There was a recent story that got picked up by the world media concerning some vintage footage surrounding the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 feature film, The Circus. In it, you can see someone walking down the street with a hand-to-ear like they’re talking on a cell phone. This, obviously enough, was seized upon as sure proof that time travel does (or will — this sort of thing is fuzzy when it comes to time travel) exist. The footage and the story was an internet meme and news sensation for five whole minutes and held everybody’s attention for about the same amount of time it takes the cell-phone chatter from the future to cross the film frame. A few seconds.

Now that it’s all blown over and media attention has been safely refocused on trivial matters like mid-term elections, I would like to point out that the argument for a futuristic sightseer walking around outside a 1928 movie premiere falls apart on three key points.

Time travel doesn’t exist today. If it did, they’d be selling tours of 1863 Gettysburg to Ted Turner and his reenactor history-nerd buddies in order to jump-start the American economy. If it exists at all, it has to be a future tech. So if that’s a future person walking around in an old movie, why do they have such a large, conspicuous cell phone? Wouldn’t they have some more advanced blue-tooth thingie stuck deep in their ear canal where it won’t draw the attention of all the primitives?

Then there’s the question of who exactly are they talking to? I don’t know what the roaming fees are like in your area, but how much do you think it’s going to cost you to be able to call someone in the future from the distant past? Especially when you’re calling from a time before satellites. Good luck getting more than a couple of bars on that connection. Can you hear me now? No, asshole, you’re in the wrong fucking century.

And I have a quibble about the location. Here’s how the conversation would probably go down.

“Dude! I’m totally at the premiere of an oldie-timey Charlie Chaplin movie!”

“Who the hell is Charlie Chaplin?”

Less than a century later, people today don’t watch black and white movies, let alone silent movies. If film geeks from the future ever plan to infiltrate some old cornerstone of pop culture, it will probably play out more like this:

“Dude! I’m totally on the set of the original Avatar movie and James Cameron is every bit the megadouche our history books told us he was!”

“Sweet! Is it awesomely cool?”

“Not really. Everybody’s covered in Ping-Pong balls and acting against a green screen.”

“Did you meet anybody famous?”

“Only the greatest leading man of twenty-first century cinema!”

“Joel Moore?”

“Fuck yeah! Oh, and I met Sam Worthington too.”

“Who the hell is Sam Worthington?”

“He was the guy in the original cut before George Lucas edited him out for the twentieth anniversary special edition following James Cameron’s tragic death in an ego inferno.”

“So the world back then still hadn’t discovered the destructive potential of overinflated egos and harnessed their might for war and demolition purposes yet?”

“Nah, they were all primitive and shit.”

So bottom line: there are no time travellers from the present or near-future visiting film sets and attending premieres. The real time travellers are the humans who have evolved into bug-eyed, lily-white, bald midgets and visit us in flying saucers that are frequently mistaken for alien space ships. At least that’s the compelling theory put forth by some deep thinkers who point out that it’s probably easier for super-evolved humans to travel back from the future than for aliens thousands of light years away to hop a ride to our backwoods planet. That means all the little dudes they have on ice at Area 51 are just us a few untold eons down the road from now, not invaders from another galaxy.

So what do we have to look forward to in the future, other than universal hair loss, a complete abandonment of tanning salon technology, and poor bone development? Apparently we turn into a bunch of bumpkin-abducting anal-probing scientists on an archaeological dig up the asses of our ancestors in order to discover what it is we all seem to be looking for in each other’s colons. The future folk have seen enough of our broadcast media, still bouncing around the stratosphere in future centuries, to have come up with all sorts of unanswered questions about our current society. Like how do people like Snooki and John Boehner achieve such a healthy, vibrant orange complexion? Why does NBC keep backing Jay Leno in the late-nite wars? And what’s the deal with the ass-obsession thing? They get that last one from prison dramas and porn.

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Not since the mass return of unwanted AOL discs to the company of origin have I seen such a worthy recycling/protest project with the message, “Stop printing so much shit we don’t want!” Just like newspapers everywhere, it’s time for the Yellow Pages to admit that their day is done and close shop before any more hapless forests get pulped to sustain their dying enterprise. This video features Montreal activists rounding up all those unwanted tomes and dumping them on the doorstep of the culprits, while this anecdote reveals the lengths the brown shirts at the Yellow Pages will go to intimidate people into keeping their failed business model afloat.

I have reached a state of clear. And not in that creepy Church of Scientology sort of way.

The last eight months of my life have been non-stop work and contractual obligations. After writing nine more episodes of Kid vs. Kat, a feature film treatment, two Telefilm applications, and a not-so-short short story, I’m finally past all my deadlines.

Now, at last, I have time to comment about the pressing issues of the day. To think of all the Earth-shattering world events that have passed this blog by without so much as a single snarky cheap shot from me. Like Larry King Live’s 25th Anniversary coinciding with Larry King’s 25th divorce. Or Lindsay Lohan’s exploding cocaine shoes. Or Sandra Bullock’s black baby that she just adopted from Madonna. Oh well, I’m sure there are plenty of celebrity deaths and shitstorms yet to come this year. I’ll just have to console myself with that happy thought.

Ever since Captain Underpants tried to blow up a commercial jet with explosives hidden under his ball sack, air travel has turned into an ordeal only slightly less luxurious than a prison bus trip to the new wing of the super-max detention facility. Very nearly known as the Christmas Day Taint Massacre, the thought of what might have happened if this would-be suicide bomber had been competent enough to light a fuse has gripped a worried world. I mean, MY GOD, one flight out of the ten million airliner passenger runs last year may have possibly, perhaps, we’re-not-quite-sure, ended in disaster. Which would have increased the number of airliner disasters last year…um…slightly.

Remember when air travel was glamorous and exotic? Back when you could smoke and drink to your heart’s content and stewardesses, most of them blonde and Swedish, would perform any variety of sexual acts with you in your choice of toilet stall or first-class seat. Well I remember that, and a great many other things I learned from watching 1970s pornography, and I miss those times terribly. Mostly because I never experienced them due to inconvenient age issues.

Well those heady days of hot stewardess head are gone forever. If a stewardess touches you inappropriately now, it’s probably because she’s performing a digital cavity search for banned substances like finger nail clippers, tweezers, or C4. New security measures are in place, with more on the way, and we won’t see them rescinded in this lifetime. I expect we’ll be stuck with this crap forever — or at least until Brundlefly perfects his teleportation machine. Yes, congratulations Captain Underpants, you’ve ruined it for everybody.

Which brings us to James Cameron.

I finally saw Avatar or, as I like to call it when I’m feeling snide (which, let’s face it, is pretty much all the time), Dances With Smurfs. Third time was lucky, because 3D IMAX tickets are booked weeks in advance, with any convenient days sold out completely as I found out the hard way twice before. Avatar has become the fastest movie to reach the one billion box-office mark. Apparently, the secret to accomplishing this feat is to charge people damn near twenty bucks for a ticket. If only someone had thought to charge, say, a hundred bucks a pop to go see Hotel for Dogs, that could have become the box-office champ of the year. Or at least the opening weekend.

After ten years of development, Avatar is being rolled out as the big game-changer. There’s innovative special effects technology poured into it by the tanker load. It’s just too bad the story itself doesn’t offer a single drop of originality. There’s not one thing here I haven’t seen before at some point, and the overall plot can be traced back to somewhere around the genesis of literature itself. In case you were too busy being dazzled by the eye candy and weren’t paying attention to what you were told by the often clunky exposition, it goes something like this: Invading imperialist-colonialist comes to appreciate the beauty of aboriginal culture and goes native, turning against his former masters in a righteous battle to avoid all-out genocide. Yeah, seen that one before. About a hundred times. Just not with smurfs.

Nevertheless, because Cameron’s new film is so successful, we’re going to see a million billion knock-offs and copycats in the coming decade. Everyone will want to make their own 3D movie, ignoring the fact that 3D has always been a gimmick, revived once a generation, that does more to take you out of a movie than draw you in. Everyone will want to fill their movie with computer-generated motion-capture performances, even though you can never replace real acting by a real human being. And everyone will want to plagiarize whatever content they saw in the last World of Warcraft patch and turn it into an action sequence or plot point. Sure, I liked the part where he got his epic flying mount, but did the movie really have to cut to a loading screen right after that?

Yes, congratulations James Cameron, you’ve ruined it for everybody. Again.

That’s right, again. He’s just too damn influential, and whatever shit he tries in whatever movie he’s shooting catches on and spreads like the swine flu (you know, like if the swine flu had actually spread and become the promised pandemic… Sorry, bad analogy).

Movie titles referred to by acronyms? T2. His fault. Movies with an unstoppable killing machine? Terminator. His fault. Monster movie sequels where all they can think to do with their cool monster design is multiply it a couple hundred times over? Aliens. His fault. Movies where the creatures are all computer graphics that don’t quite gel with how physics actually works? T2 and The Abyss. His fault. Movies where some spectacular historical event, recreated with an unsurpassed level of detail, is ultimately ruined by a trite and stupid romantic sub-plot? Titanic. His fault. Movies where carnivorous flying fish terrorize humanity by soaring through the air and being all bitey? Piranha Two: The Spawning. His bloody fault.

Goddamn you James Cameron, who elected you king of the world? Oh wait. We did. At the box office.

Zoe Saldana tries to form an expression for director, Papa Smurf, despite slow computer processing times caused by pop-up ads, cookies, MMORPGs, telesynch bit torrents, Windows Vista, virus definition updates, Nigerian identity theft spam, Youtube cat videos, Chinese hacker assaults, IP crashes, and Steve the new intern who doesn’t know which button is the “any key.”

I’m supposed to be working on the first draft of Sex Tape right now. The deadline is less than a week away. But it’s hot and unpleasant out, I don’t really feel like tying plot threads together, and the news cycle has just reached critical mass. I can’t take it anymore, and I must invoke my right to an intermission long enough to comment.

In brief:

Michael Jackson

This will be the most interesting autopsy of the century.

Farrah Fawcett

Okay, I admit it. I had that poster too.

Richard Nixon

Who can ever get enough of Nixon’s unreleased audio tapes? Man, that guy recorded everything. There are probably another twenty hours of bathroom flatulence carefully numbered and catalogued and yet to enter the public record as The White House Toilet Tapes. If you missed the latest ones, they include snippets of conversation featuring Tricky Dick telling his wife about a breakthrough in diplomatic talks with China, discussing going out to dinner with his daughter, and advocating abortion in the case of interracial pregnancy.

It really humanizes him.

Perez Hilton

Let me personally thank you for the greatest tearful video blog since the “Leave Britney Alone!” guy squeezed off a few to establish himself as the Alpha drama-queen of the new millennium. Perez managed to work himself up into a frenzy following some fisticuffs with the Black Eyed Peas in Toronto this week. Don’t worry though. Perez, despite an overacted performance of Shatneresque proportions, seems to be just fine. Which is the part I don’t understand.

You get into an altercation with an entire hip-hop band, and this is what you walk away with? A little boo-boo? I’ve done worse things to myself shaving. If you’re going to rant about a beat-down and press charges, you’d better look at least half as bad as Rihanna.

Come on celebrities of the 21st century! Learn how to mix it up. If this had been Sinatra, you’d all be dead.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

If you’re going to fake election results, do it plausibly. Don’t overplay your hand and go for an ego-enhancing landslide victory. No one will buy it. Here are half-a-dozen handy tips to help you know when you’re taking your fake election a little too far.

1. If results show your challenger failed to carry his own home town.

2. If there’s more than a 100% voter turn-out in some regions.

3. If there’s a giant nation-wide protest despite your supposed 60% support.

4. If you have to shoot and beat huge numbers of people who supposedly back your government just to maintain order.

5. If your media outlets have to stop covering the election in favour of cooking shows and medical documentaries.

6. If your attempt to pin unrest on western influence falls flat even in the middle east.

Despotic pseudo-democracies of the world take note. I’m looking at you too, America. Obama’s election still doesn’t erase the 2000 presidential clusterfuck.

The Jon and Kate divorce

Um, yeah. Actually, I don’t even know who the hell these people are and I don’t want to.

Moving on.

James von Brunn

If you’re going to go out in a blaze of anti-Semitic glory and shoot up a Holocaust museum, you might want to scrub your hard drive of all the kiddie porn you have stashed there first. Because, guess what, the police are going to swing by your house after your killing spree and check out what you have on your home computer. Now, I know, you figured everyone was going to despise you anyway for being such a hate-mongering murderous Nazi dick, but as it turns out, it actually IS possible for us to think even less of you. Go figure.

Kim Jong-il

Congratulations on naming your least-embarrassing son your successor as the North Korean head of state. One tip though. When seeking a smooth transition of power, do not start a nuclear war. In fact, starting any war at a moment like this is probably a bad idea. A threat of war doesn’t play much better either.

I know you like a parade. Everybody likes a parade. But when you’re rattling your sabre, don’t do the whole gigantic army-parade thing. I know it looks really impressive to have all your troops marching down main street in lock-step formation. But it makes a really tempting target. Every time we see that in the west, we don’t think “Wow, I’m so intimidated.” We think more along the lines of, “One napalm fly-by and that war’s over before it even starts.”

It’s a point of strategy. Read The Art of War. It’s probably covered in there somewhere.

Mark Sanford

Argentina is a long way to go for a booty call. Look, I get it, I’m a guy. Sometimes you’re so damn horny, flying to Argentina to get your knob polished sounds like a good idea. If you gotta do it, you gotta do it. When you don’t gotta do it, is when you’re the governor of a whole state and will be instantly missed by your staff, your wife, your family, the entire population of South Carolina, and the national news media.

Also not a super idea: going on an out-of-country booty call with public funds.

But best of luck with that presidential run in 2012 just the same!

Okay, I got that off my chest. Now back to work on my dirty movie. 105 pages and counting.

I just got back from the new Star Trek movie. Because I’m a geek. Not such a big geek that I saw it opening weekend, but close. You can call me a Trekkie, I don’t mind. If I did mind, I’d insist on being called a “Trekker” — and those people are some seriously messed-up Trekkies.

You know what? The new Trek movie was good. In keeping with the tradition established by Nicholas Meyer in Wrath of Khan, if the series is on the rocks and needs to be saved, hire someone who doesn’t give two shits about Trek to make the next one. You might get a real story out of it, instead of a bunch of pseudo-science techno babble and bullcrap about the prime directive. Yeah, despite all the fan fretting, it really gelled. Except…

Star Trek producer folk, you have seriously got to do something about your villains. As in: get one. Someone. Anyone.

No no no. Casting the Hulk, covering him in tattoos and giving him pointy ears is not getting yourself a proper villain. He needs something to do, he needs a plan that makes sense, he needs some sort of real motivation. What did you give us? A pissed-off miner. You could have come up with anything in the universe, and that’s what you went with? So the villain who goes back in time and (spoiler alert!) destroys Vulcan and fucks up forty years worth of Trek continuity is coming from the same headspace as, say, the slasher from My Bloody Valentine? For serious?

Lame, forgettable villains is something that’s dogged this movie series right from the start. V’ger wasn’t a villain so much as a problem that had to be solved before it destroyed Earth. Same with the probe in Trek IV. Part VI was more of a conspiracy thingie with a Shakespeare-quoting Christopher Plummer playing an obnoxiously pretentious Klingon English-lit major. There’s KHAAAAAAAN! Obviously. But really, without the grudge baggage he brings from the Space Seed episode, all he really has to offer is Ricardo Montalban in a plastic chest yelling at Kirk over a sub-space frequency. The only half decent one was Christopher Lloyd in The Search for Spock because he hardly needed any makeup to play Klingon. He gets to be genuinely nasty at points, but mostly distinguishes himself by getting Shatner’s boot to the head in one of the most satisfyingly dismissive dispatchings of a villain I’ve ever seen.

Then there are those utterly forgettable Next Generation movies starting with Generations. How do you screw up Malcolm McDowell as your villain? Here’s how you direct McDowell as a villain: “Malcolm…go full-out Caligula. Action!” Then you just let him do his thing and edit out the bits where he dances around naked and fist-fucks men. Or not if you don’t care about your PG-13 rating.

I’d rant on about the subsequent villains in the series, but I can’t even remember any of them. I think there was a bald guy. And the guy with the nose prosthetic. And…um…the other guy with the nose prosthetic. And then, er…oh yeah. Nose-prosthetic guy.

But bad villains aren’t only plaguing the Star Trek franchise these days. James Bond is having his fair share of problems finding someone to match wits with. Look at the last two guys. An asthmatic accountant who weeps tears of blood? I spent the whole movie rooting for Bond to steal his lunch money and shove him into a mud puddle. And Mathieu Amalric as…well…just some guy. What a waste! Mathieu Amalric is perfectly capable of playing a memorable Bond villain. Just look at him in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In that movie he played a paralytic with locked-in syndrome, drooling all over himself, with one eye stitched closed and the other one wide, staring and blinking coded commands to his minions. What a fantastically creepy Bond villain! At the end of the movie, Bond could have made an unfunny quip about “going down” and pushed his wheelchair into an open elevator shaft. It writes itself. But come the actual Bond movie, what’s he playing? A young Roman Polanski by the look of things. Not very menacing unless you’re a 13-year-old girl.

It speaks volumes about the Brosnan years that the only good villains were hot chicks like Sophie Marceau and Famke Janssen. Then there were the Dalton years that gave us some guy who thought he was Pacino in Scarface and Joe Don Baker. No, really, Joe Don Baker. You have to go all the way back to Roger Moore’s run to find memorable Bond villains. Yaphet Kotto, Christopher Lee, Richard Kiel. Hell, Herve Villechaize! Even A View to a Kill had Christopher Walken and Grace Jones. Terrible bond flick, but bonus points for stunt casting.

To find any decent bad guys these days, you have to turn to comic book movies. But even with well-established villain characters who have been around for decades, you take your chances. Every superhero flick has villainitis now. Gone are the days when it was just Jack Nicholson or just Gene Hackman hatching some sinister plot. Hollywood’s thing today is to overcast their antagonists, loading each movie with multiple members of the rogues gallery until none of them have sufficient screen time to ply their trade. Even the Joker doesn’t get to solo the Dark Knight anymore. The Batman movies have been stacking baddies three-high for nearly twenty years, and I think the official villain count for Spider-Man 3 was thirty-seven.

How sad is it that to find a great over-the-top, gimmicky, freak-show of a super villain nowadays, you have to look to reality? You want a giant Arab terrorist mastermind living in a cave and hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine? Check. How about a pill-popping, morbidly obese blowhard with a bionic ear who uses the public airwaves to call for the failure and demise of the democratically elected American government? Got it. Did I hear you wanted a shadowy puppet master with his own personal death squad who has his exact whereabouts erased from the public record so he can torture his victims in private as a pacemaker keeps his black heart ticking? Turn on your TV. That guy‘s been doing a lot of interviews lately.