According to this Boing Boing post, 11 7-Eleven stores are going to be remade as Kwik-E-Marts to promote the Simpsons Movie.

If all goes as planned, the convenience store chain plans to refit 11 stores across the U.S. to resemble the front of the Kwik-E-Mart, the convenience store that Homer and other characters frequent in the classic cartoon TV series.

Customers also will be able to buy products inspired by the nearly two-decades-old show, including KrustyO's cereal, Buzz Cola and iced Squishees (the cup says Squishee, but the contents will be Slurpee).

If there is one of these anyway near where I live, I'll definitely go just to take pictures. I wonder if they'll be selling any Duff.

At first I dismissed Desktop Tower Defense as yet another tower defense game. I didn't even bother checking it out. After I saw it popping up all over the place, I decided to give it a try. It's a really great game actually. It involves a bit more strategy then your standard tower defense game since you start off with a totally clean playing field and you have to place your towers strategically to get the enemy to go where you want. Also, the boss enemies are really tough. Definitely try out easy mode first to get used to the game.

This is a bit of a cheat, because I already posted most of this in the movies folder on the bbs two weeks ago. Oh well. The first thing I said to Ric after the movie was that this movie had a lot of similarities to Gladiator (soldiers, shots of hay fields, the ideal of a wife and young son back at home), but I definitely preferred 300.

The movie had a good sense of humor mixed in with a lot of very cool action, and I liked the artistic aspect as well (although, with all that cgi blood spatter, I did think it was funny that the soldiers didn't have any blood spatter on their bodies).

One complaint I have is that they made Xerxes seem pretty feminine, what with the eyebrows, his body posture, and the back massage he gave to Leonidas (and I didn't like how they altered his voice). I just laughed at every scene he was in instead of thinking of him as a threat. I know they were trying to portray him as seductive, but I thought the attempt was a failed one.

The movie did contain a few characters/ideas that seemed too familiar, as if I'd already seen them in other movies, but overall I really enjoyed this take on Spartan soldiers, showing them to be warriors to the core. I was glad they included the line from the wife, "Come back with your shield or on it," because that's one of the things that stuck in my mind when I first learned about the Spartans in 7th grade.

Gerard Butler is a man's man here, definitely showing ability to adapt, considering that he was singing away as the Phantom not very long ago. I always thought he did a nice job in Dear Frankie too; I'm going to have to keep my eye on him.

In the end, style and action won out overall, and I was thoroughly entertained (and I definitely felt like working out after I saw it!).

Here are the first set pictures from Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. So it seems that this film is actually going to be made. I was a little skeptical at first because there have been rumors of bringing the musical to movie theaters for several years (at one point Sam Mendes was reported to be directing). I'm excited that Tim Burton is doing it. It's just the kind of weird, macabre, yet ever-so-slightly humorous story that Burton does well.

If you have not had the pleasure of seeing Sweeney Todd, I highly recommend watching the stage production with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury (yes, THAT Angela Lansbury). As my college Intro to Theater professor said, it's a musical for people who hate musicals (unless you see no humor in a Vicorian-era barber who murders his customers and sends them downstairs to an accomplice who cooks them into meat pies to be sold to unwitting Londoners, in which case you may want to stay away from this one).

Picture credit: Perez Hilton, via film ick.