Awful Truths Learned From Twitter

Twitter has been around for seven years now, and has established itself as a multibillion dollar companion to Facebook's social networking revolution. It's also popularized the use of the hashtag, which has littered Facebook posts with such illegible nonsense so as to ignite a tiny fire of throat-punching rage in everyone who has "That Friend" always popping up on their news feed. Seriously, if you're using a hashtag on Facebook, it better be a freaking Game of Thrones reference.

#WinterIsComing

But this isn't an article about hashtags, this is an article about Twitter, and there are some things about Twitter you probably didn't know......

Above is a snapshot of the top 6 accounts followed on Twitter. Some interesting notes- the mystery person in the top spot has a ridiculous ten times as many "tweets" as the next most popular account. Also, the top two are each following over 100,000 accounts, which is suspicious because as we've noted before, Twitter followers can be bought as a commodity. Follower-hungry musicians, movie stars, and other notable figures often use automated programs to follow people who follow similar celebrities, hoping the action will be reciprocated. So when you take into account the fact that most people's social circle consists of roughly 150 people, anything in the 100k range is blatantly outrageous.

We can safely assume that three of those top 6 individuals up there follow only close personal contacts, while numbers 1,2, and 4 are in the business of scrounging up as many followers as possible through automated means. And considering #4 is following over 600 thousand people, it's safe to guess that they're the biggest attention whore around. Ready for the next picture?

Oh look! A list of the world's most unnecessary people. 

Justin Bieber has more followers than the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles. Lady Gaga has a few more followers than the entire population of California. Just look at that list! Rinanna? Taylor Swift? This is supposed to be a list of the most followed and therefore famous people on the planet, and instead reads as a list of people who don't deserve to be famous at all. This isn't just the top followers of people who suck at music, this is the worldwide top 6. Where's Lebron James? He's pretty famous, right? Yeah, Famous enough to be #67.

Rappers hang out with this punk for his fans, not his swag. Plus rappers usually have a thing for white girls.  

**Editor's note: I think you know we can't publish that joke.**

The five con artists masquerading as musicians that top this list are all disgustingly untalented, and make a living rewriting their same bubblegum-pop songs every year or so. But surprisingly, that's not even the saddest aspect of the Twitter top 6. What the heck is the President of the United States doing at #4 on this list?! We may never know the "why", but we can guess at the "how": the man is following 661,843 people.

Which is a conservative estimate, since recent events suggest he's following closer to 316 million.

So of the six most "adored" celebrities in the world, five are musicians created in labs by record labels looking to rake in mountains of cash, and one is a politician created in much the same fashion (and for the same reason). Excellent. We're all just thrilled at the state of the world right now.

So how far down this list of celebrities do you have to look before finding one actually worth following? Depends on your preferences, but for us here at the Mind Grenades offices, we had to scroll all the way down to #68.

Conan's the only individual in the entire top 100 we actually like. 

Neil Patrick Harris doesn't show up until #120.

-L

3 Little Things We've Had Enough Of

No introduction necessary, let's just get to it:

#1. "Radioactive"

There's a song every summer that becomes "that song that would be okay if it wasn't played eleventybillion times". Before this it was "Call Me Maybe", before that it was LMFAO, Katy Perry, and to be honest we're probably all still recovering from the Summer of The Black Eyed Peas. It's just a given that the defining song of each summer will be played at every Sonic Drive-in and 14-year-old girl's birthday party nation-wide. This year's worse. This year is worse because whoever is the acting agent for the soon to be forgotten band "Imagine Dragons" is going above and beyond what their paycheck requires, and has successfully placed the song "Radioactive" absolutely everywhere. 

Why, if it isn't Lebron James! Fancy him appearing in an article titled 

"Things We've Had Enough Of"!

Are you a sports fan? Hey look it's Lebron James listening to "Radioactive" in his new headphones commercial! And here's a promotional bit for the Pittsburg Penguins and the NHL playoffs! Are you for some reason still watching Syfy's "Defiance" series and have a burning desire to play the cruddy spin-off video game? Here's a commercial for it backed by what must be your most favorite new song in the whole wide world forever! It's everywhere. It's in trailers for cop shows and crappy movies. It's on talk shows. It's in video game commercials. "Radioactive" and its unholy mix of phony dubstep and indie-infused computer-generated wuss-rock is played so often that you actually start to savor the rare minutes of your day that aren't entirely saturated by it. If you're an up-and-coming Orwellian dictator, your best career move would be to hire Imagine Dragons' agent and put him in charge of your entire brainwashing division. 

#2. Cop Shows

Just so we're clear, "Person of Interest" is not a cop show, it's just awesome.

Pretty much the only cop show most of us are ever gonna need is Fox's "Cops" (who doesn't watch the "Ho Ho Ho Special" every year for Christmas Eve? No? Guess that's just a Mind Grenades office tradition then....). But if for some reason crime is your thing, you've had an entire decade to choose from a variety of shows that all basically boil down to the same premise. Some stand out from the pack, like the show "Bones", which stars Angel from "Buffy" and the other Deschanel sister. This show is to cop shows what "House" is to hospital shows: entertaining, engaging, and actually worth watching because they bring something new to the table. 

In House's case, that something is Olivia Wilde.

But somehow we're ten years into this cop show obsession and it's still trying not to go away. We've got three versions of CSI, two versions each of NCIS and Criminal Minds, Law and Order, SVU, Prime Suspect, Blue Bloods, Body of Proof, Castle, The Mentalist, In Plain Sight, Without A Trace, Southland, Numbers, and Cold Case-- and those are just the ones we took the time to dig up. Assuming that we're missing a couple, plus the fact that we didn't even include the wave of lawyer shows in existence...that is just too many shows about crime. Better go where the money is and make one more, USA Network!

USA Network, where a bunch of undercover agents from different agencies living together is a totally great idea.

We do need some cop shows; there's obviously a market for it. But instead of fizzling out and dying properly, the old cop shows just keep spawning spin-offs and multiplying. The universe doesn't need 32 seasons of CSI in its various forms; honestly there isn't a single show we would ever consider watching 32 seasons of. 

1969-Present, in case you were wondering. 

#3. "I Ate The Bones" And Other Awful Commercials

There are entire big powerful organizations who dedicate an enormous amount of time and effort to making sure when a product hits the shelves, the maximum amount of people possible throw money at it. There are some ad campaigns universally accepted as "wicked awesome" like the e-trade baby and certain Allstate commercials. Most others, you pretty much agree to endure in order to get back to your program. 

Then there are commercials that have the absolute opposite effect intended. You know what KFC's "I ate the bones" commercials make us want to spend our money on? Freaking Olive Garden. That's how awful they are. And what marketing geniuses told J G Wentworth that viewers totally love when commercials shout at them obnoxiously from the television screen and upset the family dog? Listen up marketing research people, I'm about to save you a buttload of work for free-- If your commercial has people yelling, or crying babies, or life-like sounding doorbells, or phones ringing: scrap it now, quit your job as a marketer, and start doing something else you might actually be good at.




-L

Characters Who Inexplicably Changed Personas, Part I

Inexplicable: Incapable of being explained or accounted for.

Great characters are what make stories worth telling. Films and TV shows alike are almost entirely dependent on whether or not the characters are compelling. This is why films like "The Fifth Element" are still awesome despite a barely discernible plot and the most obnoxious version of Chris Tucker ever; Bruce Willis is the man, and Milla Jovovich is an alien fighting machine, and together they make the movie worth watching because they're just so cool. In fact, Bruce Willis is in the imaginary hall of fame for making movies worth watching based solely on the fact that he is always a great character (and that character is always John Mcclane).

Think about everything Johnny Depp has ever been in, or all the Will Smith movies from 1995 to 2007,  all made possible by characters we love watching in action. But there's this weird thing that happens sometimes when writers get together and want to take things in a new direction; an entire character's skills, personality, and flaws can be adjusted (or erased) to fit whatever new subplot said writers want to introduce, which is why Letty is operating a tank in the latest "Fast and the Furious" movie. Good writers will actually address these changes and try to form a decent explanation for them (time passed between sequels, amnesia, that sort of thing). Other writers seem like they just go with the flow:

#1. Elizabeth Swann Is A Pampered Governor's Daughter

In "Pirates of the Caribbean", Elizabeth Swann grows up in Port Royal a daughter to a wealthy governor with a ridiculous wig, even by 18th century standards. Her ability to fend for herself is zero. She has maids who dress her and stuff. She has a fascination with pirates because sailing on the open seas and having adventures sounds more exciting than her day-to-day cushy rich-girl life. Jack Sparrow saves her life, then threatens her life like a proper pirate, at which point she forms the type of crush on him that modern-day girls all have on tough country guys (independent, filthy, rotten teeth, improper speech, lives in a cabin, and the inability to treat a lady right, face it: pirates and rednecks are the same thing). Over the course of the movie, she meets undead pirates and freaks out a bunch, and shows flashes of "tough girl", mainly for comedic purposes, as in "I'm such a pampered, helpless girl and yet...I just smashed a skeleton pirate in the face, then made a smart remark about how corsets hurt."

The point of these brief moments is to provide humor, since she's acting out of her "damsel in distress" character. Why then, in the sequels to follow, is she seen leading all the pirates in the big pirate-y battle and wielding two swords simultaneously in epic sea-combat?

Kiera doing her best to out-pretty Orlando Bloom.

Sure, she could have picked up a few things from her blacksmith boyfriend, but as he himself stated in the first movie, he only knows what he's doing with a sword because he practiced fencing for hours every day during several years of his apprenticeship (and even that doesn't explain why he appears formally trained, but it's a Disney movie so whatever).

Apparently, Knightley wanted to carry a sword throughout the entire first movie, and everyone she asked told her "no" because she's seriously just there to get rescued (again, we're talking about a Disney movie here). So in the sequels she finally grunged down her appearance and got to do some fight scenes, most of which were cut in production because they just made no sense. Her entire persona from the original movie switched from "helpless damsel" to "proper pirate lady who has mastered two-handed swordplay on an expert level over the course of two movies", and that's pretending that a proper pirate lady is even a thing.

#2. Shawn Spencer Was Supposed To Be A Rebel

The pilot episode of USA network's "Psych" introduced us to a guy named Shawn Spencer. He was a rebel with a cop dad who trained him to be a perfect detective from an early age, making him hyper observant. He uses his hyper observance to hook up with girls, he rides a motorcycle, has barely any relationship with his dad, and other than his best pal Gus, pretty much gives everyone around him crap. Including the cops. This turns out to be unwise, and he pretends he's a psychic in order to explain his skills and not get arrested, because shut up it's TV. 

The entire first season is pretty funny, and it's somewhat interesting to see how he and Gus work out the crime before having a "psychic episode" towards the end and revealing everything Sherlock Holmes style (though most plots seemed to be ripoffs of old "Remington Steele" episodes). After a season of that, things apparently got boring in the writing room and we're guessing that one writer dared another that he couldn't write an entire episode where every single sentence of dialogue referenced '80s pop culture in some way. This turned out to be a successful episode-writing strategy, and ever since partway through the second season, Shawn and Gus simply riff about the '8os and solve crime in their spare time. Smooth-talking rebel Shawn disappears after about four episodes and is replaced by immature man-child Shawn. 

**Editor's Note- The author hasn't actually watched "Psych" regularly since season 4, at which point it was still a pretty funny show. James Roday's character underwent extensive personality changes, but still made for enjoyable television.**

#3 and #4. Both Annie Edison And Britta Perry From "Community"

For about the first three episodes, Gillian Jacobs' role on "Community" was intended to be the only character in the show who could see through Joel McHale's cool-guy facade (don't keep reading until you've watched that clip). She was supposed to be the intelligent hot girl of the group, as well as the only one with a more serious and complex backstory, which would obviously be revealed in future seasons. Her character flaws were merely hinted at, and seemed more serious in nature than the rest of the cast. Her character was meant to keep everything else going on with the study group grounded in reality. 

Little did she know she would be dressed up as Michael Jackson like two seasons later.

However, she quickly morphed into more of the college activist stereotype character, and soon after that her character was firmly established as a "buzzkill", which is eventually addressed directly in the show (don't keep reading until you've watched that clip); she is also now on the receiving end of most of the physical comedy in the show, which is pretty hilarious, but still a big departure from who she was originally supposed to be. Pretty much everyone else in the group has stuck closely to who they were in the opening episodes of the first season. Pretty much everyone except Annie Edison.

"Aww look at that face, she's adorable!"--Mind Grenades Caption Department 

Annie is the straight-laced teacher's pet student who was so stressed out by her perfectionist tendencies in high school that she developed a slight addiction to adderall pills, lost her scholarship, and is now at community college to repair the damage. She's the only one in the show who ever actually studies, and she's meant to be the nerdy girl who has a crush on the former high school jock, Troy. Then the "Community" writers noticed something; Annie Edison looks like this:

"                                                                         "--Mind Grenades Caption Department

She isn't a blatant replacement as the new "Hot girl" of the group, it's done more subtly than that. But after Britta devolves into the group's figurative insult punching bag, Annie takes over as the only one in the study group who seems to have Joel McHale figured out, and also tends to care about keeping the group intact despite what everyone else is doing. These transformations of character are admittedly different than Keira Knightley's pirate queen situation, since "Community" is a clever show and the characters all still make sense despite these rapid changes. It's just interesting to watch a season of the show all the way through and notice just how fast Britta and Annie each assume new identities.

This post was originally intended to be about four or five characters longer, but that would make this article too long for the average internet surfer's attention span. Keep an eye out for Part II later this month!



-L

5 Awesome Types Of Movies (That Can Never Be Made Again)

I hope all nine bucks of my movie ticket went directly to that stuntman.

One of the most important things movies offer each of us is an entertaining dose of escapism. For 90-120 minutes, we leave everything in the real world outside of the dark theater and just enjoy the excitement of a different reality for a little while. They turn the lights out for the same reason they make the screen massive and the volume loud enough to shake your seat; it's so you feel immersed in the world being presented to you. So it's no wonder you sometimes leave a theater a bit disappointed that it's all over, finding yourself back in the real world where car-crashes can actually kill you.

And where women don't generally look like Gal Gadot.

We enjoy certain films so much, however, that we unknowingly give certain movie franchises a monopoly over a certain genre. Whether these films are untouchable because they're considered "classics", or they're more recent and just shouldn't be done again because they couldn't possibly get any better, here are five kinds of movies that just can't be made again:


#1. Underground Racing Movies That Aren't "Fast and the Furious"

For those of you who are non-believers in the "Fast" franchise, here's a quick summary: everybody in this world drives a $100,000 car, has no real job, and apparently has like five asian girlfriends judging by the gratuitous "party on top of the cars" scene that appears at least twice in every installment of the series. Cops never arrest anyone because our heroes display superb manual shifting. People can pretty much break the law all they want and still not be considered the "bad guy", unless they happen to be foreign (villains in these movies are Asian, Argentinian, Japanese, Mexican, Brazilian, and European, in that order). If you're a foreign criminal in these movies you're toast. For everybody else, car crashes are almost never fatal and your life is like a live action Need For Speed Underground, every single day.

Holy crap, it's been ten years.

If you've watched the movies from the very beginning, you know that the protagonists who started as some neighborhood thugs stealing DVD players have now become the world's leading anti-vehicular terrorism unit. We're not discussing continuity problems or movie mistakes here, so we'll just go along assuming that's a thing. Make fun of the "Fast and Furious" movies all you want, there's still no denying the success this series has graduated to through an increased budget and an effort to create some semblance of a storyline.

Also, a tank.

The most admirable aspect of the series is how it started with some underground street-racing and an undercover cop, and has since evolved into action movies with fast, colorful cars pulling off awesome bank heists and putting a stop to international terror. For the fans of the series, they can pretty much keep releasing a "Fast" movie every summer as long as it's equal to Fast 4, 5, and 6 in its dosage of face-punching, close-up-of-intense-shifting awesomeness.

What this means for the rest of the movie-making people of the world is that if you want to make a movie about street-racing and fast cars, too bad; it's already been made. The "Fast" franchise has covered all the bases, summarized for your convenience as the following:

1) "The Fast and The Furious", dingy thugs race illegal cars for respect and stuff. Paul Walker's a cop.

2) "2Fast, 2Furious", slightly less dingy thugs do the same thing but in Miami, Paul Walker no longer a cop but is working with the cops.

3) "Tokyo Drift", takes place after Fast 6 in Tokyo, where the asian guy Han is spending all his cash he made in Fast 5. Nobody's a cop.

4) "Fast and Furious", Mexican drug lord needs drivers to drive his drugs into America. This makes as much sense in the movie as it does in writing. Paul Walker is now a super cop. Letty dies.

5) "Fast 5", Every cool character from the previous four movies gets together to steal a metric crap-ton of money from a Brazilian drug guy (except Letty, who is dead). They succeed by dragging a bank vault behind two cars through half of Rio for thirty straight minutes, then they all fly to separate beaches (except Han, who drives off with Gal Gadot). Paul Walker is not a cop. The Rock is a cop. This is awesome.

6) "Fast 6" (No spoilers), The Rock (who is a cop) gets the team together to bring down some Europeans who are basically evil twin versions of themselves. This is directly addressed in the movie. Letty isn't dead. Things explode on the longest runway ever constructed by man. Nobody knows who the cops are anymore.

As you can see, these movies have stepped up there complexity and appeal with each installment in the franchise, and will continue to do so at least through next summer. Any fast car movies not starring Vin Diesel and his gang of awesome racer bros just aren't going to measure up.

#2. Any Pirate Movie Without Jonny Depp In It

This isn't the last "How I Met Your Mother" reference we'll be making today.

What's not to like about a pirate movie? Pirate movies are one of the most inherently adventurous types of action films around. Secret treasure, sword fighting, hidden isles of the sea, all that stuff. Too bad that without Captain Jack, nobody will care about any sort of pirate movie ever again, unless the Muppets sign on for a "Muppet Treasure Island" Sequel.

You may remember a movie released several years ago at the height of the pirates craze titled "Master and Commander". By all accounts, it was a great movie. It was an attempt at a more realistic depiction of how great a sea-battle movie can be, and it was a success and really very good. And nobody watches it anymore because freaking pirate zombies.

"Pirates of the Caribbean" nailed it- lots of cool fight scenes, Geoffrey Rush as the bad guy pirate, creepy ghost ship (complete with even creepier skeleton monkey), and Jack Sparrow, a character that would quickly become a staple in pop culture and pirate movie lore, and also make up for Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley being in the movie.

Every movie this woman is in, Natalie Portman would've been a better choice. Every one.

The "Pirates" franchise has claimed Davy Jones, The Flying Dutchman, Blackbeard, Mermaids, the dreaded Isla de Muerta, Penelope Cruz, and basically every other major element you'd want to include in a pirate movie, making it impossible for anyone else to go near a pirate themed movie for the next twenty years, at which point technology will advance to the point where we're literally in the movie. And even when that happens, they'll probably just re-release the "Pirates" movies in the year 2033's 4-Dimensional theaters.

#3. The Lord of The Rings Trilogy Can't Be Bested

For so many reasons...No, all of them, all of the reasons.

#4. Any Classic From The '80s

Classics are classics for a reason; there's a certain nostalgia you enjoy while watching "The Goonies", something that can't be recreated through a cheap Hollywood remake. There seems to be three major avenues of thought explored when the powers-that-be get together and think up new films to fund:

1. What movies haven't had a sequel yet?
2. What movies are old enough to reboot?
3. ...Anyone read any good books lately?

The problem with rebooting anything from the 1980's is it just can't be done. The Michael Jackson and Hair-Metal era should be remembered, not necessarily relived. So in 2011 when "Footloose" received its own stale remake, it was received with a general "meh". Nobody who saw it said it was an awful movie, it just wasn't worth seeing because anybody who wanted to see Footloose already freaking owned it (though probably on VHS).

After Footloose's failure to ignite an '80s trend, the "excitement" behind a new Back to the Future movie and Top Gun 2 thankfully lost all momentum and seem to be dead for the moment. Hollywood is content to take a page out of Disney's money-making book and just re-release classic movies in theaters every twenty years instead, which is smart, but also totally cheating.

Told you so.

#5. Iron Man And Batman Movies

As evidenced by the Batman, Superman, and James Bond movies of old, some characters are so great that each generation gets its own version. But the cash-crazy people who watched "The Avengers" make all the money last year are hungry for a justice league movie before the comic book craze dies, and it's going to be a travesty. They're working on a new Batman right now, apparently pretending that it's possible to make batman movies better than Christopher Nolan can.

"Wrong"- Nolan

The Justice League movie will either consist of characters who can't carry their own movie in a rushed and underdeveloped script with a Batman that isn't Bat-Bale, or won't happen at all because the comic book movie craze only has about two good years left in it.

We're in a special time when casting directors are doing a pretty incredible job....well, doing their job. For example, the original Iron Man film paved the way for The Avengers and all the films connected to it, but before Robert Downey Jr. donned the CGI suit, most people either weren't aware of who Iron Man was, or didn't give a crap about the dorky looking summer blockbuster soon to hit theaters. What followed was a shot in the arm of Robert's career, and an avalanche of great superhero movies becoming a reality.

Bet you read right past that "shot in the arm" joke.

Iron Man is now everyone's favorite avenger (if he isn't, it better be the Hulk), all because Robert Downey Jr. absolutely owned the role like nobody else could. We make a big deal about the performance Heath Ledger delivered as The Joker (and rightfully so), a role that played a part in ending his life. Iron Man practically saved Robert's life--and with it, his career--and it's because he was so good at being Tony Stark (because he essentially is Tony Stark). Such a believable performance makes the character more than just memorable, it makes the character impossible to replicate. You know who's going to take up the role of Iron Man, or Wolverine, or Jack Sparrow, or Joker next? Freaking nobody. 

For at least a generation, all the movies on this list should be untouchable, if movie-makers know what's good for them. There's just no sense in rebooting a batman franchise still fresh off its DVD sales, no point in making pirate movies without Depp starring in them, and no way anyone is taking car racing movies seriously without Vin Diesel. 

It's tough enough taking them seriously with Vin Diesel.

-L

6 Movies You Didn't Know Were Being Released In 2014

You probably heard they were making a "300" sequel; you probably hadn't heard

that Vesper Lynd was starring in it. 

It's a safe bet that if you liked any movie released in the past two years, its sequel will be released in 2014. Whether or not that's a good thing is a discussion for a future date; fact is, many of these sequels should be so awesome they physically pin you to your soda-stained seat. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Captain America: Winter Soldier, a new Bond film, a new Spiderman, and another Fast and Furious installment are just a few of the many exciting movies headed towards future-us. Of course there will also be a ton of sequels coming out that are totally unnecessary, but if Hollywood knows for a fact a movie will rake in the cash, that movie gets made- Rio 2, Journey to the ______ 3, yet another Tyler Perry movie, 21 Jump Street 2, How To Train Your Dragon 2, another Transformers movie, and a third Despicable Me.

We're not saying all of those will be bad (though some of them totally will be), but are there any movies that aren't sequels? Have you heard about anything coming out next year that's not related to anything we'll see in theaters this summer? Seems like all the hype is about superhero movies and the Hunger Games, when there's actually a whole lot of other awesome things developing...


#1- Ninja Turtles

Yes, Ninja Turtles is happening next summer. At a glance there is cause for major concern, since it's a live-action blockbuster reboot of a childhood favorite cartoon starring Megan Fox and being directed by the explosion fetishist frat-boy director Michael Bay. The Transformers franchise has made a ton of money despite each movie being about an hour too long and every single character with a speaking part trying to be the comic relief.

And generally sucking at it.

But here's the good part: the segments of Transformers movies that actually involved building-sized robots destroying each other were undeniably terrific. Transformers 2 was an unbearably long movie with unacceptable amounts of crappy acting in it, but people paid nine bucks to sit in their seats and wait patiently until Optimus Prime wailed on four decepticons at once, and then the price of admission was worth it. The parts of the Transformers movies that actually starred the Transformers were awesome, it's the rest of the movie that gets in the way.

This leads us to believe that even in the probable event of a convoluted script and bad Megan Fox actressing, April O'Neil and the gritty CGI Ninja Turtles reboot will be worth watching simply because seeing a favorite cartoon from your childhood brought to life with today's butt-kicking movie magic is the very reason we're all in the middle of a superhero comic book nerd-fantasy entertainment binge in the first place. Because it rocks.

#2- The LEGO Movie

If you aren't totally psyched for next year's LEGO movie, you may not be familiar with LEGO's fantastic (and usually surprising) brand of legitimately clever comedy in their very successful line of video games. Wondering how that will translate to a feature-length film? Here's Wikipedia's plot overview:

"Emmet, an ordinary guy, is mistaken as being the one who can save the universe. With the aid of an old mystic, a tough female and Batman, Emmet will fight to defeat the evil tyrant bent on destroying the universe by gluing it together."

If you are still less-than-100%-amped, than perhaps we should mention who's attached to the project. Voicing Mr. LEGO Batman up there will be Arrested Development's Will Arnett (Gob will be the voice of Batman...let that sink in for a minute). Will Farrell will be voicing the villainous "President Business", and Liam Neeson will lend his voice to a character listed simply as "Bad Cop". 

Liam Neeson, the king of greek gods, master Jedi warrior, Aslan the god-lion, the ultraninja batman villain, hunter of european kidnappers and puncher of wild arctic wolves, is gonna be "Bad Cop" in the LEGO movie.

Community's Alison Brie and the love interest from that football movie "Invincible" Elizabeth Banks will also play major characters. If for some reason you are humorless enough to not find the prospect of Liam Neeson, Will Farrell, and a Will Arnett-voiced LEGO Batman awesome on a gut-busting level, here's one last kicker- guess who's voicing the aforementioned "old mystic"?

We BS you not.

#3- The Book Thief

"This is the only non-creepy picture of death on the internet, and it's Ian McKellen"

-Mind Grenades Photo Staff

A few years ago when most people were busy reading The Hunger Games, a book narrated by death himself became popular among book clubs and for good reason- it's pretty great actually. Considering the holocaust is the single most popular topic to write about ever, it's hard to get your WWII era book noticed. Having the grim reaper introduce himself and tell you who in the book dies in the first few pages is an interesting twist. The movie adaptation will be awesome, and most people won't get excited for the film's release until they see a teaser-trailer, because people just don't read books anymore that aren't about angsty teenage love triangles.  

A new death tournament and a super awesome rebellion are supposed to be happening, 

but sure, tell us more about your boy situation. 

#4, 5, and 6 Each Involve Epic Casting Calls 

First, Angelina Jolie is starring in the dark fairytale film "Maleficent", titled after arguably the greatest villain in the Disney universe. And before you protest that claim, just try to think of any other evil witch capable of entrancing a princess in a hypnotic deathsleep and doing this to prevent Prince Phillip from saving the day:

Holy Crap this was a kids movie?

Little Mermaid's Ursula did what exactly? Turned into a Macy's Day Parade version of herself and died from being impaled by a boat? Lame. Maleficent is a sorceress with "all the powers of Hell", and she's gonna have her own film next year starring Mrs. Jolie. 

Next, The Rock is starring in a Hercules movie, which sounds pretty good in theory. Considering "Clash of the Titans" managed to screw up the storyline to stories that have existed for thousands of years, and the recent "Conan The Barbarian" flopped, we're all due for a solid "Man with a colossal figure and super strength takes on impossible odds" movie. Actually, when written like that Hercules is basically a superhero. Ever wonder if ancient Grecian children wanted to be awesome like Hercules someday the way today's kids want to be Batman? They're essentially the same guy.

Impossible muscle definition: check. 

Ridiculous animal-themed costume to kick butt in: check. 

Incapable of keeping love interest alive: sad check.

Lastly, Ridley Scott's next project is entitled "Exodus", and is rumored to be starring Christian Bale in the role of Moses. Considering Scott is the man who gave us the exceptionally epic "Gladiator" as well as a seriously awesome "Robin Hood", the Bible may finally be in theaters again after way too long of a big screen drought. 

Charlton Heston was your grandparents' Harrison Ford; show a little respect.

There's a lot to be excited for in 2014 involving hobbits and marvel comics, but now you know there's much to look forward to next year beyond the cgi spandex wearing heroes undeserving of a sequel and another try at Robocop. There are movies based on books with imaginative ideas, movies about legit vampires, and movies that start with the word "Godzilla". 

Should be an interesting year.

-L