Friday's Movie of the Week

Friday is the day dedicated to complaining about the current state of Hollywood - especially in the early months of the year. January, February, and March are the months famous for being the dumping ground of Hollywood. Everyone has spent their money buying over-priced cheap plastic gifts for others for Christmas and need a few months to recover before spending their recently hard-earned cash on watching the Summer blockbusters. There remains one single bright spot on the movie landscape during these few months of famine and that is the O'Dellicious Live Oscar Webcast (as you may have noticed in the beautiful banner above). If you're reading this you are obviously a lonely nerd with no one to hang out with, so hang out with us, online, and experience unfunny commentary, massive amounts of liquor, live commercial reads, and probably some sort of physical altercation before the night ends. Sunday, February 27th. 


Friday's Movie of the Week


               Oh. Dear. God. I'm sure Clayton felt like he cornered the market in horrific movie releases last week with Just Go With (sh) It, and Gnomeo & Juliet but this week is more then determined to give last week a run for it's money (and by money, I mean a terrible score on Rotten Tomatoes). I know people will go to theaters this weekend, and I get it, sometimes you live in an incredibly small town where there is literally nothing to do. The only thing I can ask is this - pay to see another movie than whatever tripe you're actually going to see. If The King's Speech is playing, pay for that and sneak into a different theater. I don't care what you actually see, I just care what message you send to Hollywood. Everyone knows you don't pet your dog after he takes a dump on the dining room table.

             Liam Neeson has a new movie out this week called, Unknown. While I know practically nothing about this movie, I know that it's obviously terrible as it is being released in February. It looks to be one of those typical semi-supernatural thrillers along the lines of Stay where there's an unsatisfying and impossible-to-figure-out twist at the end that usually is something like, "He was really in a coma and imagining everything the entire time!" While I don't think there is anyone in the entire world that dislikes Liam Neeson, he doesn't have a reputation for having the most discerning of taste when it comes to movie roles. I thought this movie had come out like last August but evidently it hasn't. I saw the always lovely January Jones on The Daily Show the other night advertising this movie in the most awkward of ways. All she really said (without any conviction) was, "It's good, go see it." Which, of course, is Hollywood lingo for, "It's bad, don't go see it."

Chest hair is the new black.

              I Am Number Four is based on a young adult book about a guy known as Number Three. The success of the Harry Potter and Twilight series(es) birthed a spate of adaptations of young adult novels with a supernatural bent, like the succinctly titles Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.  (Sidenote: This title reveals a lot, because one would assume The Lightning Thief would be a perfectly good title, but the point of the movie is to cash in on Percy Jackson fans, not to make a good movie). I can't really be bothered to learn too much about this movie, as it feels disposal at best. DJ Caruso (the director) also made Disturbia (pretty entertaining) and Eagle Eye (astonishingly bad) and has one of those imminently punchable faces.


             Now, if we want to go head to head with last weeks movies for the reigning champ of Awful Excrement I think this week wins with the match ups of  I Am Number Four and Unknown vs. Gnomeo and Juliet, The Eagle, and Justin Bieber Never Ever Ever Says Never. I haven't seen any of those movies, of course (I value my sanity) but I have to assume last week's movies are better than this week's. However, as Adam Sandler is famous for making genuinely reprehensible movies, Hollywood really had to pull out all the stops to create a movie that could compete with Just Go With It. But I know my Hollywood, and I trust them to always come through when I need proof that the lowest of lows has not yet been reached. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the ring the latest offering of the always hilarious comedian Martin Lawrence, famous for such movies as Big Momma's House, Rebound, Big Momma's House 2, Black Knight, Wild Hogs, and the upcoming The Skank Robbers (I wish I were making that up) in this weeks biggest (HARHAR) release, Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son. Yes, that's right, Big Momma's House can now legitimately be considered a franchise.

Random picture from my immense porn collection.

                 I've long believed that people have a way of revealing themselves for who they are without even trying to do so. When a woman goes on stage and sings a solo with no music, you know she trusts her voice. When Lady Gaga dresses like she was molested by a Klingon at a young age and her daddy never loved her, you can pretty much assume she ain't got that much in the way of raw vocal talent. When Eddy Murphy makes The Nutty Professor and a sequel in which he plays multiple characters in different fat suits it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's running out of ideas. When Martin Lawrence copies Eddy Murphy's worst ideas and stretches them out over three movies, you can assume that there is no semblance of fairness or reason on this big blue marble we call the Earth. I don't even want to criticize this movie because really, if I have to convince anyone reading this blog not to see this movie, then frankly, I don't want you reading this blog.

            Thankfully we live in an age of technology and instantaneous information and as such, we aren't restricted to watching only movies released in the theaters. Because of that (and the blessed service known as Netflix) here are the movies I've watched this week:

- The Deer Hunter
- Enter the Void
- Goodbye Solo
- Cypher
- Ken Burn's The Civil War (disc 1 & 2)
- Stalag 17


           All of these movies were interesting and worth watching (Enter the Void was particularly mind-blowing, while also managing to be disgusting and inconsequential) but the one I recommend is The Deer Hunter. I've heard a ton about it, and it won a ton of awards, but I've always avoided watching it as it seemed like a pretentious Vietnam war movie - yeah, we get it, that war sucked and we should have never been there. I finally watched it though, and it's a legitimately great movie. Not only is it awesome to see a young Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken, but the movie deals with the war by spending over half of the running time in small town Pennsylvania, showing the participants before and after the war. Personally I don't know that I could handle war, I really can't imagine going through something like that and, even if uninjured, ever really recovering. This movie's depiction of Vietnam, and the prison camps, and the knowledge that both of my grandfathers fought in that war (and my mom lived in Saigon as a baby before it fell) is pushing me dangerously close to getting obsessed with the Vietnam Conflict like I got obsessed with the Amazon basin for a few months last year after reading The Lost City of Z.

          Movies suck this week y'all. Catch up on Oscar picks or start watching Justified on FX (starring America's favorite bug-eyed handsome man, Timothy Olyphant!). Next week, however, things get good (not with movies, thanks Nic Cage) but with the Academy Awards - the movie nerd Super Bowl. Be sure to join us for the most underwhelming event of the year, also known as "something else we can bet on."