Batman is dead.

For the record, this Batman was one Lenny Robinson of Maryland, according to the Washington Post. Robinson had the best of intentions for impersonating Batman: he liked to cheer up hospitalized children. It's hard to imagine Bruce Wayne having a problem with someone borrowing his likeness for something like that.

Robinson was killed last month after experiencing trouble with his "Batmobile," a customized Lamborghini. Robinson's car was struck by a Toyota Camry whose driver apparently didn't notice the sportscar stopped in his lane in the middle of the night. Wearing all black to remain unseen by criminals is a double-edged sword.

I hope that this tragedy will make people realize just how dangerous the Batmobile really is. In the comics, Batman wrecks it about once a year during high-speed pursuits. Even when Batman is driving safely, the car is routinely the target of super-villains. It's destroyed by Penguin in Batman Returns, Riddler in Batman Forever, Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, and the Joker in The Dark Knight. I don't know who was driving that Toyota Camry, but it seems that any Batmobile might be a magnet for trouble.

This world is a worse place anytime a Batman dies. So if there's any lesson to be learned from this disaster, maybe it's this:

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I watched 16 movies in June. Here's the first batch:

103. (850.) The Horse Soldiers (1959)
Union cavalryman John Wayne rampages through the South on a desperate secret mission. Even playing a Damn Yankee in an otherwise mediocre John Huston movie, Wayne is very entertaining.

104. (851.) The Enemy Below (1957)
Robert Mitchum engages in World War II submarine warfare against sympathetic Nazis! Good movie.

105. (852.) The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971)
There's an intriguing mystery story at the heart of this Italian horror/thriller "starring" Karl Malden. Too bad the finished product is little better than a cheap, dull exploitation film.

106. (853.) The Hanging Tree (1959)
You probably wouldn't guess it from the title, but this film is fundamentally a Gary Cooper romance/western. Why did Cooper always end up with women a quarter of his age in movies? It's creepy.

107. (854.) Miami Connection (1987)
A rock band of tae kwon do masters fight a street gang of drug-dealing ninjas in Florida. If that sentence doesn't make you want to go see this film RIGHT NOW, there's something wrong with you.

More to come.

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Say, that's a good looking Ford Fusion out that window.

This screenshot comes from a Ford commercial running in the Atlanta area for about the past month. But the car isn't the reason I'm showing it to you.

This shot was taken in my favorite restaurant, Sprayberry's Restaurant. The Ford out the window is parked in the space usually reserved for the Sprayberry's International Scout. I don't think that Scout ran when I worked there in 1992. You can see it in the picture of the "229 Jackson Street" location here'.

I don't know if the commercial sold any car, but it certainly has me warning some Brunswick stew.

UPDATE: I found a video of the commercial:

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The following teaser trailers for porn videos are all completely safe to watch at work. That's part of what's so weirdly compelling about them.

2011:

2012:

2013:

2015:

That's right: four pornographic "parody" videos made by Axel Braun, the self-proclaimed "undisputed King of Parody," in the past four years. And they all star the same man ("Ryan Driller," who — I shit you not — has been nominated for two Adult Video News Best Actor Awards for his performances in two of the above movies). DC hasn't managed anything close to that production schedule (or awards recognition) in decades.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand how drawing a diagonal line through the "S" on his chest makes it okay to make rip-off Superman movies, but I have to admit that these look just as good as anything running on the CW. However, if Bruan can churn these disposable flicks out on a regular basis with production values this good, maybe DC should look into hiring him to make a real Superman movie.

It can't possibly be any worse than Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Just sayin'.

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If there's one thing everyone agrees Superman is good at, it's selling cars.

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After months of taunting the Red Bee and his one trick, he's finally proved that it's a pretty darn effective one trick. At least when dealing with children.

At the annual White House Easter Egg Roll this past weekend, the President was interrupted when a single bee buzzed the crowd of children. (He was reading Where the Wild Things Are. Oh, the irony!)

I'm sorry, Red Bee. You've been right all along. Nothing is more frightening than a lone bee. I don't know if it will stop crime, but it will certainly ruin a picnic.

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Presenting the teaser trailer for SnarfQuest Tales, a game that Cellbloc Studios is currently working on:

I didn't make that. I just told a very talented someone else how he should make it. (And then I criticized it, criticized it, and criticized it some more until it was good and polished.) Here's my original pitch, which had to be cut down to fit inside 15 seconds.

// BEGIN SCRIPT

Single camera that never moves.

Open on a sword stuck in stone, in full-on Sword-In-The-Stone/Arthurian legend style. Stone sits in foreground, slightly screen right. Background is dark, possibly solid black, though if you prefer to show hints of a countryside, that works, too. Sword and stone are spot lit.

Epic Music starts playing.

Enter Snarf, emerging from background blackness on screen left. Snarf is all confident swagger. He walks in slow motion, in time to the music. He steps up to the stone, spits into his hands, rubs them together, grips the sword, and pulls with all his might.

The sword doesn't budge. He pulls and pulls, pushing off with his feet, really putting his back into it. He works up a comical sweat. The sword doesn't budge.

Snarf tugs one last time, and the handle pops off the sword. Snarf falls backward screen left, landing flat on his ass with the hilt in his hand.

As Snarf looks in horror at the useless hilt, a shape moves in from the black background. The viewer sees, but Snarf is not aware, of the dragon approaching. The dragon looks menacingly over Snarf's shoulder. The dragon's shadow falls over snarf's head. Snarf's eyes roll up. He swallows hard.

Cue music crescendo. Screen goes black. Show SnarfQuest Tales logo plus whatever else you want to add (white text on black screen).

// END SCRIPT

SnarfQuest Tales will be going to Kickstarter later this year (around September). Mark your calendar.

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So Tom Brady has won 4 Super Bowls? So what. He's still not half the quarterback this guy was:

https://youtu.be/qhmZeVjF7i8

(Am I already suffering from football withdrawal? You betcha!)

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I watch a lot of movies. Those movies have a lot of bad actors. But none of those actors are as bad as Kate Upton is in these Game of War: Fire Age commercials.

Upton is a pretty girl, but it's hard to believe that someone who modeled her way onto multiple covers of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue could be that unaware of how she looks in front of a camera. Dead eyes, poor inflection, stiff mannerisms.... It's not sexy if I can't bear to watch.

The ridiculous ad copy isn't doing her any favors, either. It would be hard to take anyone saying "other than what's about to come out of those trees" seriously. Maybe Sam Jackson. Come to think of it, he'd find a way to make that dress work, too.

Game of War must think that some eye-candy is going to translate directly into sales. Sorry, guys, but I don't make those sorts of choices with my dick. No matter how hard I try, it's simply no good at manipulating a touchscreen.

Maybe I'm not the only one resistant to such blatant sex in advertising. Game of War: Fire Age took a huge hit in subscribers in the weeks after the campaign launched. It's still the second highest grossing app on the iPhone (to the tune of over a million dollars a day) but it's not downloaded nearly as often as it once was. Did it reach total market saturation, or was it a mistake to spend $40 million on ads featuring a bikini model moonlighting as an actress? The world may never know.

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I've been running this here blog for years, and while doing some housecleaning the other day, I discovered that one of my all-time favorite movie clips somehow got lost in one of several server relocations over the years. So I uploaded it to YouTube (which is 3 years younger than this blog) for all to enjoy!

Reb Brown will always be my Captain America!

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