Been working at home this weekend, and caught a few movies on cable. Additionally, saw X-Men with Dog on Friday, and then rented some movies at Blockbuster last night. Here's Jeff's movie criticisms (a fallback career):
X-Men: A good flick. I walked into it not knowing anything about the whole X-Men lifestyle/genre/thing. Walked out having enjoyed a good action flick, seeing some good fx, and (contrary to my criticism colleagues Arun "I've never seen a movie that I didn't not necessarily not throughly perhaps enjoy" Rodrigues and Pete "if the fx weren't done with Linux, it's shite" Rijks), I had no wont of "transformation", or "extreme-transformation", or "super-ultra-bogo-fantasmic-trepedacious-transformation", or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Good story, bunches of funnyisms (e.g., "Prove it" / "You're a dick" -- watch the movie, you'll understand). That and the opening-night crowd made the movie well worth it. The special fx are also worth the movie theater exper˙˙˙˙ience rather than a TV. After the movie Dog was telling me about how the movie actually dealt pretty well with the 30+ years of comic book history that the X-Men series has. Amazing. The movie left a lot of unresolved questions at the end (intentionally, I'm sure), such that there could well be one or more sequels. I'd pay to see them. I'll give the movie 30 minutes.
She's All That: Came on cable Friday night after I got home from X-Men. Cute derivative of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. And since I'm a Shakespeare, I had to like this. It's probably no The Cheerleader, but it was enjoyable, and easy to do some coding to while it was on in the background, so this movie also gets two thumbs up. I'll give this movie 5 minutes --
while I'm a Shakespeare fan, you have to be in the right mood to watch it.
Fight Club: Arun has been raving about this movie for some time now, not to mention that I've heard the soundtrack dozens of times (Arun has this h˙˙˙˙orrible habit of playing the same CD over and over and over and over again. I must not have trained him well), and I've been meaning to rent it for quite a while (it's actually on the pay-per-view circuit right now). Normally I am morally opposed to renting movies that are on the ppv circuit, but since I'm immanently moving to Kentucky where they just recently got running water, advanced technologies such as "cable" (much less "HBO"), "electricity", and "toothpaste" are foreign concepts. Hence, I figured it was ok to rent this. One word to describe this movie: trippy. A most excellent movie. If you like messed up, intelligent, dark, and just generally trippy movies, I can't recomend this one enough. And a bunch of dark humor, too. Great line: "Ah... flashback humor." Two thumbs up. This is a 50 minute movie (the penultimate rating of 60 minutes is very, very hard to achive. This was close).
Dogma: "Mass genocide is one of the most exhausting a˙˙˙˙ctivity that one can engage in. Next to soccer." Any movie with Loki in it automatically starts off in the lead. Not for the religious faint of heart, though -- very irreverent and an extremely satirical view of religion and whatnot. All star cast, and extremely funny. Gets a little slow in the middle (which was a bit disappointing -- should have had more Affleck/Damon dialogue), but still has an overall goodness. Who knew that Alanis Morissette was god? I'll give it 5 minutes.
BTW, the rating system goes like this:
- 60 minutes: fantastic movie. Go see it without delay; do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not stop at Dairy Queen on the way.
- 0 (no units, also known as "sympathy"): A take-it-or-leave-it film. You'd see and, and probably... well, you wouldn't enjoy it, but you wouldn't not enjoy it, either. It's a very middle-of-the-road kind of movie. Meaning that if it was available and you had the time, you'd watch it. But if it inconvenienced ˙˙˙˙you in the slightest, it wouldn't be worth it.
- 100 feet: Horrible, absolutely awful movie. Avoid it at all costs. If you surf by it by accident when it starts showing up on cable, avert your eyes immediately for fear of being blinded, and hit the mute button so that you will not become more stupid for having heard its dialogue.
That's it from Jeff's movie criticisms today. The rest of Saturday and probably most of today will be wedding planning stuff...