I saw “Man of Steel” last night. It was an OK movie by regular standards. By “holy shit they mention Kansas like 13 times” standards, it was spectacular. As many people have noted since Friday, Clark Kent watches a Kansas football game on TV during the movie, and it no doubt has taken super powers beyond those endowed to regular mortals to watch KU football the last three years.
But what game was Clark actually watching? Continue reading
It’s been a while since our last Diary of a Bad Movie. Blame it on my lack of cable in State College. In Dallas, I could choose, on demand, from a list of nauseating mediocrity. I’m not so lucky in the east.
Thankfully being home for the holidays has allowed me to catch up with a true stinkbomb of a film, New Year’s Eve, on New Year’s Eve nonetheless.
Going into the movie, other than knowing it will not be any good, I know Seth Meyers is in it. All I know about Seth Meyers, as my dad reminds me, is that he is not even enough of a screen presence to be featured in Saturday Night Live skits. And he is in this movie. This movie.
This movie, of course, contains a jumble of characters, like the regrettable Valentine’s Day, whose plots and thus lives are somehow intertwined and interrelated. Yes just like the world. In the same way the actions of a rice farmer in Japan extends to sales of wheat futures in the United States or something, the pain of Ashton Kutcher being a hipster will lead to Jessica Biel giving birth to a baby faster. Yes this math does compute in the mind of a studio exec.
Selecting from On Demand: It turns out this movie is one hour and 58 minutes long. A test of endurance. I’ll see if I can get through. Here we go… Continue reading
Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday by far, makes us engage in behavior that under normal circumstances would appear crazy. This sociologically-documented phenomenon stretches all the way back to the first Thanksgiving on Plymouth Rock. Instead of serving Pocahontas’ and Squanto’s tribes a small pox cocktail like they usually did, John Smith, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan shared a meal of turkey, fried green bean casserole and Stove Top stuffing with them, piling all of the food into a giant cornucopia. No muskets were even brought to this feast. Isn’t America great?
In modern times, these behavioral transformations are more subtle Continue reading
For the newcomers to this series, I’ll sum it up quickly: I love bad movies, love watching them as long as I know in advance that they will suck. And a couple months ago, I decided to write about one of them, keeping a live blog, in order to be productive. The end result was a massive net loss of productivity, a loss great enough to make me want to do it again!
Because the wonderful fairy tale our parents read to us just wasn’t long enough or violent enough or apparently featured enough cleavage,* Warner Bros. decided to unleash a REAL version of “Red Riding Hood” for us, starring Amanda Seyfried. And Amanda Seyfried isn’t just a girl who wants to visit her grandmother. She is trapped in a love triangle that is as arbitrary as it is requisite for the makeup of any bad movie. But it gets better. This isn’t just a love triangle. This is a love QUADRANGLE, because the big bad wolf must get involved at some point. Interest piqued yet? Don’t worry the 89 percent of critics who panned the movie didn’t find anything about it worthwhile, either.
*Length, violence, cleavage – the three nouns most often brought up in Hollywood studio meetings
Now, on to our feature presentation… Continue reading
This post, which is not about soccer, begins at 6:45 p.m. on the Sunday preceding Thanksgiving, one hour and 15 minutes before David Beckham will don the Los Angeles Galaxy uniform for possibly the last time, trying to emphatically conclude an experiment, marred with record losing streaks, coaching changes, and superstar infighting between him and Landon Donovan, that had come so close to derailing as one of the sports world’s biggest busts just two years ago.
I might watch the game. I’m not sure. I’ve just been paying a lot more attention to Beckham the last few weeks, because I need to thank him.
*****
About a month ago, as I melted onto my couch in a post-surgical haze, downing bowls of macaroni and cheese and chocolate chip-cookie-dough ice cream because my operated-upon mouth couldn’t handle anything sufficient, I decided to watch a movie.*
Continue reading
I like to watch bad movies, that is, I like to watch bad movies if I know the movie will be bad. Such knowledge allows me to laugh at the low moments, the unintentional comedy. I think this goes back to the classic, “Spring Break Shark Attack.” It came out during, get this, spring break, of my senior year of high school. The made-for-TV movie dealt with four subject matters: sharks, chicks, booze and date rape drugs. I laughed til’ I decided to turn off the TV and go to sleep. It was wonderful. 
But not all bad movies are equal. A bad movie can drag. It can just be boring. Think “Locusts,” which was on TV about two weeks after Shark Attack. These bad movies suck. I want ridiculous dialogue, subplots that are forgotten or given up and really, anything by M. Night Shyamalan.
On Sunday night, I decided to watch “The Roommate,” a genuine bomb, sitting at four percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and zero percent from the top critics. I wanted to indulge in my guilty pleasure. But I also wanted to be productive. So I settled for this, live blogging during the movie. Continue reading
The Brew House 