Back in June, I was the guest on SOLDOUTcast, the awesome weekly podcast created by my friends Aaron and Mike.

Check these guys out — they put a lot of humor and heart into what they do, and the sky's the limit when it comes to discussion topics.

On my first guest appearance, we performed a script I wrote that basically turned their podcast into a post-apocalyptic action movie. You can listen to the original installment here.

And now we've done the sequel, which is available here.

And you should listen to it, because it's kind of amazing.

Mike's fiancée Tiffany was able to play herself this time (though Mike's impersonation of her in Part 1 was pretty hilarious), and the guys' guest host for #22, our friend Greg Wilson, steps up to rescue us all from the clutches of evil before everything goes all Empire Strikes Back at the end.

The stakes have never been so high.

The massive amount of time and care that Mike put into editing this thing is flabbergasting, and the vocal performances from everyone are off the charts. Greg makes for a mighty Iron King, and when Aaron is called upon to express the greatest sorrow any man has ever felt about anything, all I can say is that you'll feel it, too.

Here are just some of the things that happen in the sequel:

Flaming pig monsters!

Christina Hendricks in furry space lingerie!

Battles!

Sex!

Mythology!

Shortcuts!

Escapes!

It's out of control, and ready for consumption.

Please let Aaron and Mike know what you think.

And yes, I wrote myself into a romantic relationship with Erica Durance of television's Smallville.

So sue me!

She turns 42 today. This photo, from her official website, was taken in April.

Read all about it here.

I loved the first two Spider-Man movies. Especially the second one.

Then the third one came along and … I can't even talk about it anymore.

But here's the review I did back in 2007. I don't own the first two on Blu-Ray because they're only available in a three-pack with the third one, and that piece of garbage isn't allowed in my home.

Anyway, when director Sam Raimi and Sony couldn't agree on the direction for a fourth film, Raimi and his cast (including Peter Parker himself, Tobey Maguire) were let go in favor of a total franchise reboot with new helmer Marc Webb (of (500) Days of Summer fame) in charge. The new film will reportedly take Peter back to high school and do everything all over again, with more emphasis on the teen angst stuff.

Eh.

After Spider-Man 3, there really wasn't much of anything they could have done to restore my interest in this character. Maybe this new movie will be awesome, and I hope it is, but I'll have to see and read a lot more about it before I can decide if I'm even excited.

In the meantime, best wishes and good luck to Mr. Garfield and his giant fucking hair.

For all the movies and television series that have been made about Robin Hood, and as much as I love anything involving bows and arrows and swords and heroics, I've really not seen that many of them. But I absolutely love Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which was directed by Kevin Reynolds, who made another of my favorites, The Count of Monte Cristo.

What wasn't to love? You had Alan Rickman and Michael Wincott in the rogues gallery and, as my friend Rhiannon eloquently (and correctly) stated, "Any movie that has Morgan Freeman flinging a scimitar at a witch is a winner." Couldn't have said it better myself.

While Costner's take was more of a fun adventure, the new version by director Ridley Scott — starring Russell Crowe as the legendary hero — goes for more of an historical angle. And though there are points in its hefty running time where it can't quite decide whether to be a sweeping historical epic or a smaller, nobler harbinger of the events that defined a nation and created an outlaw, I really can't name a single scene or performance that didn't work for me, and I can't wait to revisit it on Blu.

King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) has fallen in battle, and Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) is charged with returning the crown to England with the news. But Loxley and his men are brutally murdered in an ambush set by Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong), whose French lineage means his allegiances aren't entirely to his own countrymen.

Interrupting the slaughter — and also interrupting the fleeing Godfrey's face with an arrow that needed to go just a little to the right — is Robin Longstride (Crowe), an archer who, along with comrades Alan A'Dale (Alan Doyle), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Little John (Kevin Durand), had to sit out the battle at the mercy of the King's probation.

Robin promises the dying Loxley that he'll finish his mission for him. But Loxley gives him yet another task — returning the sword of his father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max Von Sydow), to his family home, where the woman who's now his widow, the Lady Marian (Cate Blanchett), still waits for her husband's return.

Robin and his merry men decide the easiest way to do this and then quickly disappear from history would be to don the armor of the fallen men, and so they do, with Robin impersonating Loxley. The news is delivered. Next, the sword. But nothing else that happens is remotely that easy.

The elder Sir Loxley — with an infectious glimmer in Von Sydow's eye despite the character's blindness — is far from offended by Robin's impersonation of his son. In fact, he's thrilled by it, and wishes Robin to continue the charade. Lady Marian obliges her father-in-law despite being initially disgusted by the idea, but of course she warms to Robin as the story goes on.

And I love the chemistry between Crowe and Blanchett. Robin has never known how to be anything but a warrior, and Marian never got the chance to learn how to be a wife. So even though neither of them is a spring chicken, romance is still something relatively new to them — and more than a little terrifying. It's one of my favorite aspects of the film, and I almost wish it had been given a little more time.

But we've also got to make room for the new King John (Oscar Isaac), crowned in the wake of his brother's death despite the legitimate misgivings of his mother, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine (Eileen Atkins). And his choice of queen, Isabella of Angoulême (Léa Seydoux, whose succulent lines reminded me of a dirty French Scarlett Johansson), doesn't do Eleanor's peace of mind any favors, either. (Also look out for a French lieutenant played by Denis Menochet, who played Seydoux's father, Perrier La Padite, in one of last year's most amazing performances in Inglorious Basterds.)

When the new king sends his lapdog Godfrey to collect taxes from the beleaguered citizens as the French plot a siege against England's southern coast, the barons look for a leader and a hero.

Guess who?

Throw in some Magna Carta intrigue and a wild, appropriately outrageous beachfront battle at the end, and you've got a big, exceedingly well-made film that looks fantastic and entertains with plenty of style.

Russell Crowe is really fantastic here, inspiring during big speeches and suitably reserved when quiet moments demand it. Between this and the excellent Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the Australian actor is doing England proud.

The movie also did nothing to abate the deep and mighty love I hold in my heart for Cate Blanchett, whose otherworldly beauty shines through Marian, no matter how plain they try to make her look.

William Hurt is also amazing as William Marshal, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, who served four kings and earned a reputation as the greatest knight who ever lived. Hurt's performance will make you believe it, and he shares one of the film's best and tensest scenes in a hallway with Strong.

If you're looking for a Robin Hood movie where Robin and his Merry Men run around the woods and interfere with the best laid plains of the Sheriff of Nottingham, you won't find it here. And I like that, because we've all seen that story. Robin Hood aims the arrows of its narrative at a more historical context while capably holding true to the heart of the legend we all recognize and love.

Married geneticists Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) have created Fred and Ginger, a pair of strange, lumpy lifeforms they hope to mine for proteins and other things that can cure diseases and forward science by leaps and bounds. The only thing missing from the formula is human DNA, and the corporation funding their research — for reasons both political and moral — is way too terrified to go there.

But Elsa isn't.

Soon she's got Clive spending late nights in the lab that lead to the secret creation of an oddly adorable — though noticeably temperamental — little female creature they end up naming "Dren," which is the reverse of their acro-named lab, N.E.R.D. (Nucleic Exchange Research and Development).

Dren develops quickly and unpredictably, becoming an oddly, otherly, fascinatingly beautiful young … woman? Her ability to breathe underwater, her strange, birdlike legs, and her tail with the poisonous stinger at its end are only the beginnings of transformations in directions that Clive and Elsa could never have expected — but should have.

Equally unpredictable are the things Dren's arrival unlocks within Clive and Elsa themselves after they try to hide her at the deserted farm where Elsa grew up, and the chances they take (and don't) to try to make sense of this reckless, game-changing thing they've done.

And it all ends very, very badly … with a twist.

Splice looks and feels pretty fantastic on a low budget, for which director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali should be quite proud. The special effects are a subtle and effective blend of practical and digital, with French knockout Delphine Chanéac conducting a massive amount of facial performance through the makeup. Dren only communicates through chirps and clicks, making Chanéac's job doubly hard. She rises to it, and she's every bit as fascinating as the character demands.

As for Brody and Polley, much is asked of each of them in what turns out to be a very hardcore cautionary tale. Much of the film's increasingly bizarre and troubling second half depends on these two to sell it, and they commit to it entirely. Brave work for everyone involved, even though I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about the ending.

And that's the kicker — I wish the script had given the same amount of effort as the actors. It's a film that I'm glad I saw because I'd been curious about it for months, and I enjoyed it a lot for what it was, but I won't buy it and probably won't ever watch it again.

At this point, I'm going to start talking in detail about some things that happen in the movie while completely spoiling the ending, so if you're planning to see it, please stop reading right now.

Are you still here?

This is your last chance to turn back. MAJOR SPOILERS INCLUDING THE ENDING in 10 …

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Okay.

Dren seduces Clive (though she really doesn't have to try) into a graphic sexual encounter, which Elsa of course walks in on. This, of course, is only after Elsa's own deep-seated mommy issues raise their ugly heads twice — first when she secretly encodes her own DNA into Dren, and again when she strips Dren naked in a dehumanizing, demoralizing move before forcibly removing Dren's stinger. (Though like a shark's tooth, it grows back.)

And then, by the end, Dren switches genders and becomes a winged male monstrosity that kills Clive and rapes Elsa before Elsa beats her/him/it to death with a rock.

Here's my thing — I love action in movies, and I don't mind violence. But one thing that immediately takes me out of a movie is rape, or even the threat of it. I watch movies to be taken someplace else, and to escape, and since there's nothing more vile to me than rape, I just can't handle it.

For example, it's the reason that the movie Shooter is completely ruined for me, because the heavily implied rape of Kate Mara's character not only adds nothing to the film but turns it into something else entirely. It begins and ends as a a fun, action-packed throwback to classic '80s action movies like Commando with a modern Bourne twist, but the tonal change introduced by the nastiness of that subplot yanked me right out of the movie to the extent that I just never really got back into it. Shameful and cheap.

In Splice, the rape at least goes with the territory … to an extent. As I was watching the moments leading up to it, I kept thinking, "Well, as weird and as crazy as this is getting, at least they're not having Dren rape Elsa." And then, of course, it happened. It's not nearly as graphic as it could have been, but I still draw a pretty firm line in the sand about that sort of thing.

What ultimately kills the final confrontation for me is that Dren is now entirely unrecognizable, and I think it would have been a lot more screwed up if they'd kept Chanéac as Dren instead of putting a man under the makeup. That way we'd still at least connect with the fact that the Dren we'd come to know was still in there somewhere, but instead we get a pretty standard chase scene with a brand new monster/rapist.

And then there's the epilogue, which reveals that Elsa is pregnant with Dren's heaven-only-knows-what, and the original corporation is planning to buy whatever crazy thing she bears.

And Elsa, who previously resisted having a real baby with Clive but couldn't resist putting her own DNA into a creation that destroyed her life and created some kind of abominable new one within her, will have to live with this for the rest of her days. Assuming she survives the birthing process, I guess, which she's obviously counting on doing so she can spend the money they're paying her.

Pretty brutal and twisted, though I think the chase scene aspect of the preceding minutes makes the epilogue less thought-provoking than it could have been.

Like I said, I'm glad I watched it for my original curiosity's sake, but I won't be revisiting this one again.

Trivia: Clive is named for Colin Clive, who played the Promethian doctor in 1931's Frankenstein, and Elsa is named for his daughter in Ghost of Frankenstein.

… and accompanying article here.

I think this looks fantastic, and especially worthy of note is the fact that Thor actor Chris Hemsworth is huge. Natalie Portman (playing mortal doctor Jane Foster) isn't exactly Lou Ferrigno, but he dwarfs her.

And check out the shot of people running at the 1:59 mark — it's ridiculous (in a good way) how much Hemsworth towers over everyone else.

(I don't recognize the other running man, but the other girl is the amazing Kat Dennings, on whom I have a mighty crush.)

We also get glimpses of Sir Anthony Hopkins (complete with shiny eye patch) as Thor's father, Odin, and massively talented Idris Elba as Heimdall.

There's been a lot of controversy among fans about the cast of Elba, a black man, as a Viking god, and Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano as Hogun of the Warriors Three.

I'm entirely fine with it, because the Asgardians here are not Vikings. They're beings who were simply worshiped by the Vikings as gods. Big difference, so it doesn't really matter what they look like. As long as the actors are good, we should be in good shape. And with Kenneth Branagh directing, you know he's going to get the best out of all of his entire cast.

As a side note, another of the Warriors Three, Fandral, is being played by local New Albany native Joshua Dallas, so big congratulations to him for landing a part in what's sure to be a hit.

Thor brings the thunder to a theater near you on May 6, 2011!

And don't forget to read my exclusive interview with Eric Allan Kramer, the original live-action Thor from The Incredible Hulk Returns, right here, and see the first official photo of Hemsworth in costume here.

P.S. The interviewer almost reminded me of … this.

This was their eleventh episode, which I consider a really cool milestone for them — doing 10 of anything is great, but 11 means you're here to stay. And with new guests signing up all the time, you'd better believe they're ready to hang around.

You should become their fan on Twitter and Facebook to get updates on upcoming topics and guests, and guys, I'd love to come back and do it again.

Be sure to check out all the previous episodes, too. Each podcast is about an hour, and Aaron and Mike really put a lot of heart, thought, hilarity, and fun into each one.

Of special interest in my guest-starring role on this week's episode is SOLDOUTcast: The Movie, in which we read an 11-page radio play that I wrote about Aaron and Mike and their efforts to carve out order and bring back hope in a lawless, mutant-ridden apocalypse. (Warning! Adult language and situations!)

We also talk about movies, music, and other topics as I answer the legendary SOLDOUTcast Questionairre.

You can check it out by clicking here or on the SOLDOUTcast logo below:

A huge thanks to Aaron and Mike for having me on and providing such a fun time, and of course for acting skills that would make Clooney weep.

Also, extra special thanks to Aaron for suggesting the theme music that's right up my alley, and to Mike for going above and beyond the call of duty with editing and sound effects.

You guys are the best.

Now, I'm not sayin' I've been everywhere and seen every DVD, but I do know it's a pretty amazing planet we live on here, and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think there's not a better home video format in this universe.

So when some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your DVD player, taps your years-out-of-print Big Trouble in Little China 2-disc Special Edition DVD (reviewed here) up against the wall, looks you crooked in the eye, and asks you if you have it in on Blu, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye and remember what ol' John Bierly always says at a time like that:

"Have you seen it in HD, John?"

"Yes, sir. The Blu is in the player."

It's hard to believe it's been 23 years since tough-guy trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) and his buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) followed the trail of Wang's kidnapped gal-pal to Little China, where the Sing Dings — or was it the Chang Sings? — and the Wing Kongs got their little gang war interrupted by some "David Lo Pan" character, who came out of thin air in the middle of a goddamn alley while his buddies were flying around on wires cutting everybody to shreds, and he just stood there waiting for them to drive Jack's truck through him with light coming out of his mouth.

(Tall guy. Weird clothes. First you see him, then you don't.)

And then Jack and Wang got into bigger trouble, and Jack didn't know where the hell they were a bunch of times, and he wondered where his truck was, and good ol' Johnny Carpenter directed it all with charm and wit the old-fashioned way. Lots of monsters and top-notch chop-socky later and the day had been saved, just like in the old days. May the wings of liberty never lose a feather, I always say. Not to mention the fact that Suzee Pai and Kim Catrall were hotter than two-dollar pistols.

So is the Blu-ray the best this movie's ever looked? I'd bet Egg Shen's tour bus on it. A light layer of natural film grain brings out the finest details, and the colors look deeper and brighter than your favorite eyes have ever seen 'em. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track serves up 1:1 lossless sonic action so capably that it shakes the pillars of Heaven, Wang. And if that's not enough for you, tune in to the (also lossless!) isolated musical score, where the drums are rumblin' and the guitars are slashin'. Eight deleted scenes, an extended ending, three trailers, six TV spots, interviews, ancient makings-of, the theme song's music video, and a crackerjack commentary by Russell and Carpenter are just some of the extra goodies here. They took what they wanted and left the rest — like your salad bar! — when it came to bringing over the extras from the 2001 2-disc DVD, but that thing's out of print, and all the best stuff made it anyway.

So just remember what ol' John Bierly does when the earth quakes and the poison arrows fall from the sky. John Bierly just looks that big ol' storm right square in the eye, and he says, "Give me your best shot, pal. My Big Trouble in Little China Blu-ray and I can take it."

That's why I need you good people to sit tight, hold the fort, and keep the home fires burning. And if I'm not back in 100 minutes, call the President.