"I Liked it Better the First Time I Saw it, When it was Called..."

Paul Giamatti was on The Daily Show last night to promote his new movie Cold Souls. Here is the trailer:


To sum: Paul Giamatti stars as himself - the actor Paul Giamatti, and other people can access his soul.

Without seeing the movie, here are my favorite quotes:

• "It's my soul, Schwartz! It's my SOUL!"
• Lounge Singer: "Giamatti, Giamatti... Giamatti, Giamatti"
• "There's a tiny door in my office, Maxine. It's a portal and it takes you inside Paul Giamatti. You see the world through Paul Giamatti's soul... and then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out... into a ditch on the side of The New Jersey Turnpike."
• "I think it's kinda sexy that Paul Giamatti has a portal, y'know, sort of like, it's like, like he has a vagina. It's sort of vaginal, y'know, like he has a, he has a penis AND a vagina. I mean, it's sort of like... Giamatti's... feminine side. I like that."

I'd Watch ViewMaster... of the Universe. Maybe.

Dreamworks is making a movie based off of the old ViewMaster toys. Seriously.

You may remember ViewMasters as well as I do, but for our younger readers, let me explain what ViewMaster was. I hope our older readers will enjoy the memory lane stroll.

ViewMaster was a crude plastic toy that you could look into and into which you put a white wheel with slides (slides are hard copies of pictures that you can project onto the wall.) Then you turned the wheel with a plastic switch and viewed the images one after the other. Often, these images in succession, would tell a story. Other times, they would not. they'd just be a bunch of related pictures.

These ViewMasters had many limitations, such as:

1. A very limited amount of pictures (I think it was 12) were available for viewing.
2. It was just a bunch of pictures. It had no sounds or music or moving images or anything that helps tell stories.
   
3. You could accidentally load the slide at the wrong place, thereby ruining any surprises in the story. (One saving grace, you only had 12 pictures, so the stories weren't interesting enough to be "ruined.")
4. If you put it in facing the wrong way, the pictures appeared backwards. This was confusing.
5. If the wheel got bent, you couldn't put it in the ViewMaster. And you couldn't really just View these pictures, sans Master.
6. You looked like a doofus while using them. (Think RecSpecs + What people thought virtual reality glasses would look like)

So why did we use them? One reason only. And I think this reason is the most perplexing thing about this movie... We used them because - they were the best we had. It was ViewMasters or books. Those were the story telling toys we were privy to. It was the best we had if we weren't watching TV.

But you know what's better than ViewMasters? Everything in the world that exists now. Ipods fix all the problems we once had with ViewMasters. (Yeah, I'm going to leave the idea of Ipods as a modern ViewMaster out there.) Digital cameras do more than ViewMasters!

So they are making a movie about a crude device that was replaced by portable movie players. I wonder if it will be played only on AM radio.

Movies That Exist: Tiptoes

(hattip Matt and Filmdrunk, who have a great headline)

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? I've just been handed an urgent and horrifying movie trailer. I need all of you to stop what you're doing and watch:

Cannonball! Yes, this actually exists. This is not a parody. This boat is real!

Highlights (and there are too many to do them all justice):

• "Carol and Steven's life together is perfect"voiced over a blow job scene because nothing says life is perfect like an interrupted blow job.
• "There's one small problem" - Get it? Small! Cause they're dwarfs! We're hilarious!
• Gary Oldman: "I'm his brother. We're Twins." One of us is big and one of us is small but we're twins. I bet you've never seen that before, huh?
• "They're not midgets, they're dwarfs." "Whatever." - To their credit, we're not under the misconception that they'll deal with this with nuance.
• Kate Beckinsale's assertion that Matthew McConaughey has to tell her that his family is dwarfs followed immediately by a scene where Beckinsale doesn't tell her parents.
• Kate Beckinsale's weird S&Mish leather collar in said scene.
• Hilarious dinner scene - serious pregnant scene - hilarious party scene - serious wedding scene. I know comedies don't usually win Oscars, but...
• "In the role of a lifetime, Gary Oldman" - In the sense that Gary Oldman will only play a dwarf one time in his life, this voice over is undeniably true.
• "Tiptoes" - Uh, did we mention they were dwarfs? Cause they are.
  

May this Balderdashian feature recur many times.