Just the Ticket

First on the list of Slater-ed Releases,  FROM May 21, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #39: Is WWE Worth the Pursuit?),  I turn to Pursued , a fairly recent look at the world of headhunting with Christian Slater. His voice retaining that quality of comic commentary he made famous in Kuffs , but retaining it in a suspense setting nonetheless, Slater plays a corporate recruiter who literally wants your head if you won't be bought. Thus, he always gets his man. A truly good man comes along and Slater finds his job a bit more difficult. As he must intrude on the man's life and privacy and threaten his family, Slater's headhunter gets the surveilance tables turned on him and winds up in a typical suspense-closing, life-ending gunfight/fistfight with his victim. Slater's character and actions have cookie-cutter psycho stalker written all over, and the ending takes a bit more examination and thought than a made-for-TV corporate suspense picture should require, but the concept was sort of o

One thing I forgot to mention last issue, what with all the social commentary and overstuffed turkey talk going on, was that over the holiday weekend, the  Ticketverse   (Just the Ticket, Ticket Stubs, Bring Back the Soundtrack, Dead Parade, Cover Charge, etc.)  passed the 8,000 pageview mark, and acquired another 200-plus posts in the days since. Slither passed the 200 mark, with the God-offal  Heaven  issue still running a close second at 107. Burn Notice  and Spider-Man  have long since been left in the dust by I Don't Know How She Does It  (a shocking 85), which leads Soundtrack 's REM issue by one. Since being brought back to life this year, Bring Back the Soundtrack  has made quite an impact, taking home almost 2% of the traffic between its first three issues, showing that extra-long reads do not necessarily make attractive posts as I previously thought (although they do provide more keywords to hit upon). Stay tuned for the next Ticket Stubs  as we follow the career of

So, Thanksgiving has been a fun three days off for me. Plenty of gluttony and lethargy to go around, since we had enough turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, spinach souffle, cranberry sauce, biscuits, pumpkin pie, and (count 'em) two cheesecakes to last us a month (except for the pumpkin pie, turkey, and one cheesecake we polished off on our tryp to Phan--good morning, Vietnam! That was weird.... Moving on...). All was delicious, and with the limited TV selections, we had plenty of time to clean up the two weeks of TiVo recordings that piled up whilst my father insisted on watching yet another pile of pointless, talk-infused indie films he selected from Netflix. Apparently, Barack Obama is still our president, Niki Minaj appeared on the American Music Awards, f***ed to the upth power of up, and Christina Aguilera performed on The Voice , looking like an old, slutty version of Honey Boo-Boo. In the upcoming sequel, Looper 2 , Honey Boo-Boo is sent forward in time to kill Christin

Last time, via Ticket Stubs , we looked at the AVP films, which served as horribly non-canon prequels to the Alien franchise (a little tidbit that I didn't realize when I was watching AVP the first time: Lance Henriksen, who played the android Bishop in Aliens  has a role in AVP  as Bishop's likeness, Weyland-Yutani founder Charles Bishop Weyland). The crossover event continues in this issue of Just the Ticket , which will be devoted to the canonical pre-boot, Prometheus , with a special Critical Quickie  on Predators . I recently read a review of the Blu-Ray release of Prometheus , which said that the movie answered none of the questions its cover promised (tagline: "Questions will be answered"). It's been such a long time since I saw an Alien  movie that I really had no questions, and very little basis on which to found any. For me, the Alien  series was just a fun, scary monster-fest with iconic creatures and (I now realize) predictable plot mechanics.

In a typical issue of Ticket Stubs , I'd give you guys a re-print/post/whatever of a review I did in the old days, closing things out with a relevant Critical Quickie  or two before the usual "stay tuned" mumbo-jumbo. This time, however, we're talking about the twice-mashed-up (and once-screwed-up) worlds of Alien  and Predator , where blood isn't always red (or safe to splatter every which way), what you don't see may kill you, and what you do see is worth screaming about, except that no one in space can hear you. So a little more web space is required to give the newcomers their due. To make the due-giving adequately possible, Ticket Stubs  and Just the Ticket  are crossing it over once again for a two-part update on a one-shot I wrote in college. Without further ado, here it is FROM   April 5, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #35: Rogue V. Prey):  Alien V. Predator . Cheap cast, choppy conglomeration of the two franchises (unless you place AVP after Predator a

Greetings, True Believers and Ticketholders! Following re-prints of the update from SW@ Ticket #12: Spider-Man's Future & the Usual Crap  and Coming Distractions #2: Before  The Avengers , I will get into something truly amazing. So let's get this party swinging... SWAT Ticket Update, July 13, 2011:  Since the box-office failure of an overstuffed  Spider-Man 3 , the franchise is scheduled to be revamped this year with Andrew Garfield ( WHO???!!!! ) as Pete/Spidey and a likewise unrecognizable cast. As promised following  Spider-Man 2 , the Lizard will be the main villain. Also, in an authentic turn of events, original flame Gwen Stacy is slated to be a character in  the reborn  Spider-Man . I am turned off by this new development and have my sights and hopes set on the success of the  Avengers  franchise. Good luck, Marvel! And now, back to our irregularly syndicated non-program: FROM May 6, 2012 (Coming Distractions #2: Before  The Avengers ):   The first review I saw

FROM October 29, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #22: Apocalypse Two Days From Now):  Disaster movies abound in today's world, from the updated Japanese monster classic Godzilla and the Katina-inspiring alien apocalypse of Independence Day to the cheesy acting, overblown cheap effects, quality cast, and idiotic plot of The Core . The director of the two films in column A brings us something akin to the crap in column B. Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal star in The Day After Tomorrow , a "subtle" political argument against global warming (as the free-speechers at SDSU say, "would you like to sign a petition for Green Peace?") disguised--almost--as a disaster flick. Quaid is a paleoclimatologist (a weatherman for the Flinstones, to be non-SW@) and consequent tree-hugger who discovers that the earth is scheduled for a new Ice Age in the next 48 hours because (possible slippery slope fallacy, but it could happen) chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island are being melted off of

Remember dangling chads from the first time Bush got elected? It didn't go so well for Al Gore in Florida that year, but I grew to admire the chutzpah Dubya had, even while I was laughing at him. Unfortunately, voting Bush in for a second term didn't work out that great for U.S., either. Now, it's time to decide whether we want to give Obama a chance to finish cleaning up the mess he inherited or hand it over to another noob whom we'll just be complaining about in two years because we realize we should have given one of our most historical presidential choices ever a fair shake. In honor of the polls, here's a collection of old reviews and rantings with a political slant. FROM October 18, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #21: Moore than I Can Take):  I haven't done much political ranting lately (haven't done much political ranting, period). But it suddenly came to me that Michael Moore is a F***ing Jackass. I speak in reference to Farenheit 9/11 . Not just because it

As I begin writing this, we are a hair's breadth (or is it a hare's breath? I could never figure that one out by hearing it) past the 7,000 pageview mark.  Slither  and  A Little Bit of Heaven  still rule the #1 and #2 spots respectively (and carry roughly 4% of the traffic all by their lonesome), but it would also seem that you guys like to read, as my largest posts ( Spider-Man ,  Burn Notice ,  Resident Evil , and  Bring Back the Soundtrack 's  Mashup Issue ) are also drawing in 40-70 readers each. So to oblige my surprisingly large fan-base,  Stay Tuned  is featuring it's own mega-sized tribute to the world of reality TV. As for that whole "Recall Button" thing, it refers to the button on your remote that allows you to swap back and forth between the channel you are watching and the channel you were previously watching. But since we're talking about reality today (and in reality, time moves forward, not back), let's begin with some TV-related pos