Whiz of the Web: Monday Meat Slices

The best of the internet, chopped into tiny bits and grilled for your enjoyment.

• March 24th, 2007 has been declared Shutdown Day. You are challenged to turn off your computer, walk away, and don't turn it on again for an entire 24 hours. Can you handle it?! It sounds like an incredibly freeing little experiment to us - but also an incredibly frightening one! Do you mean we can't even look at our email? What if we need to Google something? What if we run into Johnny Depp at 12th and Market and we have to blog it immediately?! Aaaah! (Via Editor Jill)
• A dude on YouTube has done the bunnies one better and edited a bunch of popular movies down to their essential 5 seconds. Pretty funny stuff. Apropos of Something has a handy list of links to some of the best ones.
• Joel Schumacher is making a Nazi movie! It's a horror movie focusing on Hitler and Goebbels' obsession with the occult (you know, like they talked about in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Schumacher is untrustworthy as a filmmaker, but this one sounds intriguing to us.
• Apparently parents are angry about the awful things their children get to see in R-rated films these days and want a better indicator of whether an R-rated movie will be a "hard R" or a "soft R" (?!). You might say, "Isn't that what NC-17 is for?" but it turns out that there's pressure from the studios to discard NC-17 altogether because it's pretty much the kiss of death for any movie: Blockbuster won't carry NC-17 movies, and many newspapers won't run ads for them. The whole thing seems pretty silly to us. How about we have two ratings: OK for Kids, and Parents Decide? OK movies would be only the most completely unobjectionable stuff. For PD movies, information would be available for parents describing the most questionable scenes ("man is struck between legs with hammer") so they could decide if they want their kids to see that or not.
• Hmm... this is odd. It sounded like we had pretty official confirmation that Shia LaBeouf was going to be playing Indy's son in Indy 4, but Shia himself is saying there's no truth to it, and it's just a rumor.
• Speaking of Indy 4, apparently in order to avoid the opening weekend for that film, and for the next Narnia movie, Warner Bros. has moved Speed Racer up to a May 9, 2008 release. Go, Speed Racer, go!
• Halloween fans can rest easy about at least one thing: Rob Zombie will be keeping the original musical theme in his re-imagining.
• Despite our bad review, everybody and his brother went to see 300 this weekend. Actually, we're beginning to think it's because of our bad reviews; the past three weekends, the film that CinePhillyist labelled "Most Likely to Suck" got the top spot at the box office. We think the studios should start deliberately convincing CinePhillyist that their movies will suck; soon they'll be swimming in the cash!

More after the jump...