02-26-2005

151) U.S. Marshalls. So now Robert Downey, Jr. is selling intelligence secerts to the Communist Chinese for drug money. I've made no secret about my rather extensive enemies list, or that Robert Downey, Jr. is Enemy #1, so luckily he gets shot at the end and all is again right with the world.

152) The Ladykillers (2004). I wasn't expecting to like this because I've heard so many bad things about it, but it turned out to be pretty decent. It took awhile for things to get going and until it did it dragged, but overall it was worth a few chuckles so I'm okay with it.

153) Good Burger. Sweet Fancy Moses, it's come to this. And equally Sweet Fancy Moses, I laughed my butt off watching this. The skinny one seemed like he was trying to channel a surfer James Brown the whole time and I kept waiting for him to ask if he could hit it and quit it, Abe Vegoda was really funny as the cook, and the blonde girl was smoking hot. Plus, a totally crazy Linda Cardellini! Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.

153 down, 847 to go.

So today wasn't the productive day I had planned. After Bama blew it I got to work cleaning the kitchen and that turned into an all day affair PLUS I just couldn't bring myself to start another movie after The Ladykillers until about 9. I was going to go see Ray with Charity but she bailed on me so she wouldn't have to change out of her pajamas and I'm kind of glad she did cause I probably would have fallen asleep anyway. This is way harder than I was expecting. Me and my big mouth.

02-25-2005

Went to a surprise birthday dinner for Lee so I only managed to get one in tonight. I'm really starting to feel the burnout set in and it hasn't even been two months yet. I'm going to work on cleaning the kitchen tomorrow and watch the Bama/Kentucky game, but I'm hoping I can still get in six. I don't know how likely that will be, but whatever.

150) La Strada. I will die alone.

151 down, 849 to go.

02-24-2005

I can barely keep my eyes open at the moment, so nothing to add to the count tonight. I'm so behind.

02-23-2005

148) I Heart Huckabees.
Dear Naomi,
I had a really good time tonight, but I'm afraid it's too little too late. I thought we could give it another shot and I really did enjoy myself and I'm so tempted to try to make it work one more time but we both know where that road ends. Things just haven't been the same since 21 Grams and I don't really see how they are ever going to go back to the way they were. It's not you, it's me. I hope we can still be friends.
-Todd

Yeah, so I actually found myself liking this in spite of myself. Save for Jude Law before all the ridiculous philosophical bullshit got to him, there isn't a single character in it that I wouldn't absolutely hate were I to meet them in real life. All of the existentialist/nihilist talk kept making me think of all the losers from my philosophy classes (especially this guy named Thoureau who was a total jackass and a disgusting slob to boot. He totally could have written a lot of the dialogue for this) in college and that all these people really needed was a good shot of William James. There was also a whole lot of weird for the sake of weirdness going on, which I HATE in a movie, but somehow I still enjoyed it and kind of wish I could watch it again. It's going on the trusty old Amazon wish list for the time being and I'll just have to see how long it stays there.

149) Eulogy.
Dear Zooey,
I had a lot of fun with you tonight but I just got out of a relationship and I'm not really in that kind of place right now. I'm flattered, really I am, but I just don't think it will work out right now. It's not you, it's me. I hope we can still be friends.
-Todd

I'm not usually keen on ensemble comedies and this is the perfect example of why. There are always at least two weak links that drag everyone else down and otherwise perfectly good performances get ruined. For example, Ray Romano is absolutely brilliant but his kids are so annoying that it totally ruins him. Preston and Jansen are awesome, but the bitchy sister ruins their performances. And so on. Whatever.

149 down, 851 to go.

There's now a very large square cut into the kitchen ceiling, revealing the floor beams from the apartment upstairs. It actually looks kind of cool. Maybe they should take out all of the drywall and make it look all lofty in there.

02-22-2005

146) Kiss Them For Me. I had to squeeze in one more Grant while I'm on a roll. Three things struck me while watching this:
1. Don't trust him Cary, he's really Colonel Klink!
2. Jayne Mansfield is such a poor man's Marylin Monroe. Her entire act was a pale imitation of Monroe's in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
3. A naval officer from Massachusetts that enlisted and attempted to get wounded for the sake of his future political career......why does that sound so familiar?

147) Shaun of the Dead. Hee hee. Very funny stuff. I liked that the best humor lay more in the details than in the obvious jokes (though those were funny too), and the visual style was quite well done. I'll buy this one later.

147 down, 853 to go.

02-21-2005

144) Suspicion. Oh man, I'm not sure what to think about this. Grant is positively sinister and it creeped me out. I mean, you just look at him and you know he's up to no good. It was a brilliant performance, but I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of Grant as villain. Besides seeing as many of the European greats as possible, I have also made it my goal to see all the Hitchcocks I haven't seen and this was a pretty good start. To Catch a Thief used to be my favorite, but it might be getting replaced. At first I wasn't really satisfied with the ending (I had a real "that's it?" kind of reaction), but once I started thinking about it it was really the best way to do it and works splendidly. Just an absolutely magnificent picture.

145) Penny Serenade. It's a Cary Grant double feature kind of night. Irene Dunne is so sweet in this that you can't help but love her, and there were a few times when even my black and lifeless heart almost broke. Girls, don't watch this without some Kleenex.

145 down, 855 to go.

So the ceiling in the kitchen finally fell in. The official story is that the faucets for the washing machine in the apartment upstairs were leaking and that's what caused the damage, but I'm still of the firm belief that our theory about squatting mexicans leaving a faucet on is valid. I don't care what the rent man says, there is no one up there painting at 3 am and if there is then they should fire him for being so slow since he's been up there working for the past SIX MONTHS. It's a pretty big mess in there and it's going to be a pain in the butt washing all of the dishes/glasses/cookware that are now covered in filthy brown water and wet plaster, but I still laughed pretty hard when I heard the crash.

three. hun. dred. six. ty. five. de. grees

burning down the house!

02-20-2005

139) Johnson Family Vacation. I'm fairly the certain the script was maybe four pages long and read something like this:

Int. Car Dealership: Cedric the Entertainer acts like Cedric the Entertainer. Hilarity ensues.

Int. Living Room: Cedric the Entertainer acts like Cedric the Entertainer. Hilarity ensues.

Int. Hotel Room: Cedric the Entertainer acts like Cedric the Entertainer. Hilarity ensues.

And so on. Once they actually got to the reunion and he and Steve Harvey had a chance to play off each other there were some funny moments, but for the most part it was nothing more than a family friendly road movie.

140) Analyze That. Just awful.

141) Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Crispin Glover's death wasn't nearly as gory or violent as I would have liked, but he was killed and that's enough for me. Six more to go.

142) Jackie Chan's Who Am I?. There really is nothing more fun than watching a Jackie Chan movie. Yeah, it was pretty silly at times but all of them are and you don't watch for the acting, you watch for the stunts. Good clean fun. Loved it.

Robin was in town, so we went to eat and then came back and watched...

143) Wonderland. The film couldn't ever really decide if it was a stylish crime piece, a Rashomon like tale of murder, or a character driven drama, but it all worked out pretty well in the end. And the soundtrack was awesome too.

143 down, 867 to go.

Bree has pictures of Jesus AND Reagan in her home. How could I not love her?

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.