“A Western like you’ve never seen before … An exciting new look at the Old West.”

Oh, taglines. I like when you do my work for me. You just described what Silverado isn’t!

I’ve had this one on my queue for quite awhile. I’ve anticipated it greatly. It was written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who is no slouch with pulp-oriented films like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark to his credit. If there’s one thing Kasdan knows, it’s action adventure, right? Not when it came to Silverado, a film that misses the mark so often that I fail to see how it’s garnered 2-disc collector sets and such enthusiasm among Western fans.

I suppose it’s all due to Costner. Little baby Costner. This is the film that made him a star and a dreamy genre successor to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. They seem to have costumed him with that very idea, because he’s wearing a variation on every famous Western and cowboy look ever filmed.

At one point, he even wears a serape. He’s a weird, goofy character — I can’t tell if he’s special or just supposed to be extremely young — and the highlight of the film is undoubtedly when he decides his horse needs to wear a hat.  It just comes out of nowhere.  Costner walks down the street, happy as a clam, and his horse is wearing a cowboy hat.

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In honor of Roland Emmerich’s release of disaster film  2012 this week I decided to watch sci-fi action classic Independence Day (aka ID4). I can’t tell you on how many levels I love this film. Sure it’s campy at times but the actors seem to believe so ferociously the fictitious alien invasion is real it just works. Moreover, it paved the way for some of the best scenes of destruction ever in film history.

Fans like me have been waiting nearly fourteen years for a sequel and we may get our wish. While promoting 2012 Emmerich spoke to MTV about the possibility of not one, but two ID4 sequels:

“What we want to do in the next – it’s actually two movies – we want to do a bigger arc,” he explained. “‘Independence Day’ was always like the king who leads his troops into battle against an evil force, and that stays like that.”

As exciting as the prospect of two more ID4 films could be allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment. One reason I like the first film so much is that it’s a closed box. That is, it simply ends. No twists, no hints at a sequel, simply an ending. With so many films vying for franchise potential these days it’s refreshing to have movies like ID4 that simply wanted to tell a story-once.

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As we all know, Thursday was a pretty tragic day in the celebrity world. With the loss of both Farrah Fawcett and Micheal Jackson, many reports of false deaths were coming out of the woodwork from the world of Twitter and even some news outlets. One of the rumors stemmed from a fake Associated Press report that 80’s pop singer Rick Astley was found dead in his hotel room, liking fans to video proof of his death, another was that George Clooney had crashed while flying a small plane over Denver Colorado.

Of these rumors, one seemed to stick out above the rest. This rumor was that actor Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death off of a cliff while filming a new movie in New Zealand. Thankfully, when there are fake stories floating around the world, there are fake reporters out there for field them. Goldblum made a special appearance on The Colbert Report last night to talk about how his death has effected him, and where he goes from here. Very funny stuff, and worthwhile knowing that not all of these pranks go unmentioned.

Check out the video after the jump.

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