[edit: Boy Do I look dumb, Crash came out second.  But in MY WORLD...]

Today it’s all about the movie ‘Love Actually’  If you haven’t seen it, but you have seen the movie ‘Crash’ then you really don’t need to watch this one.  Just make all of the story threads end on a festive Christmas happy note and it is essentially the same movie.

Although going from Love Actually to Crash is a little more difficult.  You have to replace Santa with a rapist and then replace the children’s Christmas pageant with kidnaping and decisions about if you want to sell a van full of people into slavery or not.  And add running over people, explosions, and massive amounts of racism.

Okay, so the comparison is only a one way street.  If you have seen Crash, you have seen Love Actually.  If you have seen Love Actually, you haven’t seen Crash unless you are really twisted and demented.  I’ll let you decide which one that is for yourself.

So the movie, the one in question (not the one that accidentally tripped and won Best Picture), is all about a bunch of people in their little lives going towards Christmas.  The people have some connection to one another, either by being second cousins to the Prime Minister or by being his brother in law’s secretary or perhaps by being his sister’s friend’s child who is in love with an American girl.  In case you couldn’t tell, the movie takes place in England.  Just like Crash…mostly.

There is one part of the movie where this guy falls in love with a Portuguese woman who speaks no English.  She is his maid while he works on his bad novel in the south of France.  She also falls in love with him, but he doesn’t really know it.  Also he doesn’t know a lick of Portuguese.  Really who does?  They talk, but they have no idea wtf the other is saying.

Soon after he leaves he gets sad and decides it would be a good idea to go marry her.  He runs off to do so, stopping only to take a two week course on Portuguese.  When he finally finds her, she is working as a waitress in a restaurant.  He impresses her by asking to be married and confessing his love in broken bits and pieces of Portuguese that he scrambled together.

Then comes the real tear jerker.  Knowing it ahead of time by reading the rest of this paragraph won’t even take away it’s potency.  She responds to him in English.  The grammar is messy and not structured, but it is in English.  She had been studying his language for the exact reason he was learning hers.

It reminds me of the Christmas story where the guy sells his pocket-watch to buy his wife a sweet comb.  Then she runs off and gets her hair made into a wig so she can buy a chain for his pocket-watch.  Both of the two sacrificed something they cherished for the one they love.  In the pocket-watch and hair story it turns out to suck for both of them.  But in Love Actually, it turns out to be very beautiful.

Some of the other stories that go along with the movie are also pretty good too.  There are about six storylines in total running through the movie.  One turns out to be a real downer.  Another illustrates how sad and lonely one guy is.  Another is neutral, like eating a sandwich.  But the remaining three are happy and heartwarming.

Hate to say it, but I liked this movie.  So I suppose that makes it nothing like Crash.

TBS or PBS or possibly somebody with PMS recently had a marathon where they played a couple rocket-ship movies back to back and then did it again an hour later.  One of those movies was ‘The Astronaut Farmer’ staring Billy Bob Thornton.

I watched it.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll tell you what it is about.  It’s about this good ‘ol boy Charles Farmer who wants to become a spaceman.  He is pretty pumped up about being in the airforce and NASA when he is young, but he quit that because life was hard.  Also his dad had shot himself, but mostly because life was hard.

It often is for quitters.

So Farmer decides that the best way to keep his dreams rolling is to build a rocketship in his barn and then blast himself off into space.  His twelve year old son who he would actually name Shepard, as in Shepard Farmer, is commanding the laptop-slash-”mission control”.

Farmer decides that his dreams are so important that it doesn’t matter what happens to his family.  I’m sure he would have sold off his wife and kids if it meant he could sit in his little tin can somewhere off in space.  He literally risks the farm to buy more rocket-ship parts.  The ranch is almost foreclosed.  His wife gets mad.

It really sucks if you saw the preview for this movie.  Knowing that everything is going to work and he goes to space safely makes everything kind of… pointless.  You just waste time waiting for the movie to progress far enough to see it.

The movie would have helped if there was a little conflict between Farmer and Shepard.  Just a little something to liven it up.  Farmer’s family eats up all of the lines about space travel.  They let him blow all of the money buying aluminum and fuel and weird crap.  They support him 100% and do not question him at all.  Other than the 30 second scene where the wife finds out they have no money and quickly forgives and forgets.

A disagreement between the son and Farmer would have helped to make the characters a little more real.  Sure the boy’s dad was his hero and all, but still a little thinking on his part would have been nice.

I can’t really harp to much more on Farmer, because everyone wants to go to space.  Furthermore every dork who has ever build a model rocket has thought about making one that will launch a person.

My friend and I had an elaborate plan to build rockets.  They would start out small, but would progress larger and larger and with more advanced payloads.  First we were going to launch an egg.  When we mastered that we would launch a mouse.  When we mastered that we would launch a person.  There was talk about sending a dog after the mouse, but we didn’t have the money to buy a dog (or however many dogs it would take) for the cause.  I’m not sure how we planned to afford a human launch if we couldn’t afford a $50 crossbred mutt.

We never made it to the egg launch, the rocket that we made to do that was so crappy that it pretty much killed our dreams right on the spot.  There was no way it would even hold together until we got to the launchpad.  It could hardly even hold together on the kitchen table.

Farmer could have certainly taken the advice of a couple 10 year olds, let the dream die.

Waking Ned Devine is a movie that came onto my radar about a year ago.  One of my friends was watching it as I was using a computer not far off.  When he watched it, I was around for about five minutes during the middle of it before running off to go see Legally Blonde 2, or do something equally as stupid.

The couple bits that I did see were interesting.  Not enough that I had to rush out and watch it, rather rush back in the house and watch it, but still it did look like it would be worth checking out.

The basic premise of the movie is Ned Devine wins the space lottery for a million space bucks, but the shock of winning gives him a fatal heart attack.  It is hard to cash in your ticket when you are no longer alive, so two of Ned’s friends decide to cash it in for him.  They justify it by reasoning, “It’s what Ned would have wanted.”

The tricky part is that Ned signed the back of the ticket before winning.  This means that only Ned could cash in the ticket.  This is where the movie begins to really pick up as the friends decide that they could simply have one of them claim to be Ned and cash the ticket.

What they don’t know is that for a ticket this size, an official from the lottery comes down to interview the winner and check everything out.  This is where things start to get really dicey as the duo tries to keep up the charade only to learn that more of the townsfolk might be needed to fool the inspector. (Don’t worry about spoilers, it says that much on the back of the box!)

I really liked this movie.  I was worried that it would only be a so-so movie, but it turned out to be great.

There was an additional love story in the movie that didn’t have a whole lot to do with the actual plot.  It was between a pig farmer who allegedly smells really bad despite all the soaps everyone keeps giving him and the mother of his son.

She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he always smells like a pigfarmer.  I imagine that is pretty gross and all, but she’s pretty shallow about it.  At the end of the movie he puts the girl’s father in charge of the pigfarm, takes a shower, and gets the girl.

How romantic.

If you haven’t seen the movie Waking Ned Devine, I would recommend adding it to your netflix queue.  It’s more fun than it looks to be.

‘To Ned Devine, may we forever be in your debt.’

I’m not sure what exactly convinced me to watch Brother Bear, the movie that was so bad that Disney had to actually SHUT DOWN IT’S CELL ANIMATION STUIDO because of it.  Nonetheless I watched the cartoon and came to one conclusion.  Disney should have shut down a lot more after releasing this movie into the world.

The movie is about a young tribal guy who hates bears and must learn to love bears.  When he is given his ‘life totem’ which will tell him how to act and live, it is the loving bear.  This makes him so mad that he goes and throws rocks at a bear.  The bear says ‘Stop it’ and the boy’s brother falls off of a cliff.

The movie was so bad that I don’t even remember the names of the characters.  So I’ll make them up. Jojo is the main character who hates bears.  Squeejo is the older brother who falls off a cliff.  Lastly we have Ronjo, the middle child, I’ll tell you about him in a second.

Jojo is given his totem and starts throwing rocks.  The big bear wants the Jojo to stop it, but instead Squeejo falls off of a cliff.  Jojo is pissed at the bear and goes off to avenge his brother by killing the bear that somehow caused his brother to die.

Ronjo is pissed at Jojo, but will not help him out in killing the bear.  Ronjo does decide to follow Jojo from a distance, only to find out Jojo gets killed by a bear.  Ronjo is now pissed as hell because he could have helped avenge his dead brother the first time, but now he has to really take revenge.  I don’t know how you can avenge two brothers that were killed by the same bear, and I guess that you wouldn’t actually see something like that in a Disney movie anyways.  That explains why Ronjo never actually was able to take revenge.

Now for the twist.  Jojo isn’t actually dead.  He got turned into a bear.  HOLY SMOKES RIGHT?

After killing the bear that watched his brother fall off of a cliff, Jojo is crushed by the tremendous weight.  So he did die… I guess.  But the ghost of Squeejay said no, you can’t be dead yet.  So Squeejay brings back his brother from beyond the grave and stuffs him into a bear’s body so he will learn his lesson.

Ronjo gets to the top of the mountain and sees Jojay the bear running off after killing Jojay the mancub and leaving behind a broken spear and the bear totem.

At this point in my life I am really questioning many things.  Why did I watch this movie?  More importantly, why have I gone so far in writing about this movie?  And what am I doing with my life?

Nobody in their right mind would watch this movie.  I would rather go watch Legally Blonde 2 or keeping with the theme, let a bear watch me fall off of a cliff than spend any more of my precious time thinking about this movie.

It’s been twenty five years since the move This is Spinal Tap was released into the world.  Today I just saw it for the first time.

It isn’t that it has been quoted a billion times, that’s certainly not the case at all.  In my opinion there were not a lot of great lines in the flick.  But the movie is widely known enough to be claim cult pseudo-classic.  I’m not quite sure if it is one or not.  People talk about it existing, I think just for the sake of it being a novel idea.  A documentary (or rocumentary as it calls itself) about a band that actually doesn’t exist?  Brilliant!

I am not convinced that I liked the movie.  I am convinced that I like the idea of the movie.  This movie had the same flaws as Napoleon Dynamite and Borat for me.  That is that everyone talked them up and claimed they were the greatest thing since the invention of cake.

Like any cake loving warm blooded human I rushed out to see this films.  Although after viewing them and hearing any moderately funny jokes repeated trillions of times, the movies didn’t seem to do it.  While there were some jokes in the movie I certainly wasn’t impressed to any significant degree.

The whole ‘existence of the band’ thing is somewhat confusing because apparently they decided after making the movie that they should make the band for real and put on a couple shows.  In it’s time I understand that a lot of people thought of the band as real.  Except for a couple moments in the movie, it does seem like it very well could be a real band.

The annoying thing about the ‘band/movie’ is looking through wikipedia about it.  One of the guys in the band actually does the voice for hard rocking Otto in the Simpsons. (As well as Mr. Burns, Smithers and Flanders to round things out!)

Aside from being a goofy movie, if you haven’t made up your mind on if you should watch it here is one thing to push you off of the fence (although I don’t know which way) :   Fran Drescher is in it.

Flintstone in some great looking stop motion. Apparently it was made for a movie called “Flintstones on the Rocks” Which is about Fred and Wilma having marital problems. Seems a little bit darker than the usual chronicles of Bedrock. It came out in 2001 and a quick search looks like it might be hard to find.

It’s interesting to watch older movies just to see what things used to be like back in the day.  Of course when I say ‘older movie’ I’m talking about 2003.  I recently re-watched Matchstick Men staring Nicolas Cage and directed by Ridley Scott.

I have seen this movie once before, back when it was in theaters, so I knew about the twist that it contains.  (And if you keep reading, you’ll know it too!)

It was much harder to watch knowing that it was all a setup.  Everything was so painfully obvious, but if you weren’t looking for it like poor old Nicolas Cage then you will feel really duped. (Not quite as duped as his character though!)

This really is the roll that he can play well.  A neurotic weirdo with no self esteem and multiple crippling social disorders.

It is a good movie and Cage plays his part soo well!  I’m somewhat shocked that he was looked over completly for any awards for the part.

The movie is great.  It is hard to watch twice.  Unless you are completly devoid of emotions and empathy and really like to watch people get suckered and stomped on.  Then you can laugh at Roy all you want as his heart is torn out in slow motion.