Well, its the night before the presidential election and I'm still trying to recover from our big holiday soiree. Compounding all this was getting the kids report cards in the mail the other day and not being...well....terribly happy with the results. Kellie in particular disappointed us quite a bit with a report card that included two "D's" and one "F". Unacceptable!!
She has now lost her phone, her television and her shot at playing basketball with the school team. And I still let her off lighter than I would have her brother. His report card was no great shakes, but at least it didn't feature any D's or F's!
Got a chance to check out a couple of movies over the weekend and here are my thoughts on them....
1) American Wedding--you know, you can always tell when a movie series has hit the end of the road. Sometimes you have that rare occurence when the 2nd part is better than the first (Road Warrior, Alien, Austin Powers, etc), but almost ALWAYS the 3rd one is being made just to cash in on the money making machine and the movie will end up really being terrible. Here's a prime example. American Pie was a really funny look at how embarassing it can be to be a teenager and had some laugh out loud moments, mainly provided by Eugene Levy as the father of one of the characters. The 2nd one in the series, the appropriately title American Pie 2 had a few laughs, but quite obviously wasn't as funny as the first one although it wasn't bad. Now, here in the 3rd one....they've obviously run out of ideas. The other thing that is wrong is that they've taken a very funny, although incredibly obnoxious, and tried to make him the main character of the film. And it fails terribly, just like it would have if the folks from Seinfeld had made a t.v. show about Kramer.
That character was a laugh riot when he was given 5 minutes a week, but if he had his own show he would've been insufferable. In the case of this movie, Sean William Scott's character of Stifler, who is put into a seemingly more revolting situation every film, is made to carry the film and isn't up to the job. Why? Because he's basically a very unlikeable character that we have no emotional investment in---and one that we don't WANT to make that investment in. There are a few cute scenes, but if the 2nd in the series was worth half the laughs of the original, this one is worth half the laughs of the sequel. * 1/2
2) Reservior Dogs--this may be the ultimate "guy's" film. I say that , because in all the years I've been a real film buff, I don't think I've ever met a woman who liked this movie. Its a violent, profane, loud and horribly graphic look at a robbery gone horribly wrong. That being said....its terrific filmmaking. The movie is told from about 5 points of view, all trying to explain (or understand) why the crime went so wrong. Outstanding performances from Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi,
Christopher Penn, Lawrence Tierney (where'd they dig him up?) and Michael Madsen---who plays a character that it could be argued may be the most despicable person ever to grace celluloid. A wild, violent ride. ****1/4
The DVD is terrific, with a ton of great extras!
Get out there and vote tomorrow!
Later,
Jeff
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