Mr. Brooks (2007)

  I wanted to get in at least one more horror film on Halloween, even though it's 11:37 DST right now and I may not make it in time.  I saw this one on Saturday and I really liked it.  It's understated, even though it's packed with stars, and it's a solid psych thriller.  Think Dexter in twenty years.

Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) has problems.  He is a successful businessman, a loving husband and father, but he has an addiction.  He likes killing people.  It's bad enough that he always has a little voice in the back of his head named Marshall (played by William Hurt) urging him to give in to his baser desires, but now he has a guy who wants to be his apprentice (Dane Cook) and a cop (Demi Moore) on his tail.  The apprentice has pictures of him killing a couple and the cop is independently wealthy so she'll never stop chasing.  To top it all off, his daughter (Danielle Panabaker) has dropped out of college and moved back in to his house.  What's a serial killer to do?

This is a huge departure in roles for almost all of the actors here and I think that's great.  I would definitely buy this if, you know, I had a job right now.  It's going on my wish list, though!  If any of you out there are Christmas shopping, you can totally get me this.  Or the new Kindle Fire.  Or cash.

Rob refused to watch it because he's already half-afraid that I'm going to murder him in his sleep one night.  I don't know what that has to do with the movie, either.  I put my foot down tonight, though.  It's Halloween, dammit, and everyone knows you have to watch horror movies on Halloween.  So, I gave him a choice:  Behind the Mask, Trick 'r' Treat, or Wolf.  He chose Trick 'r' Treat, which is probably the most appropriate.  So we just got through with that.

No trick or treaters made an appearance, which is always disappointing.  I used to go through 6, 7 bags of candy when I lived in a subdivision but an apartment complex?  I don't even buy candy now.  Unless I'm going to eat it.  Oh, well.  There's always next year.

Rifftrax Presents: Little Shop of Horrors (2009)

  Sometimes a show just doesn't work out.  There are creative differences and people just decide to go their own way.  This was what happened to Mystery Science Theater 3000, a great show about a guy and two robots stuck in space who make fun of shitty sci-fi movies in order to stay sane.  The show was originally headed by Joel Hodgson and then, a couple of season in, head writer Mike Nelson took over.  Joel got pissed because he didn't like where the show was going (popularity) and quit.  It ran for four more seasons.  Eventually, the show ended.

This is where things get dumb.  Joel and Mike both started rival productions that do the exact same thing.  Joel's company is called Cinematic Titanic and Mike's is Rifftrax. Personally, I always thought Joel was kind of a prat so you'll probably never hear me mention Cinematic Titanic again.

This is the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors, written and directed (though not well, on either count) by Roger Corman.  I think pretty much everyone has seen the better known musical version with Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene but this one is pretty obscure.  And for a good reason.  Holy crap, what a terrible movie.  Not a bad idea, mind, but godawful in execution.  There's not even enough to make fun of here for professional movie comedians.

The DVD allows you to watch it without humorous commentary, though I don't know why you'd want to do that to yourself.  Bottom line:  if you were a fan of MST3K, then you probably already know about Rifftrax and have downloaded a ton of them to correspond to all your favorite DVDs.  Give this one a pass unless you absolutely must collect them all.  I liked the Rifftrax version but I absolutely understand if other people don't.

Happy Halloween, everybody!  The boyfriend and I are planning to watch season one of Supernatural today (since he's a giant pansy and can't stand real horror movies).  I wish you all a thousand and one scares!

The Monster Squad (1987)

  This is like The Goonies meets Dracula.  Actually, if I think about it, it's like Van Helsing with a cast of children which is way less shitty than Van Helsing.  So there's that.

I don't think anyone from this movie ever went on to make any sort of name for themselves except for Tom Noonan, who plays Frankenstein.  It's always sad when you have people whose careers have peaked at 12.

Sean (Andre Gower) and his friends have a treehouse club revolving around classic Universal movie monsters.  Then Dracula (Duncan Regehr) shows up in their town to continue an ages old battle involving amulets which open a portal into Limbo.  Every 100 years, the amulets can be activated and the opposing side gets sucked into the Netherworld for eternity, which is what happens to Van Helsing (Jack Gwillim) in the opening credits of the movie.  Drac gets his old buddies Frankenstein, the Wolfman (Carl Thibault), the Mummy (Michael Reid MacKay), and the Gillman (Tom Woodruff, Jr.) because I guess they couldn't get the rights to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, to help him find the amulet and take Van Helsing's diary away from a bunch of middle-schoolers.

Woodruff is the only name I recognized from the cast list and that's because he's not an actor, he's a prop maker by trade.  He has actually had a long career doing work for films from The Terminator to Skyline (hey, they can't all be winners).  Anyway, it's a fun little Halloween movie if you're surrounded by people who can't stand real horror films.

Resident Evil (2002)

  It's almost Halloween, you guys!  That's one of my top three days of the year (the other two are my birthday and Christmas).  It's a time where we can dress up and pretend to be anybody we want to be and strangers give us candy!  Or booze, if you're an adult!

It's also the time where we watch old horror movies and giggle at how freaked out people get over a few ghosts or vampires, or zombies.  I remember seeing this in theaters, way back when.  Despite Afterlife being such a wall of suck, I think this is one of the better horror franchises of our time.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a shower with no memory.  A special ops team breaks into her house to tell her that she is a security operative for the Umbrella Corporation and that her mansion is actually an emergency entrance to the Hive, an underground research facility run by an AI called the Red Queen.  5 hours previously, Red Queen went rogue and killed everyone in the Hive.  Now, Alice, the team, and a cop whose sister worked in the Hive, must reopen it, reboot the Queen, and find out what the hell is going on down there.

Here's a hint:  it's zombies.  Lots and lots of zombies.

My absolute favorite part of the film is when Alice suddenly realizes she's a total badass.  You know the part I mean.  She's wandering off by herself (never a smart move in a horror movie, kids) and gets chased by a zombie doberman into a lab.  A zombie guard surprises her and she unleashes a storm of ass-kicking on him.  Then she lays waste to a pack of zombie dogs (animal abuse is never okay...unless they're zombies) and goes on to save...well, just herself, really.  Everyone else kind of dies.

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

  Don't let that "From the Producers of Saw" worry you.   This movie is about as frightening as a sneezing kitten.  It has the potential to be a real cult classic, however, what with its combination of comic book styling, massive gore, goth art direction, a genuine diva (Sarah Brightman), and a genuine wannabe diva (Paris Hilton).

In a dystopian future, surgery is the new hot thing.  You can buy organs in installments but, if you fail to pay, they send Repo Men to take back your liver or fake boobs or whatever you bought.  The founder of Geneco, Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), has a long-standing grudge against one of his Repo Men, Nathan Wallace (Anthony Stewart Head), because Wallace stole his fiancee.  She later died in childbirth.  17 years later, Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega), is beginning to learn that her world is not as it appears.  Rotti learns he's dying, and since he hates his three spoiled psycho children (Bill Moseley, Paris Hilton, and Ogre from Skinny Puppy), he has to find someone to leave his mega-corporation to in his will.  Guess who he picks?

I got this on Netflix a year or so ago and bought it soon thereafter.  It's just taken me this long to get to R.

After the Sunset (2004)

  I started watching this movie and realized that I had actually seen part of it on cable a few years ago.  I kept watching, wondering at which point I had previously turned it off, and then it ended.  I had seen the whole damn thing before.  That almost never happens to me.  I either remember what happens in the end and turn it off or I've never seen it.  But that pretty much sums up the movie.  It makes almost no impression.  You could watch it 100 times and probably still retain nothing about it.

Max (Pierce Brosnan) and Lola (Salma Hayek) are jewel thieves who retire to the Bahamas after their last heist.  After about six months, Max starts feeling that old pull.  About that time, the FBI agent who had been on their tail (Woody Harrelson) shows up to warn them off stealing the one remaining Napoleon diamond from a cruise ship.  Meanwhile, the local gangster (Don Cheadle) wants to hire Max to steal the diamond to finance his business ventures.  A local constable (Naomie Harris) teams up with the FBI agent to try and catch somebody doing something.

The movie operates mostly like an ad for the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, being shot on location there.  It does look like a super-nice resort.  Other than that, there's absolutely no reason to watch it.

The Painted Veil (2006)

  I don't even remember which movie I was watching when I saw this as a trailer.  It intrigued me, even though it wasn't my type of movie, because I like Edward Norton in just about anything.

Kitty (Naomi Watts) is a young, spoiled Englishwoman who marries a lovesick doctor (Edward Norton) in order to get out of her parents' house.  He is a bacteriologist working in Shanghai who is fairly obsessed with work and has no time for his wife's petty indulgences.  Soon enough, she gets bored and has an affair with a Vice Consul (Liev Schrieber).  Her husband finds out and threatens to divorce her unless she accompanies him into the Interior, where an outbreak of cholera is decimating a village.  They trade passive-aggressive behaviors until Kitty gets interested in the plight of these people despite herself.

It's very lushly, almost dreamily shot, with some beautiful views of the inner provinces of China.  Less beautiful, though I'm sure no less accurate, are the depictions of people dying of cholera, a spectacularly messy demise in an age with no ready access to hospital care.  Overlaying it all are the tensions of a nationalist uprising in the wake of colonial excesses.  I thought it was an interesting movie, and I could understand everyone's motivations perfectly.  I didn't feel anything for it, but that's not really surprising.

Keep an eye out for the Mother Superior.  That's the original Emma Peel from The Avengers, Diana Rigg.

Red Sonja (1985)

  Yet another movie I love that Rob hasn't seen.  We've instituted a new policy modeled after The Christy Experiment.  Every month I get to make him watch a movie he's never seen from my collection as long as it's not a horror film.  Yesterday, we spent 5 hours walking around the National Gallery of Art so when we got home, the last thing I wanted was a movie I had to think during.

Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen) is just a peasant girl when a queen comes through her settlement and takes a fancy to her.  Sonja refuses and scars the woman's face.  In retaliation, the queen kills her family and throws her to the soldiers.  Now, Sonja is a peasant girl with a vengeance.  A ghostly figure appears and gives her the strength to be unmatched with a sword by any man.  While Sonja is training on how to be a man-hating barbarian warrior, her sister Varna (Janet Agren), is a temple guardian for priestesses whose job it is to watch over a talisman of destruction that feeds on light.  The priestesses are all set to seal that badboy up in the ground when an army shows up, led by a queen wearing a golden half-mask.  Varna escapes the ensuing bloodbath and manages to get a message to her sister through the High Lord Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) before she dies.  Now it's up to Sonja to find and defeat evil Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) and put the talisman in the dark before it destroys the world.

Brigitte Nielsen got her start in this film, as did Ernie Reyes, Jr.  Also, the guy who plays Ikol, the Queen's right-hand man, Ronald Lacey, is the same creepy bastard who plays the Nazi whose face melts in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Also from Raiders, Terry Richards, who played the sword-waving show-off that Indy shoots, is here playing a bandit king.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

  I didn't expect much out of this movie and that's exactly what I got.  It's not even that it's the worst adaptation of the source novel (that would be the 2001 suckfest The Musketeer); it's just not a good adaptation.  And seeing as there are 18 other versions of the story, there's just no room for another half-assed one.  Of course, the first version you see is generally the most fondly remembered.  For me, it's the 1993 Disney one, which even I recognize is not exactly Oscar worthy.

Most of the elements are the same.  Cardinal Richelieu (Cristoph Waltz) is still running the show, Rochefort (Mads Mikkelson) still only has one eye and is an asshole, and Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich) is still a sneaky double agent.  There are still Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), Porthos (Ray Stevenson) and Aramis (Luke Evans) and they are still badasses.  D'Artagnon (Logan Lerman) is still young, hot-headed, and in love with the queen's lady-in-waiting, Constance (Gabriella Wilde).

Here's the differences:  there are a lot more scenes of Milla Jovovich actually working with the Musketeers in the beginning to steal plans for an airship from DaVinci's underground vault in Venice since DaVinci was the only one smart enough to figure out how to get an underground vault in Venice.  There's a lot more of a steampunk feel to everything (because steampunk is cool right now) which is interesting but doesn't really work.  Milady sells the plans to the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom), the mortal enemy of France who gets a lot more screen time in this version, which is what sours her relationship with Athos.  Everything is so rushed, though, it's a little hard to care.

I get that Paul W. S. Anderson is married to Milla Jovovich, which is why we'll be getting yet another Resident Evil movie probably next year (it's filming now), and that's why her role got beefed up so much but, frankly, that was a stupid decision.  The movie is called The Three Musketeers.  Not The Three Musketeers' Ex-Girlfriend Who is Totally a Smokin' Hot Badass.  I'm all for women getting parts in action movies as someone other than the Victim or Rescuee, but let's not go around desecrating classic literature.

You'll probably see copies of this in about a year cluttering up the $1 bin at Wal-Mart.  Resist the urge to buy it even then.  It won't be worth the plastic it's made from.

Reign of Fire (2002)

  I love this movie.  Not a lot of people did (except for Christy...and Rob, but that's why I keep them around).  I have no idea why not.  The special effects are good, the dragons look great, the idea is no more stupid than any other movie, and the actors are top-notch.  I guess not a lot of people grew up dreaming of dragons like I did.

As a young boy, Quinn (Christian Bale) visits his mother's work site on a London Underground expansion when the workers accidentally awaken a leftover from a bygone age:  a dragon.  Soon the world is plunged into fire.  Humanity retreats to castles.  Now an adult, Quinn is the leader of one of these bastions of safety, struggling to keep his people's hopes up.  Then a team of American dragon-hunters shows up, led by the not-quite-above-board Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey).  They're looking for the Bull, the only male dragon, which they have tracked to London.

It wasn't Oscar bait, that's for damn sure, but it's a solidly fun movie and one that I personally can watch over and over.

Plus, it makes me excited because every time I see it I'm reminded that there's a Dragonriders of Pern movie in development (2013!) and that makes me super-happy.  (Update on 3/20/13:  Dragonriders is still in development with no forward motion at this time.)

The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

  This movie took me three days to get through.  Jesus H., but it's depressing.

Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) just got out of the joint for dealing cards in an illegal poker game and comes back to his old neighborhood in Chicago.  He's pretty sanguine about the whole thing since he got into a treatment program while in jail and kicked his heroin addiction.  His new plan is to become a drummer and get him and his wife Zosch (Eleanor Parker), out of their dive apartment.  Zosch is kind of a harpy, though, and doesn't want Frankie to do anything but what he did before, fearing that he will leave her if he gets any success.  She constantly throws the fact that she's in a wheelchair because of him crashing their car while drunk in his face, even though she can actually walk.  Say it with me now:  What a bitch.  So Frankie gets roped back in to dealing cards and gets re-hooked on heroin.  Mixed into everything is Molly (Kim Novak), a cocktail hostess with a heart of gold and a weakness for substance abusers.  Things proceed down this dark spiral, culminating in the death of Louie, the heroin pusher (Darren McGavin).  Frankie has to quit cold turkey in order to clear his name.

This movie combined all the cringe-factor of Requiem for a Dream with the warmth and cuddliness of, well, Requiem for a Dream.  Seriously, this is one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen.  It's an unflinching view of addiction that was really avant-garde for its time.  Of course it didn't get an MPAA rating for the scenes of intense drug use and addiction, but director Otto Preminger didn't really care about that and three Oscar nominations seem to back him up.

I think the film survives pretty well for being over 50 years old.  God knows, I won't ever watch it again but it's still a really well-done movie.  I'm giving it the 'liked it' tag because I approve of it, not because I enjoyed it.

Red Riding: 1983 (2009)

  Well, this was definitely the best of the three although that's not much to brag about.  This one you probably could (and, in fact, should) watch as a standalone since it summarizes the previous two movies before wrapping up the whole case.

This one stars one of the dirty cops, Morris Jobson (David Morrissey) who is starting to feel bad for all the terrible things he was involved in, and a lawyer (Mark Addy), who doesn't really want to be involved but feels guilty for not wanting to help the mother of the accused.  See, the West Yorkshire police arrested, tried, and imprisoned Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays) for the murders.  Myshkin is mentally retarded but was carrying a picture of one of the missing girls when he was picked up.  The lawyer is also retained by the mother of Michael's friend, Leonard (Gerard Kearns), who was arrested after another girl went missing while Michael is in jail.  Leonard "commits suicide" about twenty minutes after the lawyer tries to get in to see him.  Morris pretty much knows all of the pieces to this puzzle and the lawyer reaches pretty much the same conclusions and actually gets to the real murderer's lair before the cop.  He's then beaten over the head and shoved into a cellar.  Then it's up to Morris to make things right.

I'm starting to think that West Yorkshire is the Texas of England, just without the death penalty.

Moneyball (2011)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Lead Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Sound Mixing    Just when I get through saying that I can't get to the theaters anymore, Rob pops in and asks if I want to go see Moneyball.  It wasn't top of my list (I figured it was a rental at best) but I jumped at the chance to get out of the house for a while.

It's fall of 2001 and the Oakland A's are struggling.  They have missed the playoff for the World Series to the New York Yankees and their three best players are leaving for greener fields.  General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has to find players to replace them for a fraction of the money other teams have to spend.  While trying to make trades in Cleveland, he notices a younger guy influencing the discussion.  Afterwards, he finds the kid in the cubicle pool and presses him.  The kid is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an economics grad from Yale with a radical idea.  The idea that games are won by players is archaic.  Games are won by runs, so you don't need big-name expensive players, you just need people who can get on base consistently.  This does not go over well with the other managers or the coach (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

This is based on a true story, of course, so anybody who has watched baseball over the last 10 years knows that the Oakland A's broke a record for 20 consecutive wins to end the series 103-59 that year.  They still lost the play-off to get into the World Series, though.

Ok, this is where Rob and I have differing opinions of the film:  The Red Sox owner approaches Beane with an obscene amount of money to move to Boston and try his system there.  Beane turns it down to stay with the A's.  Two years later, the Red Sox win the World Series.  Now, Rob thinks that's a satisfactory ending because he stayed with the team that he loved and didn't sell out.  I think that he was afraid of failure on a grander scheme and he didn't trust either himself or his process, which the Red Sox admitted that they used.  (And then, as soon as they won the World Series, they stopped using and haven't won since.  But that's a different story.)  Go see the movie and decide for yourself.

Red Riding: 1980 (2009)

  The back of the box says that this works as a standalone film, but I really think you need the first one to get perspective.  Otherwise, the movie is pretty cryptic.  It does move faster, but I think that's just a shorter run time.

The year is 1980, six years after the climactic events in the Karachi Club from the first film.  Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) was part of the original outside team looking into the murders but had to leave the investigation after his wife miscarried.  He is back now, with two colleagues, to look into the Yorkshire Ripper murders, a string of prostitute killings.  One in particular, Clare Strachan (Kelly Freemantle), doesn't jive with the others.  As he probes into the killing, he becomes more and more aware of the levels of corruption within the Yorkshire police force.

I don't want to say that this movie has been a waste, but I am really hoping that the third one ties this whole thing up like the third act of a play.  I think this was trying to play the same field as Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs but it's nowhere near as polished.

Angel of Death (2009)

  This is one of those movies that I like because it doesn't pretend to be anything else.  It knows it's a B-movie and it's perfectly comfortable with that.  And because it knows what it is, it doesn't ask you the viewer to pretend anything otherwise.  That's very comforting.

After getting stabbed in the head doing a job, assassin Eve (Zoe Bell) starts getting haunted by the ghost of a girl she killed.  In order to satisfy the restless spirit, she starts hunting down the people who pulled her strings.

And there you have it:  short and sweet.  I watch a lot of movies from big budget blockbusters to indie documentaries.  Some of them are good, some of them are not, but the ones that I dislike the most are the ones that masquerade as something else.  You know what I mean.  You see the trailer and it looks like it'll be this big thing and then you see it and it just fizzles.  I had to stop checking out trailers on Apple for that very reason.  My expectations were too high and the movie just never lived up to them.  I'd never even heard of this one and it's pretty good.

Bonus:  it has Doug Jones (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) in it as a doctor.  I think that may have been the first time I've ever seen that guy without some sort of latex suit.

Red Riding: 1974 (2009)

  Man, this movie was slow.  I put it on last night because I didn't want to stay up too late.

A rookie journalist named Edward (Andrew Garfield) is looking into the disappearance of a young girl.  He begins to realize that this is only one of a string of disappearances of young girls in the Yorkshire area.  They turn up tortured and mutilated, with swans' wings sewn onto their backs.  Edward begins to put the pieces together and link them to a deeper conspiracy of local government corruption.

There's a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking, and a lot of sex.  It's 1974, after all.  There is also a lot of Edward getting his ass kicked.  Seriously, this kid gets the shit kicked out of him for the majority of the movie.  It's not a bad film, it's just a little hard to watch sometimes.  Sean Bean and Rebecca Hall also star.  I'm hoping the other two installments of the trilogy move a little faster.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)

  Normally, I'm a fan of Terry Gilliam's aesthetic but this movie left me completely cold.  I just couldn't get into it at all.

It's the 18th Century, somewhere in Europe, and a town is being attacked by the Turks.  Inside the beleaguered town, a group of actors is putting on a play about the fantastical adventures of Baron Munchausen when the man himself (John Neville) comes in and starts claiming that it's all a pack of lies.  The town is about to get bombed to smithereens and the troupe leader's daughter (Sarah Polley) convinces Munchausen to save them.  So he builds a hot air balloon out of women's underwear so he can escape and search for his companions.  The daughter stows away on board, which is good, considering that Munchausen is easily distracted from the goal.  They sail to the moon and are imprisoned by the King (Robin Williams, who asked not to be credited) because the last time Munchausen was there, he seduced the Queen (Valentina Cortese).  They find one of the companions there, left behind when Munchausen escaped.  They escape again with the Queen's help and fall from the moon into Mount Etna, where Vulcan (Oliver Reed) is having a labor dispute with his Cyclops.  They pick up another companion and then get kicked out again when Munchausen dances with Vulcan's wife, Venus (Uma Thurman).  From there, they get swallowed by a sea monster and find the other two companions.  Now they just have to get back in time to save the town.

Some of the cinematography and set design is beautiful but most of the movie is just a mess.  I'd say give this a pass.

Finding Neverland (2004)

  I have no idea why this one was in my queue.  Possibly someone recommended it to me?  It could have just as easily been my love for Johnny Depp rendering me temporarily insane.  He has a Scottish accent here.  Mmmm.

J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) is a struggling playwright with a social climbing wife (Radha Mitchell) who is constantly bitter that he spends more time on his writing than with her.  Things get worse when Barrie becomes acquainted with a young widow (Kate Winslet) and her four sons, George (Nick Roud), Jack (Joe Prospero), Peter (Freddie Highmore), and Michael (Luke Spill).  Over the course of helping the children deal with the grief of their father's death, Barrie comes up with the idea of Peter Pan.  His producer (Dustin Hoffman) thinks it will flop, and the widow's mother (Julie Christie) thinks Barrie is a bad influence.

There's a huge theme of children having to grow up too quickly and deal with adult problems, as can be expected, and also the healing power of imagination.  It's well-acted and the fantasy sequences are well-shot and integrate nicely.  I can recognize that it's a good movie, even if it's not the type of movie that generally interests me (character dramas, blech).  I do kind of feel that poor Jack got screwed.  George and Michael get main roles in the play and Peter gets the lead but Jack at best gets to be a low-level pirate and at worst, gets a sex change to be Wendy.  I know it sucks to be the middle child, but damn.

It won an Oscar for Best Original Score in 2005.  I only noticed the music during the production of Peter Pan so I can't really say if it deserved it.

Across the Universe (2007)

  This is what it would look like if a Beatles record could fellate itself.  Honestly, I didn't get it at all.  As a music video montage, it's not bad, but as a movie, it sucks.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a young Liverpudlian dockworker who goes to America to find his father, a maintenance worker at Princeton.  There he meets Max (Joe Anderson), a student more interested in playing golf than getting a degree.  Max takes Jude home for Thanksgiving and announces he's dropping out of college and moving to Greenwich Village.  Jude goes with him and they move into an apartment with a singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her band.  Meanwhile, Max's sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) gets word that her boyfriend (Spencer Liff) has been killed in Vietnam.  She moves to NY to live with her brother and starts dating Jude.  Max gets drafted and Lucy becomes very involved with the protest movement, so much so that Jude feels abandoned.  He is arrested and deported after trying to get her out of one of the protests.  After moping for a time, Jude comes back and joins Sadie's band on top of Apple Records for a concert, hoping to see Lucy.

Visually, it's a very pretty movie and there are some notable cameos from Bono, Eddie Izzard, and Salma Hayek.  It's not precisely acted but it is beautifully choreographed and all the songs were done by the actors involved, so there's that.  I just didn't like it.  I found nothing particularly appealing in the story or setting.  I wasn't alive during the time period and I've never done drugs so I can't relate to any of the trippiness.  Rob and Christy both liked it so obviously it's likable.  Just not to me.

The Abyss (1989)

  I don't think I've ever seen this movie from the beginning.  I always caught it about thirty min to halfway in and watched from there.  I didn't realize how quickly they show you the aliens.

Oh, yeah.  If you haven't seen the movie, **SPOILER** it's about aliens **END SPOILER**.

A US nuclear sub sinks into deep water after seeing something weird on their radar.  A deep-sea mining operation is pulled in to go search the wreck for survivors, since the Navy team would take too long to get there and there's a hurricane on the way.  They send a SEAL team down, led by a man named Coffey (Michael Biehn), to lead the operation.  This does not go over well with Bud (Ed Harris), the civilian leader of the miners, especially since they are also bringing down his estranged wife, Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio).  A series of disasters occur, with Coffey beginning to succumb to pressure-induced psychosis and confusing aliens with Russian subs.  He removes a warhead from the stricken sub and brings it on board the mining rig.

This won an Oscar in 1990 for Best Visual Effects and most of the smaller ones still stand up.  The really huge set pieces have that seam all the way around, where the computer graphic was added in, but Cameron has always been a front-runner for special effects.

A lot of the suspense in the film comes from all the underwater work.  You can feel the characters' isolation, their panic as things start to go wrong.  When one of the helmets is breached and begins filling with water, I think everyone can imagine that kind of fear.  Space is a slightly different ballgame, since so few people have experienced it, but I think everyone who has ever been in water has had a near-drowning, just enough to make you never want to repeat it, so it's a more accessible fear.  Even though deep-sea vessels and space shuttles are basically the same things:  little safe spaces inside enormous spaces that will kill you if you move from one to the other.

Ratatouille (2007)

  Another Pixar classic.  I just bought it on blu-ray recently and tried it out the other night.  Rob had never seen it, so I made him.  The short that comes with it is Lifted, one of my absolute favorites.  I think he may have liked the short more than the film.

Anyway, a rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) dreams of becoming a chef.  He is guided to one of the best restaurants in Paris by the spirit of its dead owner, Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), only to find that Gusteau's successor is more interested in capitalizing on the chef's name with a line of frozen food than adhering to the tenets of fine cuisine.  The other new arrival is Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano), a gangly scarecrow who is woefully inept in the kitchen, but is hired as a garbage boy as a favor to his recently deceased mother, a one-time paramour to Gusteau.  Remy is caught by Linguini after he 'fixes' a soup that Linguini had messed up and a partnership is born.  The head chef, Skinner (Ian Holm), is suspicious that Alfredo has come to take the restaurant away, and Remy's father (Brian Dennehy) is concerned that he is spending too much time around humans.  Hanging over them all is the menacing spectre of Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), a fearsome food critic whose previous review of the restaurant caused it to lose a star and contributed to Gusteau's death.

If Pixar were a restaurant, it would have five Michelin stars.  Even flops like Cars and its sequel only serve to as contrasts to their successes, like a shadow emphasizes how bright a light shines.  There's really nothing to say about them that can't be summed up with the words "It's Pixar."

Audition (1999)

  I was so looking forward to this movie.  I had heard it was the bee's-knees as far as Japanese horror goes.  What a disappointment.

Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a widower with a son about to move out.  He decides that he should get remarried but isn't sure how to meet girls.  His friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) is a movie producer with a great idea:  hold an audition for a fake movie.  At the auditions, Aoyama sees a girl he likes.  She's young, beautiful, modest, and talented, having studied classical ballet for twelve years before a hip injury ruined her dreams.  They begin to date, despite his friend's warning that her background doesn't quite check out.  Soon, he proposes, but the night after, she disappears.  Despondent, Aoyama searches for her but only finds one creepy thing after another.  Reality and memory blur a bit as he reflects back on the conversations they had, until she shows up at his house, drugs him, and saws off his foot with piano wire.

Men, this is why you shouldn't lie when you're trying to pick up women.

There's surprisingly little gore in the movie and only one scene that made me jump.  See, the girl keeps a big burlap sack in her apartment.  Every once in a while...well, you'll have to see for yourself.

Honestly, just seeing the sack and not knowing what was inside it was much more suspenseful than when it gets opened up.  Although, that scene had its own pitfalls.  It's been a long time since I've seen something in a movie that actually made me want to throw up, but I wouldn't call that horror.  Oldboy was much worse in terms of violence, suspense, and fucked-upness.  Now there was a movie that reveled in its own weirdness.  This one could have been so much more.

10,000 BC (2008)

  This is one of those movies that could have been so much better.  I think if they had gone the Apocalypto route and had the entire thing in subtitles, it might have seemed less silly.  And don't tell me that they couldn't have made up a language because every other "tribe" in the movie was subtitled.

I will give it props for two things, though:  good special effects and mentioning that the pyramids were built by either aliens or Atlanteans.  That's some funny shit.

Okay, so it's caveman time.  A tribe of people called the Yaghal live in the frozen tundra and rely on the annual mammoth hunt for survival.  A child with blue eyes is found who heralds the coming of prophecy, that the tribe will be attacked by four-legged demons and only a warrior who wins the white spear can save them.  The current white spear holder decides that he can't wait that long and bails, leaving spear and son in the care of a friend.  The son (Steven Strait) grows up to become a hunter who is in love with the blue-eyed girl (Camilla Belle).  He manages to technically kill the bull mammoth, fulfilling the prophecy, but feels ashamed because he didn't work within the team and was really trying to save his own ass.  So he gives back the spear and tells Blue-Eyes that he is giving her up too.  Of course, the next day, warriors on horseback raid the village and capture all the able-bodied members as slaves.  D'Leh (that's his name) is frantic to get Blue-Eyes back and sets off after them with three companions.  They cross over all sorts of terrain but lose the slavers at the Nile.  A local tribe helps them get an army together after D'Leh accidentally triggers one of their prophecies.  (He did a saber-tooth's math homework and the saber-tooth said hi to him in the lunchroom, thereby making him cool.) All the slaves are being used to build the Great Pyramid for the aforementioned alien/refugee from Atlantis, who is being worshipped as a god.  D'Leh has to work together and lead this army in order to free all his people and get his Blue-Eyed Girl back.

This was almost good.  So close.  They either needed to go full Conspiracy Sci-Fi and have a UFO inside the pyramid or cut all that goofy shit out.  Stargate or Conan.  You can't half-ass it.

This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006)

  This documentary was mentioned in the Censored segment of Indie Sex but it's been in my queue since 2009.  I've always been interested in the reasons people have for censorship, mostly because I think all those reasons are crap.  No one should tell you what you can't see or what you should be offended by, you should be able to decide that for yourself.

Like most of the documentaries I watch, this one is marginally depressing.  It shows how a giant monopoly (the MPAA's rating of movies) is skewed towards the studios and is inherently corrupt.  It also shows that state of affairs is very unlikely to change given that the review process is shrouded in secrecy for the "protection" of its members.

Kirby Dick, the documentarian, hires a private investigator to find out who the raters are at the MPAA. After almost a month of checking license plates and rifling through trashcans and taking surveillance photos, they finally discover the identities of 8 of the 9 raters.  Jack Valenti, who started the MPAA in the 70s, stated that raters would be average American parents with kids aged 5-17 who would serve on the board for 3-5 years.  In theory, that sounds great, like a committee of the Everyman looking out for the children.  However, most of these people are older, white, and with kids who are almost in their 30s.  They're Morality Police, slapping restricted ratings on things that make them uncomfortable like any sort of gay relationship, female orgasms, and any sexual position that isn't missionary.  That's a sad commentary on our societal norms.

You know, just thinking about it again while I'm typing this is making me depressed.  I'm going to go watch something happy.

Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer (1985)

  What?  I'm a child of the 80's.

I remembered seeing this when I was a kid, during that phase where I was really into horses.  I loved My Little Pony and read all the Black Stallion series.  A talking horse that could run on rainbows was pretty high on my list of Awesome Things, only supplanted later by She-Ra's horse that could turn into a unicorn.  My mother was very excited because she has had a life-long love of horses and hoped to be able to share that, but it was just a passing fancy that was over by age 10.  In that time, however, I managed to cram a ton of horse shows into my tiny brain and, occasionally, I get nostalgic for the things of my youth and dust off some piece of memorabilia for review.

This one has not fared well with the passage of time.  Holy crap, this animation sucks.  It's like everything was a still frame except for the mouths of the characters so there's a creepy disconnect between their blank faces.  The voice work is not great, either.  Everyone is high-pitched and grating.  I'm sure that's to make them seem more child-like but as an adult, it's horrible.

Rainbow Brite is all excited because Spring is finally here and she can bring color to the world again via rainbows.  Then, a mechanical horse shows up and tells her that there's a problem on the planet Spectra.  Spectra is made completely of diamond (actually foreshadowing the discovery of one from earlier this year) and controls all the light in the universe.  An evil gem-hungry princess is covering the planet with nets in order to possess it for herself.  Rainbow Brite must put a stop to this before all the life in the universe is wiped out.

There's almost no reason to watch this movie as an adult.  It is, frankly, a crap film and there is so much more in the way of intelligent anime.  That being said, if you have a little girl around 5-7 years old, it's available on Streaming from Netflix so you could just download it straight to your phone, hand it over with some headphones, and enjoy a blissfully quiet car ride.

On an unrelated TV note, the first new Fall show to get the axe is The Playboy Club, cancelled after only four episodes.  Apparently, it was in the middle of filming episode 6 when it got the news.  Ouch. It's a shame, really.  Good concept, good acting, good direction, it just couldn't seem to find an audience.  It probably would have done great on HBO or Showtime.

In my slow working through Rob's movies, I watched the first season of The 4400 over the last couple of days.  I was not blown away.  It's about 4400 people who vanished from various points in history only to appear on the shore of a lake in Washington in 2006.  None of them have aged and they slowly realize that they now have certain powers.  I was hoping for aliens but the first season reveals that they're actually being manipulated by people from the future in order to avert catastrophe.

2012 (2009)

  This isn't a very good movie, for all that it is supposedly accurate.  The fact that it seems so ludicrous only goes to lend credence to the old adage "Truth is stranger than fiction".

The premise is that the world is destined to end in fire on December 21, 2012 because the Mayans predicted it that way.  Beginning in 2009, the sun starts generating more radiation, causing the Earth's core to heat up and the crust to start shifting around wildly.  This sparks massive earthquakes worldwide.  The coast of California falls into the sea (as pictured in the above poster), Yosemite becomes a super-volcano, Hawaii is engulfed in lava, and the human race is doomed.  Except for around 400,000 people who were either chosen by their governments for their respective skills or bought their way on board for a billion euros a seat.  Those people get to board giant arks being built in secret behind a Chinese dam on the Tibetan border.

Jackson (John Cusack) is not one of those people.  He's just a guy who published a sci-fi book that didn't do well who is trying to stay connected to his two kids after a divorce.  Thanks to a timely trip to Yosemite where he meets a crazy ham radio operator (Woody Harrellson), Jackson finds out about the whole she-bang.  Fortunately, he also moonlights as a limo driver for a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric) who has tickets to Ark #3.  He gets his family and flies from LA to Vegas just before California ceases to exist and pimps out his ex's new husband (Thomas McCarthy) as a pilot to get them all on board the Russian's plane for China.

I really couldn't have cared less about all the people involved, though.  I like John Cusack but this could have starred anybody and it wouldn't have mattered.  The only reason to see this movie at all are the effects and some of them fall apart on a smaller screen rather than a theater, I think and by 'fall apart' I mean they just don't look as impressive.  You can see the seams, as it were.

Black Snake Moan (2006)

  I have been meaning to watch this movie for quite some time, ever since it first came out, but I never got around to it until this week.  That is a damned shame, really, since it's a very good movie.

Rae (Christina Ricci) is a girl with problems.  Specifically, a sex addiction stemming from childhood abuse.  Now, I'm not talking a cute little "I got caught sleeping around so I'll claim it's an addiction" thing, I'm talking about a girl who doesn't care where it comes from, she has to have it.  It's how she deals with stress.  Naturally, in a small town, this leaves her with quite the reputation.  Her boyfriend, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), is leaving for the Guard, despite his crippling anxiety attacks.  This stresses Rae, so she goes out looking for a party.  What she finds is Ronnie's best friend (Michael Raymond-James) who beats the shit out of her and dumps her on the side of the road.  Enter Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), a retired blues player whose wife has just left him for his younger brother.  Ouch.  He takes the arrival of a half-naked, half-dead white chick on the edge of his property as a sign from God and brings her inside.  To keep her from running off while in a fevered state, he chains her to the radiator.  This will later prompt some serious misgivings from the local preacher (John Cothran, Jr.) but Lazarus sticks to his guns.  He feels a deep calling to help this tiny deranged nympho, and maybe along the way, she can help him deal with his own issues.

The acting is top-notch, of course, and the story is compelling.  Mr. Jackson learned to play the guitar for this role and does it well.  I plan on getting the soundtrack at some point.

It's funny, I had just finished a book also set in the South with a heavy focus on blues music called Southern Gods by John Jacob Horner.  I am from the South but I grew up with Country, not Blues.  You need a river for real Blues music.

Anyway, the film is very good and I encourage everyone to check it out.  Christina Ricci spends a great deal of the running time naked or nearly so, if you need a little extra encouragement.

The English Patient (1996)

  Yeah, this was the Christy pick for October in case you couldn't tell.  What a snoozefest.  I cannot believe it won an Oscar for Best Score, too.  That was the sappiest shit I've ever heard.  I wanted to stuff my ears with wax like Odysseus' crew against the Sirens.  Ugh.

I have no respect for this movie so I'm just going to break it down.  There may be some spoilers but, trust me, they're for your own good.

Okay, so this plane crashes in the Sahara at the tail end of WWII and the pilot is horribly burned and disfigured.  He claims amnesia so all anybody knows about him is that he speaks English.  Hence, English patient.  A nurse (Juliette Binoche) is tired of seeing people she knows getting blown up so she takes the burned guy and holes up in a monastery until he dies.  A Canadian spy who worked for the British named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) is pretty sure that Burned Guy is actually a Count Almasy, who they believed sold the Germans aerial maps that led them to capture Cairo.  Considering that Caravaggio lost both his thumbs to a German interrogator (Jurgen Prochnow), he's a little pissed about it.  In a long-ass series of flashbacks, we learn that Burned Guy was totally the Count and before the war started, he was part of an expedition of geologists and explorers.  He began an affair with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) whose husband (Colin Firth) eventually attempted to kill them both by crashing a plane but only succeeded in killing himself and injuring the wife.  Burned Guy takes the wife to a cave and walks across the entire goddamned desert to get help for her, only to be accused of being a spy for the Germans and taken into custody.  She dies.

/deep breath

Interspersed amongst all of the flashbacks are bits of the nurse's story as she falls for a young Indian minesweeper (Naveen Andrews).  Frankly, they could have made them two separate movies and I would have been okay with that.  I wouldn't have watched either of them, but it would have made more sense.

Anyway, the Count confesses to Caravaggio that, yes, he totally sold those maps to the enemy so that they would gas up his plane so he could get back to the cave after escaping from British custody.  She's been dead for a couple of days at this point, but he loads her up in the plane and attempts to fly her somewhere but he gets shot down by different Germans and thus, burns.  He then asks the nurse to push enough morphine that he can die in peace.  I'm not 100% certain why they didn't do that at the beginning of the fucking movie, rather than have a trained professional battle nurse quit her post to hang out in a monastery with him until he was "ready to die".  Man had burns over 80% of his body.  Even with modern care, the odds of him making it were slim.  I would have gone all Angel of Death on him by the time the opening credits stopped rolling.  I'm just sayin'.

Indie Sex (2007)

  This is a four-part documentary that originally screened on IFC about different aspects of sex portrayed in movies.  The segments are about an hour long and are broken into:  Censored, which looks at the history of censorship from the Hays Commission through the Legion of Decency up to our current system; Taboo, which is more about specific directors' visions and how they portray them; Teens, which covers not just teen sexuality in movies but also the nature of movies directed at teens; and Extremes, which delves into the furthest reaches of the sexual spectrum on film.  There are a whole host of movies mentioned, many I'd never even heard of and most of which I (sadly) haven't seen, and lots of interviews from people in the industry.  If I didn't fear Netflix thinking I was some sort of sex fiend, I would add all of them to my queue.

Overall, I thought this was a pretty good documentary.  I'm not sure if it really had a point, other than 'independent movies are cool because they'll let you do full penetration on film and not call it porn' but it was always interesting and fairly informative.  I probably shouldn't have to say that it is completely chock-full of explicit content.  Seriously, if you can't handle seeing a lot of nudity, some S&M, and same sex lovin', give this one a pass.

16 Blocks (2006)

  This wasn't a bad movie.  I missed it when it originally came out, probably because it didn't look interesting, but it doesn't suck.  I even remember where I was when it was in theaters, because Slither came out the same year and I saw it with my roommate, Bri. 

Anyway, it stars Mos Def as a petty thief turned witness, Bruce Willis as the grizzled old cop who's supposed to get him to the courthouse, and David Morse as the crooked cop who's trying to kill them both.  That's pretty much the entire plot right there.  It's well-paced, though, with enough action to keep you interested.  I like Mos Def as an actor, though I prefer his more humorous roles, and Bruce Willis is strongest when he's playing a cop.  David Morse makes an excellent bad guy (though you wouldn't know it from the third season of House where he was completely wasted) and generally all the roles are well-acted.

Except for the video release of Superman II, this is the last film Richard Donner has directed, and at 81, probably the last he ever will.  That ends his career with a bit of a fizzle, but when you've directed The Omen, Superman, the Lethal Weapon series, and The Goonies I think you can probably rest assured that your legacy will be fine.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

  God, what a boring movie.  90 minutes of talking and 10 minutes of crying and bleeding.  Netflix was smoking some crack when it recommended this to me at 4 stars, no less!

Tarantino can really be a self-absorbed prick when he's given free reign.  Supposedly, this is about a failed diamond heist and the ensuing bloodbath but it's really just a bromance between Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and his gutshot buddy, Mr. Orange (Tim Roth).

There are a couple of references to other Tarantino films, True Romance and Pulp Fiction, which I'm sure he thought was clever.

Honestly, the entire movie was lost on me, and the fact that it's cemented into popular culture is a tragedy.

Dirty Dancing (1987)

  I took a break from my alphabetizing (now on Pushing Daisies!) to watch Dirty Dancing.  Well, that's not really true.  I took a break to force Rob to watch Dirty Dancing.  Can you believe, a child of the 80's who had never seen this movie?  I couldn't stand for that, so in the tradition of girlfriends everywhere, I sat him down and glued his eyelids open so he couldn't look away.

Of course he liked it.  I don't know anyone who doesn't like Dirty Dancing.  Even people who claim to hate Dirty Dancing are just embarrassed to have like it.  It's one of approximately 5 girly movies I own (discounting musicals and Disney).  I can't say it's one of my favorites but I will always have fond nostalgic memories of watching it while baby-sitting with my cousin, Fallon, when I was 10 or 11.

For the 15 people on the planet who have never seen this movie, it's about a girl named Baby (Jennifer Grey) who goes with her family on vacation to an aging resort called Kellerman's.  Once there, she meets the sexy, brooding dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) and his platonic partner Penny (Cynthia Rhodes).  Penny is unfortunately knocked up by some douchebag waiter and, since it's 1963, has to go to a back alley doctor.   But, oh no!  She and Johnny were scheduled to dance an exhibition at the nearby hotel and if they don't go, they don't get paid for the summer.  Baby to the rescue!  She begins mambo training with Johnny in secret since her parents won't approve.  Cue montage!  During all this close-knit time together, Baby and Johnny fall in looooooove.  But can their relationship survive the wrath of Baby's daddy (Jerry Orbach)?

Of course it can.  It's an 80's movie.  Come on, now!

Everybody who has seen this movie, I'm sorry because I know you will now have the theme song playing in your head for the rest of the day.  Sing it with me:  Now I... (I!)... haaad the time. of. my. liiiiife and I ne-vuh felt this way before!  And I swear...it's the truuuth...  And I owe. it. all. to. youuuuu!
SAXOPHONE SOLO!

Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)

  People tell me my taste in movies is hard to pin down.  Movies they thought I would like, I hate and movies they thought I would hate, I love.  I say that they're just not paying attention but that's because it always makes perfect sense to me.

Every once in a while, though, I will watch something and think "I should hate this" but I don't.  This is Crank 2.  If you thought the first one was good fun but that the action was a little slow and the plot made too much sense, boy, are you going to like the sequel.

It picks up almost immediately after the first one ended, with a black van shoveling Chev Chelios' body (Jason Statham) off the street and carrying him off.  From there, his heart is removed and a temporary artificial one is implanted.  This heart runs off an electrical charge provided by an external battery pack which he almost immediately loses.  Hence the title, as he manages to find any source of electricity he can to power his fake heart until he can find his real one.  The bad guys in this are the Chinese Triad gangs, though there is also some involvement by a mysterious Mexican gangster named The Ferret (Clifton Collins, Jr.).  Amy Smart is back as his semi-retarded girlfriend, who is now a stripper going by the name of Lemon.  Bai Ling is a crack whore.  Efram Ramirez is playing the brother of the character he played in the first movie.  Dwight Yoakum is back as Chelios' personal doctor.  Yes, the country singer.

Sadly, this was also David Carradine's last role, playing the head of the Triad.  I say sadly not just because the man died shortly thereafter, but because his last character's name was Poon Dong.  That's a hell of a legacy.

Anyway, the movie is fast and loud and stupid but it's surprisingly fun to watch.

Attack the Block (2011)

  This movie has been on my radar for some time now.  It only got a limited theater release after making the festival circuit but every critic that saw it raved about it.  I have been eagerly waiting for it's release onto video, figuring (rightly) that was the only way I was going to get to see it.

Has anyone mentioned how cold this last week or so has been on the East Coast?  Holy Jeebus.  I've had to dig out  some of my fuzzy winter pajama pants just to cope.  But, that happens to be my favorite attire for horror movie watching.

This reminded me a lot of Feast, a little horror-comedy that I felt was just slightly too disgusting to own.  Attack the Block doesn't go for the gross-out;  it prefers to ramp up the suspense instead.

A group of South London teenaged hooligans start their night by mugging a woman (Jodie Whitaker) and generally being little bastards until they see something fall from the sky and crash into a car.  The leader, Moses (John Boyega) investigates and gets his face mauled by the creature.  Naturally, they bludgeon it to death.  Filled with the high that comes from defeating your enemy, they parade the corpse around their neighborhood before stashing it in the local drug dealer's weed room.  Whilst discussing how much money they will make selling the unidentified alien to the newspapers, they suddenly notice a lot more falling stars.  These creatures are not as small as the first one, though.  As one kid describes, they are "gorilla-wolf-lookin' motherfuckers".

The creature design is really fantastic for being simple yet spooky.  They are about the size of small gorillas with fur that is so black it seems to swallow light.  They have no eyes but their rows upon rows of fangs glow in the dark.  They are fast, agile, and deadly.  Don't get attached to any of the characters. That's all I'm saying.

The filmmakers and critics were worried the movie wouldn't do well because the accents are accurate to the region.  That is to say, they are damn near impenetrable.  Rob and I watch a lot of British stuff, from Doctor Who to Red Dwarf and even we had to rewind a couple of times to make sure we understood.  I won't judge if you have to use the subtitles, but I will judge if you don't go see this movie.  It's on my list to Buy.

Fall TV 2011

I've been watching a lot of TV recently.  Holy crap, have I been watching TV.  I wanted to give all the new fall line-ups a shot so I took a break from my exhausting movie posting schedule (ha!) to check out what's new.

Monday

2 Broke Girls (CBS) is hilarious so far.  I am totally Max, the Brooklyn waitress with a smart mouth and a flair for cupcake baking.  She strikes up an uneasy partnership with Caroline, the dispossessed daughter of a Ponzi scheming dad.

Terra Nova (FOX) is a lot like Jurassic Park meets Land of the Lost in a one-hour drama about people who move from a polluted future to an alternate timestream in the dinosaur age.  This one is getting a maybe.

The Playboy Club (NBC) is surprisingly good, or at least the pilot was.  A new bunny (Amber Heard) accidentally kills a mob boss after he attempts to sexually assault her and the assistant district attorney helps her cover it up.

Of course there's also the last season of House and the new season of Castle.

Tuesday

New Girl (FOX), the Zooey Deschanel comedy, left me completely cold.  I found the main character, Jess, annoying and the three male roommates were flat caricatures.  I will not be continuing with this show.

I'm not watching Ringer because it's on the CW (strike 1), it stars Sarah Michelle Gellar (strike 2), and it's about a woman who takes over the life of her dead twin (strike 3).

I missed the premiere for Unforgettable, some cop drama about a woman with perfect recall, so I'll be waiting for the reviews of that one to see if it's good enough to Netflix.

Besides, I have Glee and Raising Hope to watch.

Wednesday

Suburgatory (ABC) turned out to be a really funny show about a kid and her dad (Jeremy Sisto) who move from Manhattan to the suburbs. 

I'm hoping Harry's Law (NBC) turns out to be the new Boston Legal.  

I think Revenge (ABC) will end up being like Desperate Housewives:  good for one season and crap thereafter.

American Horror Story (FX) premieres this week and I am looking forward to that.  

Thursday

Charlie's Angels (ABC) is total crap but I will watch it anyway.  Call that a guilty pleasure if you must. Plus, the new Bosley is hot.

Rob's very interested in Person of Interest (CBS), the new JJ Abrams/Jonathan Nolan drama about two dudes who use a sophisticated government surveillance system to solve crimes that don't fall under the purview of national security.  I'm less enthused by Jim Caviezel's performance.  I would like him to be more charismatic but it's a decent show.

Friday

A Gifted Man (CBS) has a really great cast but the pilot didn't really thrill me.  Basically, a surgeon is being haunted by his dead ex-wife so he won't be such an asshole.  

Still, the only other thing on Fridays is Kitchen Nightmares.

Sunday

Pan Am (ABC) turned out to be very different than I expected, with a Cold War spy twist.  I'll definitely give that one a shot this season.  

Dexter (Showtime) is back starting tonight.  All the seasons after 3 have kind of sucked (except for the finale of 4.  That was awesome) so I'm on the fence about this one.  Supposedly he finds religion.  We'll see how that goes.

There are a couple more stragglers near the end of October, both fairy-tales-with-a-twist (Grimm on Fridays and Once Upon a Time on Sundays).  I'll probably mention something about them if they're any good.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

  This one predates my Oscar countdown by a year.  This one won Best Picture.  I didn't queue it up because of that, though.  The Academy and I were on the outs at that point for the No Country for Old Men travesty.  My mother saw it and recommended it to me, however, so I figured I'd see what the fuss was all about.

Almost three years later...

It's not a bad movie.  It's a lot better than many of the Best Picture winners from previous years.  Did it deserve to win?  Not in my opinion.  Juno had the popular appeal, but for my money, Michael Clayton was a better film.  I think either of those would stand up to the test of time better than this one, which is really just a cute little star-crossed lovers story.

Jamal (Dev Patel) is one question away from winning the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, despite having been born in the slums of Mumbai with no real formal education.  Fortunately for him, every question he has answered came directly from all the hardships he has faced in life, which are legion.  Not so fortunately, he is suspected of cheating and hauled off for interrogation.  He spills his entire life story to the Inspector (Irrfan Khan) about being orphaned with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and falling instantly in love with Latika (Freida Pinto), only to lose her again and again.  The only reason he even wants to be on the show is because he thinks she's watching.

The depictions of life in the slums are depressing, as they should be, but the overall tone of the movie is upbeat.  It's better than City of God but I wouldn't own it.

Hereafter (2010)

  This was one boring movie.  They could have named it Purgatory, because it feels like you would need the prayers of the faithful to save you from it.  After watching this movie, I have a better understanding of what eternity would feel like.

The thing is, I really like Clint Eastwood movies.  You know this.  I have raved about other ones he's done.  But, statistically, they can't all be winners.  This one was nominated for an Oscar last year for Best Achievement in Visual Effects, probably for the awesome tsunami wreckage in the first 15 minutes.  After that, it's really not worth watching.

Marie Lelay (Cécile De France) is a French journalist vacationing in probably Thailand when she is caught in a tsunami and dies for a couple of minutes.  After that, she becomes super interested in what happens to you after you die so she can make sense of what she saw.

Marcus (Frankie and/or George MacLaren) is a London boy who loses his twin brother (Frankie and/or George MacLaren, seriously these kids are so identical that they each got billing for both characters.  That's just creepy) after some bullies chase him in front of a car.  After that, he becomes super interested in what happens to you after you die so that he can contact his dead twin.

George Lonegrin (Matt Damon) is a factory worker who used to be a big-time medium but left everything behind when it became overwhelming.  He knows exactly what happens after you die and he doesn't want to have shit to do with it since it basically ruined his life.  His brother (Jay Mohr) keeps trying to push him back into the business because of all the money to be made.

Eventually, and I do mean eventually, all three stories come together.

This one gets both the Christy tag, since she and I watched it together, and the Rob tag since it was his movie.  The copy he let me borrow had no subtitles so I had to have Christy read me half the movie, which presented its own source of hilarity.