Shriek if You KNow What I Did Last Friday the 13th

I'm a big fan of slasher movies, and a big fan of spoofs. So this one is pretty easy to review, in fact I can do it in one word: Worthless.

Completely lame, nothing about it was funny or original or good in any way. Kelly Kapowski was hot, but that's not enough to make this piece of shit worth watching.

Uzumaki

I have heard nothing but great things about Uzumaki, and have seen it listed as the best J-Horror movie more than a few times. I had also never really heard what it was about, but definitely wasn't expected what I saw. I thought it would be more of a horror movie and less of a weird Japanese pseudo-art film.

It held my interest for 90 minutes, but I never really enjoyed it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the type of geek who loves anything Japanese no matter the quality. But they would be better off watching something good and Japanese so I would probably steer them away from it too.

Project ALF

Six years after NBC canceled ALF somebody thought it would be a good idea to bring a little bit of Melmac back to television. And I for one am glad that they did. I was a huge fan of ALF as a kid. I even dressed up as him for Halloween when I was 6, and I think the mask is still around somewhere.

The movie is probably not for everybody, it is pretty cheezy but surprisingly funny. I found myself laughing out loud several times during the movie, more times than I did when I watched Tropic Thunder in the theater the other day. One weird thing is that while the show was on NBC, the movie aired on ABC, and ALF makes a joke about Fox.

Pineapple Express

This was probably the movie that I was looking forward to more than anything else this year. My top 3 movies last year, all of which were basically tied for first, were No Country for Old Men, Superbad, and Knocked Up. The team of Apatow / Rogen hasn't gone wrong yet (I'm just pretending Drillbit Taylor doesn't exist), and Pineapple Express was no different. It was one of the funniest movies I've seen in a while, but it didn't quite live up to the Apatow/Rogen brand name.

It had some hilarious scenes and then there were a few that just didn't work, like the scene with Rogen's girlfriend and her high school friends. Actually I wasn't a fan of any of the scenes with the girlfriend. I wasn't too sure about James Franco after the last Spiderman movie, but he delivered in this one. Definitely worth checking out in the theaters, and I'm sure it will make its way into my Blu-ray collection, but somehow still a little disappointing.

The Dark Knight

In the immortal words of Public Enemy, "Don't Believe the Hype." I went to see this movie opening weekend with pretty high hopes. I like Batman Begins, I like Christopher Nolan, I like most of the actors in the movie, but the movie just didn't do it for me. And the hype and praise for the movie is driving me crazy. It hit #1 on imdb's Top 250 pretty quickly and I figured it would drop down over the next few days, but now 13 days later it is still there.

It is a decent movie, but there is no way that it is the best movie ever. The acting was good but there is no way any of it was Oscar worthy. If Heath Ledger wasn't dead, people would be laughing at the fanboys claiming he deserves an Oscar. It's sort of like when John Wayne won an Oscar for a crap movie because he was on his death bed, the only difference is John Wayne had a long distinguished career and probably deserved an Oscar at some point in it.

The movie itself wasn't bad, actually it was pretty good. Heath Ledger was probably the best version of The Joker I have seen, Christian Bale is a pretty damn good Batman. But the movie was too long, and too slow. I feel like they could have easily cut 45-50 minutes out of the movie. It didn't take too long before I started checking my watch and shifting around in my seat. By the time I thought it started to get good towards the end I had pretty much lost interest.

But obviously I am in the minority on this one. $300 million dollars in 10 days, and about $10 million a day on the weekdays since then. I won't be surprised if it takes in more than Titanic, it's over half way there already.

Youth Without Youth

When I heard that Francis Ford Coppola had a new movie coming out I was pretty stoked. The theaters around here don't get a lot of smaller movies, and this was no exception. It played from about a week and I didn't know it was playing until the last day it was here. I couldn't wait for it to come out on video so I could get it from Netflix. I finally got it this week, and it was pretty horrible. I'll give his next movie a shot, but I think it could be time for him to hang up the director hat and stick to producing his daughter's movies.

i like movies

I just got done watching an episode of IFC's Ultimate Film Fanatic on youtube. I never saw it when it was on the air, in fact I don't think I had ever heard of it before seeing a link to the episode I just watched. It was a decent show I guess, but I am still looking for the ultimate film trivia show. Something a little more interactive, or at least something that lets me shout out answers at my TV.

One of the guys on the show plugged his website, and after checking it out it inspired me to make this blog. I watch a lot of movies in the theater, on DVD, downloaded (only stuff not available on DVD), however I can get them. My goal for this year is to watch 1,000 movies, and I am well on my way. A little over half way and I am at about 665 movies. It was a long cold winter and so far not much warmer this summer.

My tastes are all over the place, it is probably easier to list the stuff I don't like than it would be to list the stuff I do. I don't like French New Wave, anime, a lot of older black and white/foreign intellectual stuff, art movies, experimental movies, 60% of the Criterion Collection, and a bunch of other stuff I can't think of. I watch anything, and try to watch stuff in the genres that I don't like.

I will try to update this thing a couple times a week with short reviews or other movie related things. Now back to watching some movies.