We should've killed E.T. when we had the chance

Seriously, that little bastard got on the mothership and nearly 25 years later, he's brought back all his buddies to slughter the human race! It would be cool since Spielburg did the ultimate friendly alien movie and now he's doing the big theatrical version of War of the Worlds. I have faith in the combination of Cruise and Spielberg (Minority Report is one of my favorite movies of the last few years), but there's a lot of big question marks behind this film. War of the Worlds was a radio broadcast, so how do you expand that into a movie (yeah, it's been a couple of movies and a TV show, but this movie seems to have no relation)? And honestly, on the surface, it looks a little like Signs, which was such an asbymal waste of time. And hell, last time the aliens were beaten by our own atmosphere, so I hope that's not the ending here. I guess we'll all find out in two days, but if I see any police aiming walkie talkies at the aliens (in case you forget, he altered the DVD release of E.T. so that the police only had walkie talkies instead of guns), I'll know Spielberg has been drinking from the same kool-aid mix that Lucas has been on the last decade or so.

Although it's not even out yet, the upcoming 25 to Life is already the favorite whipping boy of several senators (including Hilary Clinton) and one idiotic CNN analyst. Off course they are complaining about the violence level, and the fact that you can live the life of a gang-banger, setting up ambushes and drive-bys. Of course, they forget to mention that EVERY preview so far says you also have the choice to play as a police officer. And they are mostly doing the usual song and dance of protecting little Billy from things he'll learn about from his friends at school anyways, but they are taing it one step further and pleading with major retailers to not even carry the title. This is a nifty little way of getting around the first amendment, because they aren't trying to pass anything, but unless a better election issue comes up, come release time they may actually resort to protesting outside stores that carry the title (while ignoring plenty of other equally violent titles that are releasing in the same time frame), which can be just as bad as any legislation. Wal Mart has a pretty good history of having no spine, but I hope other retailers will take a stand and tell these morons to stop being such assholes and focus on important issues like oh I don't know, the war effort or social security or the drug war or the defecit or gas prices. I could keep going but I'll spare you readers.

There's been a lot of fairly unholy unions in entertainment, but I think this latest one tops them all. Midway, maker of overrated recycled crap like 5 million similar NFL Blitz titles and the mostly laughable Mortal Kombat titles (MK II was the only worthwhile one of the whole series) has teamed up with MTV to make games. Take a few minutes to let the horror of this news sink in. MTV is officially in the games buisness (and they are making their own game division called MTV games). This means we'll be forced to be subject to horrors like Pimp My Ride The Game, The Ashlee Simpson Game and whatever other crappy shows they have. I can see a Real World game right now, hopefully it's an FPS.

And finally, if you thought Jack Bauer had a lot of bad days before, it's about to get even worse for the most beleagured federal agent in TV history. A movie is supposedly in the works, although I don't know how they squeeze what's normally 24 hours of TV into a two-hour movie. But more pressing is 24: The Game. It takes place between seasons 2 & 3, and it looks pretty damn cool. I just hope it's not actually based on a clock, because I loathe time-based titles. I'll most likely be back on Thursday, so until then....