I love Nicole Kidman.  And this movie is the perfect reason to do so.  She plays a perfect Samantha.  Will Farrell plays Darrin.  Eh.  Will Farrell.  So much like Darrin no one cares.  Best summed up by the line, "They changed Darrins, and no one noticed!"

Isabel is a witch that has decided to live a perfectly normal life... by giving up witchcraft.  This is easier said than done, as anyone that has tried to do that can tell you.  Her father is critical about the whole idea; I mean really.  Who would want to give up witchcraft?

She runs across Jack Wyatt.  A never-was movie actor whose last big screen film cost $140 million to make and grossed only $1.2 Million.  That's what he gets for filming the movie in black-and-white and with that wardrobe department.  The fact that he's a overly egotistical jerk ("Make me 20 cappuccinos and bring me the best one.") is beside the point.

Jack is trying to redeem himself... well, it's the only acting job he could get... as being cast as Darrin in a remake series of the original Bewitched television show.  He demands that they retool the show to make it central on the Darrin character and take away all lines and parts that Samantha has.

When Jack sees Isabel wiggle her nose in a bookstore, he falls in love with the wiggle.  The fact that she's an unknown and won't overshadow his character is a huge plus.  He begs for her to play the part of Samantha -- a witch that gives up witchcraft to live and love her mortal husband, just as Isabel is trying to do.

Jack keeps being a jerk until Isabel can't stand it anymore and the magic starts flying.



Isabel:  It's like rich guys that don't really know why those women sleep with them.
Father:  But they sleep with them, so there's not really a problem.

Jack:  I've worked my ass off to the bone.

By the turn of the millenium a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use.  It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself.  Its creators foresee millions of positive uses -- while others fear it as a new form of mind control...

Thus begins the visually stunning Virtual Reality thriller, The Lawnmower Man.

I started out very disappointed in this movie, after it was hyped up pretty good by a friend of mine.  While the first portion of most movies is setup and character building, the build up went on way too long.  The first half of the movie at least.  We had to pause the movie to go do some Christmas stuff and when we got back to the set we decided to watch a SciFi Channel presentation that I was currently recording instead of returning to the movie.

Once my girlfriend fell asleep (she's sick, poor thing), I finished watching the movie by myself.  That's the point it got interesting.  Things started to happen -- I mean literally.  The movie started to actually get some action sequences and some interesting scenes as well as things moving and going bump-in-the-night on screen.

While I can't say that I shy away from spoilers in my opinions, I think I'm going to hold out any mention of what occurs at the end.  Don't skip forward to the last 2-3 chapters of the movie.  After you have seen it all the way through once, you could probably miss the first 5-6 chapters after that.  But the ending by far makes up for the slow start.

Have fun.

After six months active flying towards Orion at nearly the speed of light and an estimated 700 years passing on Earth, the crew lays down for a long winter's cryogenic hibernation.  Thoughts of home and questions rattle through thier heads.  Does man still wage war with one another?  Does hunger still ravenge parts of the globe?  Does anyone remember they are up there?

Shaken awake from their slumber twelve months later, they have landed on an alien world.  A malfunction has crashed them down on the wrong world and in the middle of a lake.  Some 2000 years have passed back on Earth.  The female scientist died in her sleep, so the three other crew members are the end of their kind on this foreign planet.

This is the first of the Planet of the Apes series of movies.  Like everyone else, I've seen this in Saturday afternoon matinees on television.  I stole the box set from a friend of mine and decided to watch the films.  I've always enjoyed the movies.

Detective Hank Holten on a missing persons case is seduced by the missing girl, Layla, to accompany her into an orgy.  Someone screams, and then another.  Some of the party-goers are biting the necks of the others.  When the detective starts shooting the vampires, the Master attacks him to defend his children.  During the struggle, a curtain is pulled aside and the Master gets a dose of sunlight.

This leaves Hank in a half-state slowly turning into one of them.  As the hunger builds within him, he calls on his recently estranged wife, Susan, who is a famous author of vampire novels, a la Anne Rice.  Spouting vampire cliches, they go after the Master, knowing that if he is killed then Hank's transformation will be halted.

Figuring they know where the vampires sleep, they know that they must go in while it's still daylight, find the Master, and kill him.  However, once the Master is killed, his life is forfeit -- the rest of the coven will attack.

It was a pretty good show, although I've seen many reviews that didn't like it that much.  It was loaded with cliche's and misinformation about vampires.  Well, at least misinformation as far as we know.  Susan spouts off a shopping list throughout the show of everything from garlic, to holy water, to not removing the wooden spike after the vampire dies.

The movie has a great ending.  All movies have a twist, but this one was very unique.  While the movie isn't a first run theater type of movie, it's a pretty good bet.  You should see it.

Layla:  I thought we had something -- you and me.  And then I catch you shacking up with Goldilocks.

I hadn't intended to watch this movie but the opening credits were very intriguing.  It started out with title sequence that looked very much like West Side Story. All of the gangs in New York were invited to the Bronx to an organization meeting.  They met a flamboyant leader, named Cyrus, bent on creating a super gang.

When Cyrus was assassinated, a rival gang blamed the Warriors. All hundred gangs in attendance went after the nine delegates.  They had to make it from the Bronx all way back to their Coney Island turf with every gang in New York after them. It was a long night.

Narrowly keeping from getting caught and losing several members along the way they finally make it home only to find the rival gang there.  The leader of the rival gang laughingly admitted to the murder that was overheard by another large gang leader which cleared the Warriors.

Great movie.  Wery well done and very much so a must see, especially if you enjoyed West Side Story without the music.

During the movie there were advertisements for the game version for the PlayStation2 and X-box.  The graphics look identical to the movie and many of the same scenes were shown.

I expected this to be a Vin Diesel version of Kindergarten Cop, and I was largely correct.  However this movie was very slow and tedious building up to the good stuff.  The big Navy Seal changing diapers and coping with teenagers sneaking around and throwing parties is all pretty standard fare and predictable.  the director just long-winded the build up quite a bit.

Once the ninjas broke in the first time the movie just almost jerked to life.  Kind of like trying to start your car, and it just didn't quite hit.  Soon after that the movie came together for the last 45 minutes or so.

The last parts make everything else worth the wait.  Very enjoyable.  The movie is worth the rent (or the buy), but if you want to go "Yadda Yadda Yadda" as you skip forward to chapter 9 on the DVD.  That's where the oldest son, Seth, quits the wrestling team that his father wanted him to do, and joins the cast of The Sound of Music.  It gets interesting there.

Hal is a party animal.  Out every night, picking up cute girls.  Hanging on to a girl for only a short while until he finds something wrong with her, or until she gives up on him.

He runs into a hypnotist who changes his outlook.  He sees people who they are on the inside.  The beautiful girl inside the shell.  And in Hal's case, he completely falls for the most beautiful girl he's ever seen, inside a very, very large woman.

And predictably in the end, he learns that beauty is also inside, not just skin deep.  For an hour and forty-five minutes the movie goes traipsing down a predictable path.  But there was a very touching moment when he sees the little girl in the hospital that was just the cutest button earlier, now with true eyes is a massively scarred burn victim.  He holds her and understands.

This is quite possibly the stupidest movie I've ever seen, although I haven't seen Man with the Screaming Brain, yet..  Throughout history I have never shyed away from watching movies, even those that I know are supposed to be horrible.  And if the critics don't like a movie, I'm defiantly seeing it.  They rarely ever give good critiques, and movies like Gandhi win top awards.  I even want to see Gigli just to see how horrible it really is.

Luckily a lot of people enjoy stupid movies.  Anchorman has a vast contingency of fans that spent the movie rolling in the floor.  And that is absolutely great.  I'm not going to tell anyone that they are wrong for liking a movie, and the movie fans aren't stupid, stupid is just the genre.  A lot of people didn't like Airplane! for the same reason and I thought it was great.

Anchorman is the story of a news.. umm. anchorman in a time when women were just coming into their own.  By the clothes and hair it was set back in the late 70's or early 80's.  A woman gets brought in to give the news some diversity.  Ron falls in love with her and she with him, which only goes to complicate things.

The stupid parts?  How about an animated sex scene?  No, not an animated portrayal of sex, I mean a fantasy amusement park named Pleasure Land where cupids and unicorns abound and you make love on rainbows.

How about the street fight scene between the news teams of five televisions stations?  The only rule is no messing with the face or hair.  "Of course."  The lead of the Spanish Channel News Team shouts "Policía!" and everyone scatters, with the music riffs in the background taken straight from West Side Story's rumble.

During the end credits they even played outtakes.  FROM Smokey and the Bandit!  Wha?  Ha Ha.  OK, that was funny.

The best way to summarize the movie was a line from the final outtake.

This is ridiculous.

Nicolas Cage is targeted by modern Ghost of Christmas Future in a Ferrari -- HIS Ferrari.  Nick is a leading financial giant, in a world of merges and take overs, some of them hostile.  Too busy for family, his love life is nil, but WHOA what a sex life.  He's able to woo the finest things in life.

Running across a guy in a convenience store while he's picking up Egg Nog to drink alone, he tries to "save" him, talk him out of carrying a gun and such.  The guy spins things around, and tries to save him.

When he wakes up, his world is different.  No Ferrari, No apartment in the city, no $130 Million deal.  But what he does have it worth just as much, or at least he learns that it is.  He's now in a world married to his old "what if" girlfriend with two kids, including the cutest little girl that thinks he's an alien, and working at a tire shop for his father-in-law.

Pretty good movie.  It's a good "feel good" movie, but it's not the "get lucky" type of chick flick that it sounds like.  But it's well worth a watch in mixed company.  You can probably squeeze a kiss or two out of it, and then, who knows? 

StoryTeller had some nice things to say about it, from a woman's point of view.

Bizarre movie, but I'm not a huge Quentin Tarantino fan.  The exception to that was Kill Bill, which I enjoyed very much.  This movie is from a Frank Miller graphic novel by the same name.  The entire movie is in black-and-white often with a single color accent, usually red.  There's a lot of blood.  Everything in the movie was in exact novel style, from the directing to the special effects.

Interesting movie that wrapped around itself.  It was told in a series of three or four unrelated chapters.  It wasn't until the very end that we got any type of mutual tie in to join the chapters together.  And the only common thread was that a character was seen in the same night club.  Kinda gory, but then again, it's Quentin.

Marv:  Modern cars.  They all look like electric shavers.

Marv:  I need a set of handcuffs.
Domme:  What style you want?  I have a collection.
Girl:  Just give him whatever you have on you.

Marv:  The killing?  No.  No satisfaction.  Everything up to that is kickass.

After FBI Agent Mackelway is sent to a small branch office because of an improper arrest that got the criminal released, he starts to investigate a serial murderer.  The victims turn out to be serial murderers themselves.  The purpetrator is ex-FBI Agent O'Ryan from a secret government project called Project Icarus studying remote viewing and automatic writing.  Using these skills he's tracking and killing off murderers.

The goverment taught them how to turn on the visions, but did not teach them how to turn them off.  So the agents slowly went insane seeing things that no man was meant to see.. the pure evils of the human psyche.. the depths that sick men go to satisfy their yearnins for improper lust and blood.

Leading Mackelway to the death farm of Suspect Zero who has kidnapped and murdered hundreds of victims from accross the nation, O'Ryan and he finally catch and have to kill the suspect.  O'Ryan begs Mackelway to help him turn off the visions and kill him.  He attacks and is shot by his partner.

A very intriguing film that made me a bit uneasy in places with the subject matter, but overall it was a pretty good film.  Kinda slow, but these types of films often are -- I think they call it Suspenseful.  The beginning was a little difficult to wrap your mind around what was going on and getting to the point that you understood the fact that we were seeing a trained psychic ability and not some sort of flashback of flashforward directing.  But once you got that "Ah-ha" the rest of the film started making sense.  I think this is a see-it-twice film so that you can realize and appreciate the beginning scenes that you were baffled during the first time.

A store clerk, and his 67 Chevy, is ripped back in time to sometime around the year 1300.  In order to return he has to retrieve the Necronomicon.  By a twist of the fates, the lord of the area is also in need of the Necronomicon in order to protect his lands from evils that are surrounding him.

Armed only with a mechanical hand, his double-barrel, and a chainsaw, he goes to retrieve the book.  After bungling the magic words, an army of undead rise from the ground.

This movie is considered the echelon of Bruce Campbell's career.  It defiantly has the largest cult following of any other of his movies.  Lines from the movie has been used in other shows and games, including the line "This.. is.. my.. BOOMSTICK!" famous in the Warcraft games.

It's a great movie, and a definite must-see.  But don't expect an epic adventure.  It's a comedy, it's almost satirical, it's definitely a movie without a stitch of seriousness.

Lessons learned from Army of Darkness:

• Always remember the secret words, especially if the words are in Latin.  Latin words are very important.
• It's always the last one you pick  Even if you try to skip to the last one, it's always the other last one.
• The word "forth" is hard to say correctly when your jaw keeps falling off.
• Skeletons are flammable.

Ash:  This is my BOOMSTICK!

Ash:  Good.  Bad.  I'm the guy with the gun.

Dead Sheila: You found me beautiful once.
Ash: You got real ugly.

Skelly 1:  Retreat!  Retreat!
Skelly 2:  Get the Hell out of here!

Mafia! is another one of the Jim Abrahams entries into the Airplane! genre.  This is not his best work, and isn't near the quality of Top Secret! and Airplane!  Apparently, an exclaimation point is required in the title in this genre.

Still, it's a humorous satire on the Godfather, and many more of the mafia movies done in Abrahams style.  Even pokes fun at President Clinton and Forrest Gump.  ("Run, florist, Run!")

It's not bad, but don't skip the others.

Three hunters are walking through the field with their quarry thrown over their backs.  One states, "I love hunting, the kill.  Makes you feel top of the food chain."  At this point a huge pterodactyl swoops out of the sky and bites one of the men in half and kills the other two.  A college professor on a field trip with a few members of his class, including, of course, the ubiquitous buxom blondes that always trip while running from danger are attacked and lost several of their classmates.  A small band of American army special forces are in the woods capturing a terrorist end up saving the college group when they attacked by the terrorists and by a dozen or so pterodactyls.

On this blog, I've torn up the SciFi Channel for their total ineptness presenting us with a movie that is worth watching.  (See Alien Apocalypse and Alien Express.)  Previous movies were presented with very poor special effects. This movie was well worth watching.

We are so used to seeing aliens on the big screen with full high-quality surround sound, multi-million dollar budgets and paying $7, that we forget that an alien movie we see for free, designed for the small TV screen, a couple of 6" built-in speakers, and a budget of a couple hundred thousand, just won't have the same quality of effects.

At no point in history has there ever been pterodactyls that looked life-like.  Pterodactyls, and most dinosaurs in general, are poorly rendered in movies, with the exception of the Jurassic Park series.  But even in those movies, pterodactyls looked wrong.  So I was able to watch this movie without the expectation of well designed dinosaur birds.  I expected the effects to be bad, and am happily surprised that they aren't actually horrible.  A few scenes are hokey and cheesy, but only a few.

I expect real pterodactyls to be far more bat-like, than are ever put forth in movies.  That would make them believable, and very hard to animate.  In this movie, we find out that they are a lot like spiders and bees, in that they collect food and put it with the eggs, so that the babies will have something to eat when they hatch.  This is why the pterodactyls are attacking the people and dropping them in the nest full of eggs and newborns.

I spoke too soon.  Looks like SciFi ran out of budget for the last 30 minutes.  The worst effects scene?  A guy crossing a rope hand over hand.  I mean, how expensive is that to film?