Haven’t done this in awhile…

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The Hills Have Eyes – Have I bashed this one yet? It ties Mothman Prophecies for the worst movie I’ve ever sat through. 1/10 Add The Whole 10 Yards to your “List to Miss” along with Sentinel

Fahrenheit 451 – Yeah, so it’s 40 years old, so what? You have to get back to the classics sometimes. It’s a cautionary tale of the future where books and independent thinking are forbidden. A ‘fireman’ whose job it is to burn books begins to question his government’s reasons for banning literature. Don’t expect anything flashy, but it’s still a good story. 7/10

Lucky Number Slevin – Loved this one. Not a big Hartnett fan, but I thought he did really well with this. Lucy Liu as the loveable ‘girl next door’ Morgan Freeman and Sir Ben as crime bosses, the add a little Bruce Willis as a ‘World Class assassin’ and you have a killer cast. It moves along nicely, good action, some humor, and keeps you guessing. About the time you figure out what’s going on, the director reveals it (my only real complaint is that some of it he beats you over the head with… yeah, I get it, this guy shot that guy, move on now) The style works well – the flashbacks had a look that I liked for some reason. It’s not quite The Usual Suspects kind of “WTF is going on??” but pretty close. It does have a few peripheral moments that you won’t see coming at all.
Check out the deleted scenes on the dvd. There’s an extended version of one of the scenes with Freeman and Sir Ben that’s just impressive. I can’t decide if I want to give this an 8 or a 9 out of 10, so I’ll give it an 8.5

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Have I really not mentioned this one yet?? This and Lucky Number Slevin were probably two of my favorite rentals so far this year. “…wetter than Drew Barrymore at a grunge club.” and “Don’t worry, I saw Lord of the Rings, I’m not gonna have this thing end 17 times” — I think I actually had to pause the movie at least once because I started laughing so hard. I thought Kilmer’s dry sarcasm went well with Jr’s scatterbrained attitude and attempted bravado. Fun movie to watch. 9/10

District B13 – Something entertaining from the French. The two lead actors are stuntmen, so the whole movie is basically one long action/fight sequence. The acting is horrid, and the story is pretty lame… but if you want to see some good fight scenes and Parkour on film, give it a look. 5/10

X-3: X-Men – The Last Stand – A pretty solid X-Men movie. All the ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘alternate endings’ that the commercials keep mentioning? Mild after-thought. Seriously, the ‘alternate endings’ are just stupid fillers where only a few seconds have been changed. The deleted scenes are pretty much the same thing – just a few seconds erased or changed here and there. If you saw it in the theater, don’t bother picking up the dvd for ‘all the extras’ 7/10

Tsotsi – It won a ton of Best Foreign Film awards in 2005. It’s a powerful story of change and redemption set in South Africa. If you’re not a big fan of foreign films, you probably won’t like this one. I give it a 7/10 though.

Speaking of powerful, I watched United 93 last week too. Wow. I was worried it was going to sensationalize or exploit the tragic events of 9/11 but it was very much the opposite. If you poke through the credits on IMDB you’ll notice that many people even played themselves. The film was done without any kind of political undertones or trying to assign any blame. It was also very respectful of those involved – every person on flight 93 was represented in the credits, but never named in the film. It was a very emotional and chilling account of that day, and is supposed to be a very accurate portrayal. I can’t even give this one a score… you can’t really rank a film where you shudder as the final scene cuts to black.

You know what I hate?

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Dollar bill feeders in vending machines.  Who designed these things?!  Right about the time you figure out you fat-fingered it trying to get it in the slot, the motor reverses to spit it back out… making you wait there even longer.

I also hate people in elevators who wear so much perfume you can taste it.

And that’s my random disgust of the day.

Movies? Why not…

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Matador – seemed like a good idea, but just couldn’t hold my attention. Brosnan and Kinnear had good chemistry, and I thought it was a good role for Brosnan but the plot just flopped on me. 3/10

Benchwarmers – meh… how many times can we do the same movie? 2/10

V for Vendetta – The Wachowski brothers redeem themselves. Never read the book, so can’t say how well it does there. The action was great, story was solid, and can you really go wrong with Natalie Portman? 8/10

Yes Men www.theyesmen.org – Got a kick out of it. Can’t believe the stuff these guys got away with. 6/10

Watched Winter Soldier just because I had heard a decent amount about it. Disturbing really. My father was in the VietNam war, and I know the trouble he had readjusting to life back here. He never really talked much about it either. A frightening look at war and what it does to people. Also makes you think twice about backing the US whenever we accuse people of war crimes – if we can’t confess to our own, we have no right to accuse others.

October Sky – Somehow I missed this one years ago. Great, feel-good, based-on-a-true-story about The Rocket Boys getting out of a small mining town by using their brains. 7/10

… man I’ve watched a lot of movies lately….

Cellular – Lame. I’m not sure who told me to watch this, but I want to punch them in the face. 2/10

Inside Man – How did anyone give this a good review?! Great cast directed by Spike Lee, it just tried to do too much. It was a great bank heist movie – I may have even put it up close to Heat – but it tried to throw some political thriller BS in there and lost me. I still give it a 5/10 for the good parts though.

Scary Movie 4 – Not my idea. Pretty much what you should expect from this franchise by now – good for a few laughs, but if you haven’t seen what it’s spoofing you’ll stare blankly at the screen. I’ll give it a 4/10 just for the digs at Cruise.

Brick – Really enjoyed this. I actually had to turn the subtitles on a few times – the fast dialogue, made up lingo, and bad sound made it tough to watch at parts. Watching some of the deleted scenes, you see what the poor sound engineers had to work with though. A noir-murder mystery that’s light on the mystery. Fairly original I thought – they set it in a high-school. The high-school aspect isn’t really meant to be high-school. Don’t think of this as a Dead Teenager Movie. I think the director even said something about “… this is to high-school as Gotham City is to New York City” Good story and solid acting by a bunch of unknowns. 8/10

Random Update

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Just felt like typing something this morning I guess.

If you’ve been stopping by my little corner here for awhile, you’ll notice I’ve got some links up to the ‘old’ stuff. Some of it I’ve made look pretty, other things I just haven’t. I’ve always used this site for my own personal amusement, and I thought it’d be nice to get some of the old stuff back. Not everything works, and I know the ‘fish cam’ is down more than it’s up and I broke the comments again… but like I said, it’s for my amusement and the 3 of you that read this don’t click on the google ads enough for me to quit my job and work on it full time. 🙂

So, anyway, a lot of crap has happened lately. One of which was a friend of mine had an accident skydiving and died from his injuries. It’s weird how the human brain works sometimes. Even though when you start in this sport, the ‘old timers’ will tell you “Skydive long enough, and you will lose friends to the sport” – it still seems like it’s something that happens to ‘someone else’. He just screwed up – which is one of the things that makes me mad. Maybe mad isn’t the right word… let me see if I can explain: Ted was a very logical person – he thought through everything he did or was about to do. Even then, a momentary lapse in judgment cost him his life. I don’t think things through that much, and I do a lot of shit on a whim. It just seems like analytical people should miss the “Shit Happens Bus” more often.
Ted and I had had our issues, and we were probably a bad influence on each other on occasion… but I always had a good time with him, he could always make me laugh even if I was having a crappy day/week, and the skydives were always fun… or at least entertaining. The last few times I’ve been out to the DZ, it’s just been ‘different’ and I’m not sure why. Because he’s not going to be there again to jump, drink, talk, laugh with or if just because the whole ‘losing a friend to the sport’ has taken some of the joy out of this hobby of mine.

Beware, dear son of my heart, lest in thy new-found power thou seekest even the gates of Olympus . . . . These wings may bring thy freedom but may also come thy death.

-— Daedalus

I think I had more to write, but I think that’ll do it for today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write my “Ode to the Lady in the POS Gold Buick”

Shuffle

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This is just a test. I’m switching hosting providers.

Why is it everytime you call to cancel, they want to see what they can do to keep you? Any other time you can’t get them to do anything for you.

I think everything that I care about is working again. I put some links up there to some old parts of the site – some of it’s really ugly, and some of it isn’t working yet. You’ll have to get over that.