Yeah, well I've been busy. The upcoming commencement of my teaching career in a foreign land has temporarily taken over my ability to blog or watch movies effectively. I blame this on the drugs. NyQuil, DayQuil, whatever-quil. It happens. Bring it on meat brain. I did watch movies. I have watched movies. I am still watching movies. But the blogging has taken a step to the back burner as I prepare myself for transcendence into the world of education and unreal expectation.
So, where to begin? I have 4 movies to write about. Of course (if you know me at all), the genres vary imm
ensely. I will begin with the classic of classics, Casablanca. Bring it on 1942. I find it difficult to watch a movie like this when not in a specific mood. It's a Wonderful Life is a fantastic representation of my classic movie collection, but it can still be difficult to watch those smooth talking 1940s characters such as Rick from Casablanca or George Bailey. Rick's last name escapes me at this very moment. But it was part of a deal. My friend and I each created a list of five movies we love that the other has to see. It goes along with those old arguments of “how can you say you love movies and have never seen _______________!?” You fill in the blank. And yes, Casablanca was one of them for me to watch.
A classic. That's all I can say about it. It was good, interesting. I found it insanely heroic to shoot a movie about WWII during WWII. I guess it would be like shooting The Hurt Locker and The Messenger and any other Irag War movie-type. But WWII was such an uncertain time. And to shoot it in the middle of everything, talking about Hitler and NAZIs and other parts of the war (there were other parts?) was pretty cool, especially to see 70 years after the fact. The characterization of Humphrey Bogart's character Rick was intense. I loved him. He was a drunk, a smooth talker, an asshole. Pretty much like Scott, you know, the one banging Kourtney Kardashian, but Bogart doesn't have that slimy greaseball hair and the douchebag look on his face, as in it looks like someone threw a douchebag onto his face after using it.
Moving on, here comes the weird movie. Movie #2 in my friend's list for me was Magnolia. With a star-studded cast including Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, and others, the back-and-forth movement of different people's lives throughout one dreadful San Bernandino day brings about rain in the form of frogs. This is not a literary work by me, it's true. These frogs descend from the sky in a storm of biblical proportion. I didn't really understand it, but the small stories inside the movie were pretty interesting. The movie actually had John C. Reilly playing a good part. I haven't seen that since The Good Girl. I don't really have much to say, except that the movie was long. It wasn't unbearable, but just long.
Sucker Punch. What a dumb title. Probably because everyone (including Zack Snyder) knew it would be a dumb movie. With the exception of making young girls sluttified (I don't care if that's a word, it's the correct way to describe it) and video-game like fight sequences, the movie just falls flat. Were they trying to show some king of feministic dominance in alternate realms? Was Snyder trying to show that even though
young girls are cute and pretty and vulnerable looking, they should be feared and fought against? I
guess. Truth is, I don't really care. It was an interesting concept, but the story was way to intense for what the movie was. The eye candy
was nice. Vanessa Hudgens and I have kind of a relationship of her being in movies and me liking them. I'm ok with that. She was hot. And that's all I have to say about that.
And now to talk about (yes, real title) I Spit On Your Grave. A remake. From when, I don't know, go to IMDB and look it up, because I don't feel like it. So yeah, the whole reason I got this movie on Netflix is because I heard the star, Sarah Butler, on the Howard Stern show a while back and they were talking about it. Of course, she came in to the show because she's hot and was promoting a movie. Movie plot in one sentence, go: So this woman drives to an old cabin on a lake to write a novel, ends up getting raped by 5 guys and gets revenge on them by setting up Saw-like traps around the small, rural town. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Look, watching a rape scene in a movie is a really hard thing to do. Watching the innocence get pounded (no pun intended) out of a woman and her life being completely transformed forever is a hideous and disgusting sight. But the badass shit she pulled was the stuff that actually made me have to cover my eyes and cower on the corner of the couch. Sticking fish hooks in eye
lids and ensuring a man cannot blink as crows peck out his eye balls. Watching a pair of garden shears John Wayne Bobbitt a man's manhood and altogether being. Ugh, I just cringed a little. Terrible. But the movie was straight forward. I never say if I like rape movies, because I don't know what kind of speculation that would bring, but it was definitely not a movie for the faint-hearted.
So there you have it. Four reviews right there. Boom. I promise to try to keep things up to date as best I can. I still have Taxi Driver, City of God, and Synedoche, New York to watch on my friend's list. By the way, he had never seen The Goonies or Rudy. So I win.
