“You know when girls are like “Oh, I was so gone last night, I shouldn’t have seen that movie”? We can be that mistake!”

So, the music day is complete of our 2007 Pop Culture Hall of Fame Voting, and I’m fairly pleased with the voter turnout so far, but I’m hoping that it’s only a fraction of what’s to come–as I said yesterday, IF YOU READ THIS BLOG SEMI-REGULARLY AND PAID SLIGHT ATTENTION TO ANYTHING THIS YEAR, YOU SHOULD BE VOTING IN THIS. Vote for up to five choices (and one write-in if you feel there’s something I missed) either in the comments box below, or by e-mailing me at fadeout95@gmail.com. Remember, if you don’t feel like voting every day, you can also wait until the end and cast one complete ballot once the nominees for all categories have been announced. So let’s continue on with this year’s movie nominees, and don’t forget to vote for yesterday’s batch if you haven’t already:

John McClane Gets Creative in Live Free or Die Hard

“I was out of bullets,” explains McClane. I think most of us were pretty skeptical when we heard about Live Free or Die Hard–I know I was, especially when the PG-13 rating was announced. But that one single image from the previews–A car. Getting shot. Into a helicopter.–was more than enough to ensure my ass in the theaters. The rest of the movie had some ups and downs, but the car-helicopter collision alone ensures the movie’s worthiness as part of the Die Hard dynasty, and will surely go down as one of the canonical Cool Moments in Action Movie History.

The House in Knocked Up

If this is what post-grad life is actually supposed to be like, maybe I don’t have to be so terrified of graduating college after all. Featuring a cast that essentially amounts to the Apatow Dream Team–Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Martin Starr and Jason Segel–The House pictures a twenty-something utopia in which no one seems to have anything to do except drink, get high, dance to Ol’ Dirty Bastard and officiate Ping Pong games. Forget all that bizness with Katherine Heigl, kids and emotional maturity–this is your movie right here. Frankly, I cared less about whether Ben and Allison were gonna end up together as I did about whether Martin was gonna end up winning the beard bet or not.

Martin Scorsese: 1 for 8

Did anyone actually believe that Marty was gonna get his this year? Even after all the signs–the unanimous critical and commercial success, the Golden Globe, the slew of other Oscars The Departed had already picked up–it still didn’t seem possible, having been burned so many times before. Ultimately, I don’t know what’s more shocking, that Scorsese finally won an Oscar after 40 years and about a half-dozen Oscar-worthy films, or that he won one for a movie that didn’t suck, like, at all. Now the Academy look like fucking geniuses for passing Gangs of New York over.

Rose McGowan’s Machine Gun Leg in Planet Terror

Grindhouse–it didn’t quite turn out the way people thought it would. And maybe there was no way to market Death Proof and Planet Terror in a way that would’ve worked out better–maybe reviving a genre that only two people in the world still remembered and cared about just wasn’t a commercially viable proposition in the first place. It’s undeniable, though, that there was still some cool-ass shit to be found in both movies, including the most lasting image from either movie–Rose McGowan as the hottest one-legged character in all Pop Culture since Captain Ahab. I do wonder what people in the prosthetics business thought about the likelihood and practicality of having a machine gun leg, though–or did they just go, “why didn’t we think of that?“

Hey, Isn’t There a War Going On?

What the 9/11 was to film in 2006 (World Trade Center, United 93, and the best-titled movie of all-time, Sorry, Haters), the War in the Middle East was to film in 2007. And, being the patriotic country that we are, everyone decided to watch Transformers instead. Consequently, war-themed movies like Rendition, Paul “I won two Oscars last year, goddamn it!!” Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Peter Berg’s The Kingdom and Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs all fell by the wayside comemrcially, and most critically as well, proving once more that America still prefers stories about precocious wizards and motorcycle gangs than ones about what’s actually going on in the world. Not that I actually saw any of these movies either, of course–they looked depressing.

“My Skull’s on Fire, But I’m Good”

No, I haven’t actually seen Ghost Rider–yet–but I have seen the previews. Over. And over. And over. For the first two months of 2007, I couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing that annoying goth girl talking to Eva Mendes about Ghostie–”He had this rad chopper…it was all flames and stuff…his face a skull…and it was on fire…like, hhhchchhhchchch…it was an edge look, but he totally pulled it off.” And then, that immortal Cage sound byte. Wasn’t quite enough to get me to see the movie, but apparently it was for the great majority of America, as the movie ended up grossing over $100 mil. Can you blame them, really?

David O. Russell Gives Lily Tomlin a Piece of His Mind

Whoops. No one knows for sure who leaked the clips to the internet–George Clooney swears it wasn’t him, which confuses me somewhat as to why he should’ve been considered the primary suspect in the first place–but apparently Lily Tomlin is a real troublemaker, and David O. Russell is one nutso son of a bitch. Choosing the funniest part between Russell insisting “I’M JUST TRYING TO BE A FUCKING COLLABORATOR!!,” Russell appearing to be done with his rant but storming in from a different direction offset to continue to chew Tomlin out, or Russell shouting “I’M YELLING?!?? DO I FUCKING YELL AT YOU?!?!…before right now?” is indeed a tough one, but the whole clip is fairly golden, and became a deserved YouTube sensation earlier this year. Coming up in 2008: clips leaking of Tomlin getting verbally shellacked by 9 to 5 auteur Colin Higgins.

Young Seth’s Illustrations in Superbad

“When I was a little kid, I kinda had this…problem. And it’s not even that big of a deal, something like eight percent of kids do it, but whatever. For some reason, I don’t know why, I’d just kinda…sit around all day…and draw pictures of dicks.” And off it goes. I don’t even know what I was expecting Jonah Hill to say as his reasoning for hating Becca, the girl Michael Cera’s character crushes on for most of Superbad, but I was totally unprepared for the barrage of dick drawings–dicks as bars on a bar graph, dicks riding a bomb a la Dr. Strangelove, dicks standing up to tanks at Tiananmen Square, banana dicks, water-color dicks…a truly mind-blowing assembling of phallic art, all hand-crafted by Ben Goldberg, brother of writer/producer Evan. Special props to the Superbad producers for making this one of, like, the three hilarious scenes in the movie to not be spoiled by the previews, and super-special props to Casey Margolis as Young Seth, easily the most underrated performance in the movie.

Three is a Magic Number

If nothing succeeds like success, then 2007 set out to prove that even less succeeds like success’s successes (or something like that). The three pictured above–Spiderman 3, Pirate’s of the Carribean: At World’s End and Shrek the Third–were three of the four highest grossing movies of 2007, but they weren’t close to the only threequels to hit it big this year. Elsewhere on the list of top 25 grossers could be found The Bourne Ultimatum (#6), Rush Hour 3 (#12) and Ocean’s Thirteen (#21). Were any of them any good? Who knows–the Bourne one was the only I actually bothered to see (some pretty good chase scenes in that one). But next year, which with the upcoming Rambo and Indiana Jones movies looks to be the year of the IV, we’ll all be reminiscing about the good ol’ days, when movie plots were only recycled twice.

The Simpsons Movie Actually Gets Released

I remember browsing snpp.com or some other Simpsons bible site in Middle School and getting excited that it looked like they were finally getting working on the Simpsons movie, which was surely going to be the best thing ever. Flash forward TEN YEARS later and I’m…slightly less enthralled at the idea of a 90-minute Simpsons episode. And though some people seemed to actually be pleasantly surprised by it, my opinion of it was pretty mcuh what I expected–a couple laugh-worthy moments, ultimately a pale imitation of past glories with a distinctly hollow aftertaste. But I have to admit that the few weeks leading up to it were a whole lot of fun–the Kwik-E-Mart that opened near Times Square, the national Springfield competition, the Simpsons trivia contest my local pub quiz unit held (which, incidentally, me and three friends won, winning free passes to the movie). And ultimately it’s just crazy that they finally finished it and put it out–to a certain generation, it’s kind of like Brian Wilson putting out Smile or the Red Sox winning the World Series.

Honorable Mention:

The fake intro to Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
RZA, Common and T.I. in American Gangster
The Southland Tales trailer
“Pop! Goes My Heart” from Music & Lyrics
Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me

*VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE*