The Screengrab

It seems strange to be talking already about the contents of a Dark Knight DVD already.  After all, the movie is still playing in theaters all over the place -- in fact, it's still in the middle of a real barn-burner of a theatrical run, with each week proving that a Spandex-clad Christian Bale still has some legs under him.  By the time the last theater in America yanks the latest installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman series in favor of Election Movie or whatever other Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer abomination comes down the pike, it may be the most profitable movie in the history of the world.  Still, today's media cycle is shorter than Billy Barty, and it can't be denied that some people were already demanding a Dark Knight DVD release on their way out of the theater after having seen it for the first time. 

That's why we're grateful to insider site Blu-Ray.com (via a Spanish DVD fansite, so please do consider the source before writing us angry letters) for some advance info about what we're going to get when we finally plunk down our $30 for the deluxe DVD release of Dark Knight.  Neat stuff:  it'll be a double disc, with director's commentary, making-of featurettes, production stills, trailers, viral marketing content, gadget stuff, and all the rest.  Multiple audio formats will be available, and there'll be plenty of origin-of-a-scene stuff and special effects spotlights for the geek contingent.  Especially fun:  the release will include six different clips from fictional Gotham City news shows and media broadcasts, treating the events of the film as if they were real stories; this could be setting audiences up for the next movie in the series -- tentatively titled, simply, Gotham -- in which it's rumored we'll see all the action from a citizen's-eye view.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

How could you do this to me, IMDb Bottom 100 list? After all we’ve been through together, how could you make me sit through two Friedberg-Seltzer spoof movies in a single week? It was only last Friday that I took on #72 Meet the Spartans, and now you present me with the diarrhea duo’s previous exercise in pop culture regurgitation, Epic Movie. Look, I was patient and understanding when you made me watch two Kickboxer sequels. At least you gave me a few weeks to recover between them. But now you’ve crossed a line, IMDb Bottom 100 list. We’ll continue to do business together, but we’re no longer speaking.

The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin. Also, the word apparently had yet to reach the top Hollywood agencies that they would serve their clients best by destroying all query letters from Friedberg-Seltzer Industries; there are actual recognizable faces on display here in addition to the usual sort-of-look-and-sound-alikes. Kal Penn, Jennifer Coolidge, David Carradine, Crispin Glover (!) and perhaps most dishearteningly, Fred Willard, all show up and do their best to survive with their dignity intact.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here’s a serendipitous turn of events – not for me, of course, but maybe for somebody out there. On the very day that Disaster Movie, the latest parody from the writing-directing team of Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is released in theaters, our Unwatchable selection of the day just happens to be the humor-challenged team’s previous effort, Meet the Spartans. (And when I say effort, I don’t really mean it in any traditional sense of the word.) This is purely coincidental, but if I can do anything to dissuade even one person from spending money on Disaster Movie this weekend, I’ll consider this post a success.

I doubt that’s going to be possible, though, since it seems highly unlikely that any regular Screengrab readers would be seeing Disaster Movie in the first place. For my part, Meet the Spartans was my first experience with the Seltzer-Friedberg team, but I can’t say I was completely unaware of what to expect – basically, that these bozos are Zucker-Abrams-Zucker for people who were often dropped on their heads as children.

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Over the past week, Dr. Uwe Boll has gotten quite a bit of attention on the 'net, including a number of pieces right here on Screengrab. It seems all of this attention started with a little petition...

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Forget Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, Howard the Duck and all the other renowned turkeys of cinema history. The Guardian delves into the depths of the IMDb’s 100 lowest ranked movies to find the truly toxic, the absolute worst of the worst. As Sam Richards writes, the IMDb list “differs from most critic-voted ‘worst movie of all-time’ lists, in that any film that's memorably bad - say, Swept Away - tends to get just enough positive responses to save it from total ignominy. The Bottom 100 exists to catalogue films that have been viewed out of error, obligation or last-turkey-in-the-shop desperation.”

Richards sampled a handful of the lowest-ranked entries “in a Ludovico technique-style experiment.”

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Josh Levin puts a stopwatch on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Meet the Spartans: "Various news sources have declared that Meet the Spartans has a running time of 84 minutes. Some online reviews peg the actual running time at 68 minutes. I went to a 5:30 p.m. screening. After previews, the movie began some time between 5:44 and 5:47. The closing credits started at 6:47. After a cast-performed rendition of "I Will Survive" (note: this was a reprise of an earlier performance) staged on the American Idol set (note: not the real American Idol set), the credits ran over a black screen. Perhaps two minutes later, the credits gave way to scenes that weren't strong enough to make the first 60 minutes, including Spider-Man removing Donald Trump's toupee. After about five minutes of these deleted scenes, the credits started again. They moved at about 10 lines per minute. And, considering the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make, they included a surprising amount of names; I'm guessing 8,000. By the time the credits had been slow-rolling for several minutes, the other 15 people in the theater had gone home. As the credits continued, I put on my headphones and listened to some music. At 7:09, more than 20 minutes after the credits began, I was rewarded by" a cinematic vision of "a Stallone impersonator gyrating in the outfit Britney Spears wore to the MTV awards."

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