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horselover_fat
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Name: Josh
Country: United States
State: Pennsylvania
Metro: Pittsburgh
Birthday: 8/5/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: - soccer/baseball/football- any book with black ink on white paper- desert rock- going out for drinks and banging on the table louder than anyone else
Expertise: - nodding during mind-numbing conversation- using another's self-esteem for toilet paper- theft/arson/public urination- judging books by their cover then saying "i told you so" at a later date
Occupation: Analyst
Industry: Banking/Finance
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  joshwander19
Member Since:
3/10/2005
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| Movies I've turned off after only 20 minutes just in the last two days: Australia What.the.fuck was this overblown piece of shit? In just 20 minutes Nicole Kidman managed to piss me off, Hugh Jackman pissed me off, and even the little Aborigine kid pissed me off. Plus, since the movie is such a grandiose turd instead of just a regular one, I figure those first twenty minutes easily ran about a million kangaroo pelts (or whatever ridiculous currency they use on that continent). Darren Aronofsky can't find funding for his movies, but Ban Lurhmann gets to make this? If this spectacular dud wasn't enough of a wake up call for Mr. Luhrmann, somebody should get a shovel and remove his overconfidence the hard way. Diner Caught up in all the Oscar buzz about Mickey Rourke, I took a chance on Diner. However, when I saw Steve Guttenberg had a speaking part, I thought better of it and just turned it off. How good could it have been? If fucking Steve Guttenberg was playing the fucking dead horse's head in The fucking Godfather, I'd turn it off. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People Finally! A male-tinted bookend to The Devil Wears Prada. Who is the audience for this movie and Simon Pegg, what else are you going to let your agent convince you to do? First, Run Fatboy Run and now this? You better hope Star Trek doesn't suck or your ass will find out how quickly Hollywood can spit you all the way back across the pond. | | |
| Home Movie
Growing up in Honesdale, PA I'm already well aware of the saying, "It takes all kinds..." It's a saying usually reserved for life's weirdos and even then, it's bestowed only on the supremely happy ones. Typically followed by a flailing hand, a shrug of the shoulders, or a sigh of exasperation, it's a way of subtly criticizing somebody's life choices, but not necessarily their life.
You see, happy weirdos haven't just taken the road less traveled. They're the type who have taken their entire plane of existence and piloted it into a mountainside, correctly suspecting that afterwards, when they emerge physically unscathed from the crumpled cockpit, they'll somehow land on Xanadu. It's a method of living the rest of the screaming masses are incredibly uncomfortable with.
For some examples, take Chris Smith's Home Movie. The hour long documentary follows a handful of happy weirdos as they give tours of their outlandish homes: in one a couple has customized their house for their dozen cats. In another a former actress tours her custom built treehouse in Hawaii. Then there's the couple who converted an abandoned missile silo into a home.
How can you criticize them? Each family/couple/person is living out their dream life. Bill Tregle lives on a houseboat in the backwaters of the Louisiana bayou. He farms alligators. If he's hungry he eats, if he's tired he sleeps, and with that Gump-ish of an existence, I guarantee you he sleeps a helluva lot better than me. No taxes, no bills, no fucking people. Sure he shits over an open hole in a badly listing houseboat in part of the country where even a strong sneeze breaks a dike and washes him out to sea, but *shrug.* He's happy.
I wouldn't live in any of the houses profiled. Even the moldering treehouse in Hawaii with its own hydroelectric generator. I need my electricity and my outrageous $150 cable bill. I need my central air and I just couldn't live without my big windows that offer such lovely views of my neighbor's siding.
If Bill Tregle had a phone, I would call him and tell him I'll see him soon. | | |
| My Name Is Bruce Wikipedia provides a decent summation of Bruce Campbell's latest effort: "The plot revolves around Campbell, playing a sleazy version of himself, who, after being harassed and mistaken by fans to be a character much like Ash from the Evil Dead series of horror films, is abducted from his trailer park home to fight against Guan Di, a Chinese war deity." If that sounds like a cool movie to you (like it did to me), then you'll like this. If it doesn't, then it won't. Simple as that. | | |
| JCVD I had heard plenty of things about JCVD before I watched it. Unimpressed by everything I read, I attributed most of the positive hype to internet fanboys who haven't quite progressed passed the whole let's-watch-Cyborg-on-late-night-cable-while-having-a-sleepover-in-the-late-80's era of their lives. I figured just like another fanboy favorite, Bloodsport, the positive reviews came from people who's lives were stuck in syndication. I was wrong. JCVD successfully builds on the recent trend of washed-up action star comebacks. Stallone was first with Rocky, Willis followed up with Die Hard, and now the Muscles-from-Brussels shows them all how it's proper done. Whereas Rocky was just meant to be a decent bookend for the series and Live Free or Die Hard was meant to be a watered-down money machine, JCVD takes an contrarian approach and feels like a film that just happens to have Jean-Claude Van Damme in it. Oh, and happens to have him in it starring as himself. The writer/director, a Mabrouk El Mechri (if that's his real name), does an excellent job of making the film seem to be about Jean-Claude Van Damme the celebrity and not Jean-Claude Van Varenberg the washed-up movie star. To the bad guys, Van Damme is the a hero, a common man who's never forgotten where's he's from and who can defeat an army of baddies using only his bare hands. To the cops, Van Damme is dangerous and mentally unstable, a joke and a liability. To Van Damme himself, he's none of those things - just Jean-Claude Van Varenberg caught up in yet another regrettable situation. The story is blended together from all three persepectives, with Van Damme's as the lynchpin. The movie's no-name cast really relies on him and the movie's surprising success is not a result of Van Damme's muscles, but his acting chops. Who knew the Belgian could act? JCVD has me on the Van Damme bandwagon. Let's see if he can keep it rolling. | | |
| Max Payne
I must be the only person in the country who thoroughly enjoyed Max Payne. It only got an "18% Fresh" rating on rottentomatos.com and last time I saw it listed on Netflix, its community rating was barely two stars. But, what can I say? I liked it.
Sure it was formulaic. Sure Chris O'Donnell had a speaking role. Sure Mila Kunis was awful. I mean, really awful (her performance as "Mona" was so bad, the only one worse that comes readily to mind is Mark Whalberg's in his other 2008 dud, The Happening). In the "Max Payne" video game, Mona is smart and sexy assassin, but here, Kunis couldn't be more wooden if she were reading her lines off a cue card. Olga Kurylenko - who plays Mona's sister but is unfortunately killed off in the first act - played a much better seductress/spy in Hitman. Kunis could have taken some notes from that, but decided to phone it in instead.
Whalberg's not going to win many fans out of this either, but I think the director, John Moore, did right by everyone in not asking him to do too much. Don't get me wrong, it's not that Marky-Mark can't act, it's that he doesn't have much range. He's a poor man's Keanu Reeves. Remember how the typically awful Reeves was perfect in the Matrix movies? His sparse talents were exactly matched with what the movie required. Likewise, Whalberg was perfectly cast in The Departed and Boogie Nights mostly because he didn't have to push himself too far.
And that's ok.
He's good as "Max Payne," because he just so happens to be good at everything the character requires. Payne is a stone faced, killer; beaten down, despised, and treated like a ghost. His family hates him, his only "friend" hates him, and instead of being allowed a real policeman's beat he's been banished to a basement deskjob. Sound like anyone Whalberg knows? After The Happening he's lucky not to be banished to Bollywood.
Max Payne is also one of the better video game-to-movie adaptations I've seen and believe me, I've unfortunately seen a bunch. John Moore deftly combines the stylized imagery of the games with his own ideas to nicely fit the already established mold. He gives his actors all they can handle, controls the pace well, and makes excellent use of a modest budget. Other than Kunis really letting him down, it was a solid job.
I've played through both Max Payne game's and enjoyed them both immensely. They weren't the best shooters I've played, but I played them the whole way through because they were fun and I wanted to see how the story played out. I have roughly the same feeling about this movie. It wasn't the best action movie I've seen, but it was fun and enjoyed it the whole way through. | | |
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