Read it here.

-I’m not allowed to say anything about X-Men Origins: Wolverine until Friday under penalty of being blacklisted from my press screening list.  Fox has been keeping things very militant since the internet leak.  I may or may not have seen some or all of it today or another day, and it may or may not have been *****************************.

-I added a feed to my COED Magazine articles on the sidebar to the right.  My latest article: some easy but fun jokes about pirates.

-I forgot to mention this at the time, but the L.A. Times mentioned me by name in a blog post about my COED article on the upcoming summer movies “guaranteed to bomb.”  Thanks, respected film writer Patrick Goldstein!

-Seriously, I’m afraid to even mention Wolverine in a sentence.

This is one of only two scenes in The Informers in which Amber Heard (pictured with Jon Foster) is not topless.

I continue to work on back-end coding stuff for TheCinemaSource, which is the main reason you haven’t read a lot of my movie reviews lately.  (We’ve now successfully migrated our interviews and contests sections to WordPress; next step is the movie and DVD pages.)

The secondary reason is that there just haven’t been many interesting movies out lately.  With the summer movie season less than a week away now, that should change.  This coming week I’ll be going to screenings of both Wolverine and Star Trek — the latter of which, I’m becoming slowly convinced, is going to turn out to be one of the greatest creative successes of the summer.

There’s also a great smaller movie coming out in June that you should be aware of — Moon.  It’s a low-budget sci-fi flick starring Sam Rockwell, and the story is terrific.

But before we get into summer mode, you can check out the most recent two reviews I’ve written for spring movies.  The first, just posted yesterday, is for The Informers, a very strange ensemble movie about despicable rich people in early-80s L.A.  (It’s based on a book by Bret Easton Ellis, the guy behind American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction).  And in this case I don’t mean “strange” in a good way…it’s ultimately a pretty pointless exercise in despair, although I really liked the subplot starring Brad Renfro — in his last role before he died of a drug overdose in January ’08.

The second review has actually been up for a while but I never mentioned it on this site — Knowing.  I was one of the few critics in the entire country (give or take Ebert) who actually really liked it.

Finally, also check out The Top 10 Summer Movies Guaranteed to Bomb on COED Magazine, which got almost as popular as the previous article about the Wolverine leak.

When that copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was leaked online at the beginning of April, I was surprised by how many movie sites condemned the leak and called for people not to download it.  So this past Friday I submitted a piece to COED Magazine called “What the Wolverine Leak Means for the Future of Piracy,” suggesting that large-scale movie piracy was finally starting to be seen as a big deal and a bad thing to both the media and the public.

Sometime over the weekend, they must’ve posted the article, because I just checked the site and it’s up, in the “Cover Story” section.

With 60 comments.  And 1380 1396 Diggs, with another 315 comments on Digg’s site.

I’ve submitted a few articles to Digg before, for other websites, but this is the first time an article has really “hit.”  So this is kind of new to me.  And naturally, since the article has an opinion, most of the responses are from people who have the opposite opinion.  I know this is really indulgent, but I’d like to share some with you now:

“Waldo” (sweet name) says: “this article is retarded.”

“jin” (even sweeter name) says: “this is such a bullshit conclusion. nothing’s changed. nothing will change. unless society decides to go gestapo to do it.”

“me” (not actually me) says: “this article is nothing but fearmongering and trying to sway public opinion on pirating. it fails. garbage paid propaganda.”

I thought that one was particularly funny.  The guy sees an anti-piracy article and assumes I’m a paid studio shill.  Trust me, if a studio paid me to be a shill, I’d demand a lot more money than what I was paid to write this article.

“Chris” says: “The person that wrote this does not know someone that has pirated anything and he totally is against it. Having said that ‘If piracy translates into lost revenue, that’s going to translate into smaller budgets and fewer jobs.’ i have heard that before but let me ask this- does Jim Carry need 15 million a movie?”

No.  But budget cuts will not come from Jim Carrey’s salary, I promise you.  (And by the way, how do you come to the conclusion that I’ve never known someone who’s pirated anything?  I still have BitLord installed on my computer, Chris.)

My favorite response was from “Steve Larson”, who actually addressed me by name:

“Dear Michael Dance,
You immediately lose all credibility right off the bat by suggesting that X-Men Origins: Wolverine could potentially be a ‘good’ movie. Buddy, it’s a superhero movie… it’s not art.”

What?  I didn’t say it was art.  By your statement’s logic, no superhero movie can possibly be good?  But wait, Steve Larson’s not finished:

“you claim that people who download pirated movies are immoral somehow…you live in the US right? Guess what, part of the taxes you pay goes toward killing people with weapons, so STFU about morality. Morals are as irrelevant as they are in the eye of the beholder. If you had actually passed your community college intro to philosophy class you would have known this already.”

Darn, I didn’t even take Intro to Philosophy, so I guess he’s got me there.  Of course, I also didn’t go to a community college.

But again, the logic is the best part.  He basically says “You’re not allowed to have an opinion about morality because you live in the U.S.” and then follows that up with “But it doesn’t matter, because once I took a philosophy class that said morals are subjective.”

However, little did I know that Steve had saved the best for last:

“I don’t even know how to respond to this absurdity except to say that you are possibly the biggest corporate tool of a “journalist” I have ever had the displeasure of reading. This explains why you write for COED Magazine, whatever the hell that is. How can you write for an online publication and be so clearly out of touch with people who use computers? How is it even possible?”

Especially since I write for, like, seven online publications, give or take.

At this point, I should explain to the people who love me and don’t normally troll around internet movie sites that the majority of comments about any topic are usually this bad.  The internet’s a bastion for negativity; it comes with the territory.  (Now I know how the editors at Ain’t it Cool News feel every day.)  And I should also explain that I’m only cherry-picking the really negative comments; most of them don’t insult me, and the fact that a lot of people are Digging this article means (in theory) that a lot of people found it interesting.

Knowing so many people are reading, though, I of course started wondering whether or not I could’ve made the article any better.  I still think it’s a decent article, but the answer to that question will invariably be “yes.”  In that sense, it’s a good learning experience. Before I hit “publish,” I’ll asked myself: will I be embarrassed if fifty thousand people end up reading this?