02-19-2005

134) Love Don't Cost a Thing. Weirdly enough, this made me start thinking of the power of film to bring people together. In the third or fourth grade my parents went out of town and left me with my sister for the weekend which unfortunately coincided with the weekend that my niece would be having a slumber party. I was subsequently subjected to a night and day's worth of girlish squealing and, to top it all off, one of her best friends at the time was my mortal enemy. Later on we learned to get along, but at the time we hated each other with the fire of a thousand suns. So Windy and her friends had rented a stack of girly videos to watch and then naturally spent the whole night running around the house squealing and giggling and not watching their movies, but said best friend and I managed to stay in the living room and watch them together and generally get along for a whole evening. I don't remember what all we watched, but I know Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Can't Buy Me Love were two of them (we also watched Transformers: The Movie, but that was obviously my choice). It also got me to thinking about going to see Beavis and Butthead Do America on opening night. I went with a couple of guys and when we walked in the whole theater was packed out with every kind of dangerously agressive subset you could imagine. There were your angry punks, angry stoners, angry jocks, angry rednecks and then me, with three guys that wanted to leave because they were scared. After assuring them things would be allright (and thinking to myself that maybe we really should leave) we took our seats and waited for the worst. And the worst could have really happened because that theater was a powder keg ready to explode. Not only were there at least three different groups that typically didn't get along crammed into a small space, most of them were high or drunk or getting there as coolers full of beer were being brought in through the fire exit at the front of the theater by some very enterprising young gentlemen. Several bottles flew across the theater and many an angry word was exchanged until the lights went down and we all cheered, settled into our seats, and for nearly two hours sat and laughed together as brothers at the exploits of Beavis and Butthead. It really was a beautiful moment and everyone left the theater with their differences set aside for a little while as we all laughed and recalled our favorite moments. Other than bringing those memories up, whatever.

135) Envy. So let me get this straight. Be grateful for what you've got AND follow your dreams? That's two feel good themes for the price of one people! SCORE! Okay, this actually wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good either. Ben Stiller has the most success with a "throw enough jokes at the wall and some of them are bound to stick" method of comedy. Look at Mystery Men. Not the funniest movie ever by any stretch of the imagination, but by the end you've laughed at enough of the jokes that you forget the ones that didn't work. Same for Zoolander and Dodgeball. There's so many gags going on that for every one that falls flat there's another one right after it to make you forget. This one took too long to set up a lot of the humor and the only truly funny parts were the quick throw away lines from Jack Black that were more than likely improvised on the spot. I laughed some, but I could have skipped it.

136) King Arthur. Two things struck me while I was watching this: First, how much I wish I had Excalibur on DVD and, second, how much King Arthur looks like Joe Namath. From what I remember from my 10th grade English studies of the Arthurian legends, this was completely off the mark. But who cares, really? Plenty of old westerns throw notorious villains that were never within the same state together to pull a train robbery, so if using legendary characters to tell an exciting story that isn't exactly true to their legend then so be it. Antoine Fuqua has really developed into a Bruckheimer production/big action director and everything looked great, so I'm okay with it.

137) Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed. Not so much a horror movie like the first one, but more of a weird character drama that just happens to be about a werewolf. Still great, just a different kind of great.

138) Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. Not as good as the first two, but it did get back to the creature feature scarefest theme and it worked out pretty well. Made me think of Ravenous.

138 down, 862 to go.

Special Robin is Annoying Update: Robin wouldn't stop calling last night or tonight and ate up a lot of valuable movie time.