If you had assumed that the website “GreenLanternDC.com” went to the official site for the movie Green Lantern, the Warner Bros production of the DC comic, you’d be wrong. Because it actually goes to Green Lantern DC, a gay bar in Washington DC.  You know, the place with bars on the windows, that’s downstairs from The Toolshed. They offer a myriad of exciting promotions and drink specials, such as “bears do yoga”, underwear party, and shirtless men drink free.  Aw. I wish FilmDrunk headquarters was in DC, instead of crummy old non-gay San Francisco. (*kicks empty can, faint sound of house music*) … (*ntz*) (*ntz*) (*ntz*) (*ntz*) (*ntz*) (*ntz*)…

The Green Lantern has undergone a transcendental rebirth.  The original Green Lantern, which closed July 1999, was a small, dark bar, with black spray paint over the windows and a less-than-elegant atmosphere.  Now, a bright paint job, a new ventilation system and friendly staff [and new upholstery, hopefully -Ed.] have given the old place a new attitude.  Owner Greg Z. wanted to open a club that was an alternative to the established gay venues around the 17th and P Street scene, one where regular guys could meet in a casual, clean, and fun spot.

The central bar that sits square in the middle of the first floor is designed for a small crowd to engage in conversation.  The modified space also allows patrons to, as one regular remarked, “casually cruise and be cruised.”

Directly upstairs from the Green Lantern is the Toolshed, which caters to the “bear crowd” — rugged lumberjack types, although flannel is optional. [GreenLanternDC]

Don’t patronize me, block quote, I think I’m WELL aware what a “bear” is. So why is the bar called The Green Lantern, you ask?  Well because it’s the gayest superhero, of course.  You might think Superman is the gayest, because he wears a red cape and his underwear on the outside of his leotard.  Or Spider-Man, because he’s always running around the city in a spandex onesie, shooting his webbing on the baddest of bad boys. But The Green Lantern’s prized possession is a gaudy ring, which he won for going face-to-face with a purple-headed alien without showing fear.  That’s not an origin story, it’s Boy Scout Camp.

[Thanks to Jon Brown for the tip. Boy does that sound like a euphemism all of a sudden.]

Green Lantern‘s hype was no match for the fact that it looked kind of crappy this weekend, as it opened to a disappointing (for producers, not for moviegoers) $52.7 million.  That’s not terrible, but it is worse than Thor ($65 million), X-Men ($55.1 million), The Incredible Hulk ($55.4), or either of the two terrible Fantastic Four movies ($56m and $58m).  Not to mention that 45% of the gross came from higher-priced 3D screenings, putting the actual attendance more in line with Ghost Rider or Daredevil.  Bad news for Warner, who, according to the NY Times, spent $300 million to make and market it. Okay, on second thought, maybe it is pretty terrible.

“We’re trying very hard to deliver,” said Jeff Robinov, Warner’s top movie executive. “Yes, there is a lot at stake. But I try and frame these things in terms of my own expectations. If you look at ‘Batman Begins,’ it did about $370 million worldwide and got us to a sequel.” A whopper of a sequel in “The Dark Knight,” which earned more than $1 billion at the global box office and showered DVD money on the studio.
“It’s not a comic book movie as much as an epic adventure with huge scope and scale, a space opera in the vein of ‘Star Wars’ with an Earthbound ‘Top Gun’ vibe,” said Greg Berlanti, a producer of the movie and one of four credited writers.

“I try to temper things with my expectations, and I totally expect this B-list superhero comic about a poop tarantula from space fighting a magic ring to be comparable to Batman.”  I want what that dude was smoking.  Green Lantern will be lucky to make back its $300 million, and earning anything on a sequel would be a miracle seeing as how most people agree that this one kind of sucked real bad.  In other news, Mr. Popper’s Penguins debuted at number three with $18 million (on a $55 million production budget), and The Hangover II’s worldwide gross of $488 million surpassed the original’s $468 million.  Deadline says this means “the combined worldwide box office for both Hangover pics now exceeds $1 billion.” I don’t know what kind of space math they were using to make 468 million and 488 million add up to a billion, but in any case it’s the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time.  It just goes to support my thesis, people love watching monkeys do drugs.  Not only is it my thesis, it’s also the theme of my birthday party. (full top 10 and fantasy summer box office standings after the jump).

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WEEKEND MOVIE GUIDE: Unless you’re an extreme masochist, this seems like the perfect weekend to catch up on those overlooked smaller films, like Midnight in Paris, Tree of Life, Beginners, The Trip, or Submarine. I’d tell you if they were any good, but I’ve been suffering through crap like Green Lantern and Super 8 for you.  AVENGE ME!  Movies covered: Green Lantern, Mr. Popper’s Penguins (I didn’t see it, but Lindy West interviewed a 9-year-old about it), and HBO’s Summer Documentary series.

GREEN LANTERN: Ryan Reynolds and his ring of green jizz fog sex up Blake Lively, and help make the world safe from giant calamari monsters who suck out your skeleton for some reason.

RottenTomatoes: 24%

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

“Even by the standards of the current run of mediocre comic-book movies, this one stands out for its egregious shoddiness.” -Dana Stevens, Slate

“Even in the brainless world of cinematic comic books gone bad, it’s as bad as it gets — a dumb, pointless, ugly, moronic and incomprehensible jumble of botched effects, technical blunders, and cluttered chaos.” -Rex Reed, NY Observer

“Green Lantern is a new primer on how not to make a comicbook movie unless you want to screw sh*t up. Flat FX, smirky acting, clunky writing and clueless direction. WTF?” -Peter Travers, RS

Armchair Analysis: Again, I don’t really need the armchair here, as I already watched and reviewed it. The gist is that foundation of the movie is a conflict between two abstract concepts, as represented by two abstracted entities (different colored jizz fog from space).  Still, the badness of it is more fun than Super 8‘s slick pointlessness. At one point Blake Lively’s character actually says, “Hey, aren’t superheroes supposed to get the girl?”

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I wish I could tell you that Martin Campbell fought the good fight, and actually attempted to make a good movie.  I wish I could tell you that.  But Hollywood is no fairy tale world.  Sometimes a director is able to fight off a bad movie idea. Sometimes not.

You get the sense that a lot of people thought, “Green Lantern? Sure, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable title for a movie, I could see that on lunchboxes and underwear.” And things sort of went on like that, with everyone mildly agreeing that it seemed like a movie someone should make, but no one being particularly excited to make it.   There are a lot of problems with Green Lantern, not the least of which being a climactic scene in which Ryan Reynolds conjures a giant Hot Wheels track out of magic green fog jizz from space, but I think you could trace most of them back to the fact that it’s just vague.  It’s all forgettable broad strokes with no specificity, more like someone half-assing a superhero mad lib.  “Okay, so the hero wears a spandex… blank, and he has to stop the villain, …blank, from stealing the world’s… blank.”  A few of the blanks they didn’t even bother filling in.

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POOP TRANSPLANTS ARE REAL!  For our 52nd episode, which we assume (we didn’t really check) marks a full year of glorious Frotcasts, we brought on Trevor J. Blank, author of the award-winning (really) essay on the function of farts in American folklore (FARTLORE!).  We first learned of him about a week ago, when he coined the glorious phrase “It is usually boys who make farting a game or a weapon.”

(the player below may take a second to load. here’s a direct link to the podcast.)

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Other topics:

• We also discussed Green Lantern, and whether green jizz fog is preferable to yellow (review forthcoming) (5:00)
• I talk about going to an open mic where all the patrons were German backpackers (ie, not great at understanding jokes in English), and the icing on the cake was that afterwards, a woman tried to give me her business card, as she earnestly believed I could make a fine living impersonating Mad Magazine cover cartoon Alfred E. Neuman.  Who is a picture.  And has a single catchphrase. (3:30)
• Shaq’s sex tape (18:00)
• Australian news anchor gets clowned by the Dalai Lama (20:40)
• An incredibly racist campaign ad from LA (see above) (24:50)
• We bring on an actual doctor to confirm that fecal transplants are indeed real. (28:30)
• Fartlore interview begins at 37:50.  A half hour of fart talk.  Brendan nearly died.

Keep the emails coming, frotcast@gmail.com. INTERNS: We’ve had some interest, but no one has panned out so far. If you are legitimately interested, email us. REMIXES: We thought a Frotcast remix might be cool.  If you’re into sound editing, send it over. DOWNLOAD this week’s cast here.  SUBSCRIBE on Itunes.

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