VIDEO: List of movies watched in 2007 + viewing coincidences list

We only watched 34 in 2007! One every 10-11 days. And 41% (14) of them were animated. The other 59% (20) were live-action (though 2 of those had puppets!). We watched our movies in high-def 15% of the time — 5 movies — as we got an HDTV in the fall. We only watched 2 (6%) in the theatre (one was free). If you don’t count animated movies, Troma/B-movies, fan edits, documentary movies, we only watched about 13 “real” movies. So I’m going to break from the normal posting formula and not show the “awards” up top, because with so few movies, they’re not as important this year. Read on for 34 reviews!

Please leave some comments … let me know where you agree, disagree.. What you think.. What recommendations you may have based on what you’ve read.. Links to your own reviews of any of these movies… Links to your own lists of movies you’ve watched (friends only please), etc…

Also, check out our list of viewing coincidences at the bottom. Probably only interesting to us, it’s just fun to keep track for the sake of keeping track.

MOVIES WATCHED
IN THE THEATRE

300 – Not that great. Just one long fight scene with virtually no plot. This is what I get for allowing Glen a one-time chance to persuade me to go against my instincts and see a hyped-up movie in the theatre, despite having plenty of unwatched stuff at home. At least our tickets were free (thanks Glen), which was the only reason for seeing this in the theatre. But in the end, it was still a waste to see this for free! The visual effects were neat, but got EXTREMELY repetitive after awhile. Gratuitously slowing down and speeding up time is only cool so many times. The South Park episode that spoofed 300 pretty much touched on everything that was wrong with the movie. And my friend Ryan’s blog touched on everything ELSE th at was wrong with the movie — historical and ethical issues. But all in all, it was just a long fight scene. Please read Ryan’s blogposts: This one details the historical inaccuracies, while this one details the ethical problems!

The Simpsons Movie (+ 35min TVGuide Big Movie Premiere special). OF COURSE THIS WAS GOOD! And of course, as always, with any animated endeavor, there are ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS naysayers who claim to be “fans” but don’t like it. These are probably the people who say Simpsons stopped being good after Season 8. These same people either stopped watching the series 10 years ago, and held a idealized, inaccurate nostalgic memory of the old series …. Or they have been hypocritically watching the series the past 10 years DESPITE whining about how bad it is, and continued to whine about it when the movie came out. I really don’t need to hear it; you people are the ones who killed SeaLab, and every other great cartoon — and now you’re trying to take down The Simpsons? Just go watch some other show if you don’t like it! My other least-favorite criticism is “it was just like an episode of the show, but movie-length”. No shit sherlock–what do you think it’s supposed to be? Oh right — idealized romanticized unrealistic expectations. I don’t know why animation causes people to have these false expectations more than live-action, but it does. So…I was drunk during this, and passed out like 15 times… I probably missed at least 25% of the movie. And yet I still had jokes to make when I got home, and still look back and laugh at the story. The best part is, next time I see it, I’ll get to see the missing 25%! But again — I don’t see how you can go wrong with The Simpsons. Be it 1 minute, 5 minutes, 22 minutes, or 90 minutes — you can’t go wrong with The Simpsons.

WATCHED IN 1080 HIGH-DEFINITION —
THAT’S 6 x DVD QUALITY

Shrek 2 – Due to being in 1080p, and being CGI, this was basically the most impressive visual movie we’ve ever seen in our life, and one of the first movies to be seen on our new Sharp Aquos 52-inch HDTV. This was a great way to be introduced to 1080p quality, which is SIX TIMES that of dvd. DVD IS NOW GHETTO! I’ve never seen individual blades of grass on a TV like that. I’ve never “gotten lost in Shrek’s burlap” (this was the gay joke of THAT month!), but the fact of the matter was — even a burlap sack had amazing detail. And CGI is more pristine and perfect than live-action, so this showed off the TV more than any nature documentary ever could! Not to mention that the movie was pretty entertaining too — assuming you aren’t vomiting from all the cutsey-ness. Antonio Banderas/Puss N Boots saying “I have shamed myself” was hilarious! And Edina from Absolutely Fabulous playing the voice of the witch was a great touch!

Saw 3 – An incredibly disturbing movie brought to us in incredibly disturbing detail. Scott S, Shannon & Christian, & Mark joined us to watch this one. It flashed back a LOT to Saw 1, and even prior to Saw 1, but for the most part (except for a couple of characters in the very beginning) ignored Saw 2, which was interesting (Scary Movie 4 fortunately spoofed Saw 2 a lot, so it wasn’t completely forgotten). We gain even more insight into the motives of the previous 2 movies’ actions (even though Saw 2 wasn’t featured, this movie provided insight to Saw 2), and into Jigsaw as a character himself. I liked it a lot and look forward to Saw 4. The brain surgery scene, in 6X DVD QUALITY — was just. Wow. And you are made to feel sorry for serial-killer Jigsaw. You are made to have human compassion for another human in intense suffering, despite the fact that this serial killer had no human compassion for his victims. Or DID he? His scenarios were always designed to teach someone who was wasn’t their life what the value of life is. In that sense, Jigsaw probably considers himself to be doing a favor — at least to those who survive the experience. And Amanda’s actions would speak to this. Quite an interesting moral toss-up. And you finally get to find out what happened at the end of Saw 1!

X-Men 3 (1080i) – suuuuuuuch a deviation from the comics. In reading trivia, apparently actors were whisked away to other projects, so they let the actors availability control the plot. That’s a BAD BAD BAD idea for something based on a comic book – where the plots are already fleshed out and JUST WAITING FOR A PROPER MOVIE ADAPTATION. This was anything BUT a proper movie adaptation. Despite this drawback, it’s not like the X-Men Comics don’t go all over the place either — they have different titles that take place in alternate universes, “What If?” series, time travel that changes past events, etc, etc. So, what happened in the movie definitely wasn’t out of the realm of what could happen in the comic books. It was still an entertaining chance to see some of our favorite heroes, usually cheaply drawn, instead featured with Hollywood Blockbuster levels of special effects.

WATCHED IN 720p HIGH-DEFINITION —
THAT’S 2.25 x DVD QUALITY

Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix – didn’t quite like it as much as the last one, but that may be because we watched a fan edit for the last one, with 30+ minutes of deleted scenes put back. Potter movies really need to exceed 3 hours to be complete. They often remove lots of scenes (30+ minutes) in order to make it short enough for impatient instant-gratficiation Americans (who will gladly pay extra to see less). But the fact of the matter is, movies based on books need at least 3 hours if they are to tell a book’s story without skipping plot elements. Every Potter I’ve seen without deleted scenes felt rushed, and every one with deleted scenes re-inserted into the proper place felt … awesome.

V For Vendetta – a profoundly awesome movie, politically relevant, and inspiring. I had to rush off to Ebay to buy my own Guy Fawkes mask. Please read my full review, which I posted immediately after watching the movie: https://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/movies-reviews-v-for-vendetta/

ANIMATED MOVIES
WATCHED IN DVD QUALITY

A Scanner Darkly – wow, that was twisted. Not familiar with the Philip K. Dick story it is based on, but the story itself was both twisted and full of twists (is that redundant?). The rotoscope-style animation (crisp animation drawn over live-action film) was incredible as well, giving a completely new visual style … It’s a “cartoon”, but you can very obviously tell which actor plays each character. The political relevance of the subject matter (technology war, surveillance society, war on drugs) was amazing too — this touched on political phenomenon, such as the war on drugs, that has been largely uncommented on recently. This is even truer after the War On Terror took everyone’s attention away from the War On Drugs, as well as legitimizing many unconstitutional practices that actually started during the War On Drugs. An intense synergy of incredible visuals, incredible politics, and an incredible plot. One warning, however: I had extremely high expectations that weren’t met. This movie is far from perfect. It doesn’t get the cherished “10” rating. It does, however, make you feel less sober while you are watching it.

Aachi & Ssipak (1.5hrs) – [WIKIPEDIA PAGE] Uhhhh… WHAT?!?!?!?! Who would have thought?!!?!? A Japanese anime film about a future where everyone has ID chips implanted in their anus, and are rewarded for their defecation — the primary source of energy to power the city — with highly-addictive ‘juicybars’, thus creating a mutant sub-class of juicybar addicts, semi-human looking 2-foot tall machine-gun welding terrorists who are unable to shit on their own ………… And then they meet a hot girl who poops a LOT ………. Who THE HELL would have thought that this would be IMMENSELY entertaining? WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! NOT. EVEN. ME. And I’m just about the only human I know who would give something like this a chance! Suffice to say, expectations were exceeded at a level greater than any other movie this year. An incredibly high kill-count, with deaths often occurring at rates unseen since the MTV Aeon Flux shorts… Quality action battles, with animated quality not seen since Cartoon Network’s acclaimed Samurai Jack series… Bathroom humor and crassness and at a level not seen since we watched the envelope-pushing (in JAPAN–and that’s saying something) Oruchuban Ebichu [check out how messed up that is] series…. And a visual style that is unique, and NOT just looking like Every Other Anime(tm). Who the FUCK would have thought this would be any good??? Thanks for the recommendation Compn… This kicked ass, and there’s no way I ever would have seen it otherwise. I didn’t know you could make an exceptional movie about poop, but apparently its possible. OSCAR-AWARD WINNER FOR “BEST POOP-THEMED MOVIE EVER”! Just kidding — but MTV has acquired the rights to make this into a series. Who knows if they actually will?

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theatres – The film that shut down Boston with a terrorism scare and caused the head of Cartoon Network to resign! It was of course awesome to be able to watch the show for 80 minutes instead of 11 minutes. It had the feel of a series of episodes at times. Turns out, in the “deleted movie” (disc 2), it is quite apparent that much of the latest ATHF season indeed came from the movie. One almost gets the impression that they made the movie first, then took parts out of it to create the episodes of the latest season, then filled in those parts taken out with new stuff so that the movie wasn’t a rerun. Then released it. It didn’t really feel like a long episode of ATHF, it felt like an alternate version of the last season, coupled with a origin story (there was a 4th character–chicken–as well, but he got eaten). Most of our group of 8 hated it, but the 3 true ATHF fans who were watching (Me,Carolyn,John The Canadien!) all of course liked it! What did you expect, Citizen Kane?? I think this is the first “11-minute cartoon” (as opposed to 22-minutes) that I have seen adapted to film.

Bill Plympton – The Tune – interesting, unpredictable, and yet completely boring all at the same time. Many songs. Way too many. Carolyn says she’ll never get that hour back. I was happy to see the works of one who had created many of the great animated shorts that I had originally seen in Liquid Television. This, however, was a total overdose. Still, some parts are very psychedelic. Some of these parts WERE featured in Liquid Television, I believe. At least, I’d seen some of them before. The thing with Plympton is that it’s not how he draws, it’s what he chooses to draw. The man is brilliant, but feature-length films are something he should not necessarily be doing. 3 minutes at a time is the best dose; watching this “movie”, that was prettty much just about needing to write a single song, was like eating seventeen quarter-pounders.

Discworld – Wyrd Sisters (animated) (2.5hrs) – Not sure if this counts as a movie, but it was 2.5hrs long, and had a single plot, so I would say yes. Based on Terry Pratchett novels, this was a generic story about a kings, regicide, witches, and a forgotten prince. But done in British style. With alcohol drinking. Lots of alcohol drinking. Where they SAY it is alcohol they are drinking. Where one of the main characters SAYS it is medicine, and good for you. Definitely not American. “Here in America we don’t take that kind of crap!” It was nice to not be treated like a child and have to watch someone drink “root beer” in a completely unrealistic manner. And some of the British deadpan humor was good, as well. It was enjoyable.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score – So incredible for a show to come back! The first 2 shows to ever return (Family Guy,Futurama) are among our favorites… Are we just lucky, or do we have great taste? Because lots of shows have died, and lots have fans have whined, but only two have ever come back :) This time-travel story was amazingly mindfucking, which was really great. I managed to see it before its release, which was an extra-special treat… I believe 13 people watched it in 1 room. As always, any show-that-becomes-a-movie gets the complaints of “it was just like an extended episode, wahhh!” … Which to me is just people who don’t know how to manage their expectations at all. In this case, the movie was made specifically to be cut into 4 22-minute episodes, so it damn well better feel like “an extended episode” because that’s exactly what it is! 4 episodes, actually! When converted for TV, it will be shown fullscreen instead of widescreen! Anyway, I’d argue that all animated movies, even the Beavis & Butt-head or South Park movie, are just extended episodes. And this one was truly great. Characters were explored, we flashed back to the very first episode with new light being shed – AGAIN. Fry & Leela’s love story is resurrected, explored, and possibly concluded. And the time-travel-complicated plot was any sci-fi lover’s dream! A brilliant mindfuck! Looking forward to the next Futurama ‘movie’ greatly! Evan’s review HERE.

Hellboy:Blood & Iron (1h15m), Hellboy:Sword Of Storms (1h14m) – two animated Hellboy movies – I guess the animated series, which I had been anticipating since its announcement, never happened … So we get some movies instead. One of these was DEFINITELY better than the other. It worked pretty well as a generic superhero cartoon, complete with a ragtag band of misfits with varying powers. The haunted house one, whichever one that was, was decent. The other one wasn’t quite as good.

Howl’s Moving Castle – A fine anime indeed, and unique as well. This is from the guy who gave us Princess Mononoke (which outgrossed E.T.) and Spirited Away (which I didn’t care for nearly as much as the other two). A movie about a magic castle, which moves. This was really really fun. I had been looking forward to watching it for YEARS, and it exceeded what expectations I had–greatly. If there were 2 anime movies I’d recommend this year, it would be Howl’s Moving Castle, and Aiichi & Ssipak.

StarChaser – The Legend of Orin (1985) (Young Sung) (1h40m) – considering this is a straight-to-video b-movie produced the early days of VHS, and was not actually an anime either — this turned out rather well. A bit cheesy at parts, with the standard “easy win” ending found in such films …. but overall an interesting space-based / underground-mine-based sci-fi. It entertained with interest. If I had seen this in 1985, as a 5th-grader, I would have loved it.

Superman – Brainiac Attacks (2006) (1h16m15s) – It was nice to see what basically amounted to 3-4 new episodes of the animated series, which ended several years ago. The *exact* same animated Superman (Tim Daly most of the time) has lasted for about 15 years or so (through the Superman:TAS and Justice League series), which is quite impressive. Now that Justice League is over, this may be the last we ever see of this Superman incarnation. [UPDATE: The Superman Doomsday animated superman movie from 2007 was NOT the same Superman, so it would seem this is the final incarnation.] Anyway, the movie was entertaining… However, Lex Luthor seemed very childish compared to his usual animated Superman/Justice League self. At times, he practically reminded us of The Mask!!!!!! That is not at all consistent with the last 15 years of animated Lex. Anyway, a throwdown with Braniac is always interesting. Also, The Phantom Zone looks totally different in animated form than in Smallville, which was actually pretty cool!

The Thief & The Cobbler aka Arabian Knight aka The Princess & The Cobbler – After some research, it was determined that we saw the “5th version” of this movie, which has 6 different known versions, for various strange legal reasons. This movie apparently holds the record for longest production schedule – 28 years. Thus, I almost think any film buff should see it, just because of that one ridiculous fact! Richard William‘s animation was excellent, psychedelic, and with some good optical illusions at times. Escher & Dali seem to be some influences. We prepped this movie by watching a 30 minute compilation of animated TV commercials done by Richard Williams. Some were done in different languages, and many were from different countries. This gained us a respect for his animation. So anyway, this movie is INCREDIBLY SIMILAR to Aladdin, and the version we watched came out around the same time. Jonathan Winters sounds just like like Louie Anderson, and it’s interesting that in the first 4 versions of the movie, The Thief is completely silent, but in version #5, possibly after decades, the character gets a voice. That explains why Winters seemed to talk about random present-day things that really had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MOVIE. It was a cutesey add-on, and added more “content”, but perhaps the character would have been more mischevious without the voice. Very interesting trivia – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112389/trivia – apparently 950 deaths were edited out of our version!!! WTF!!! So, we watched the rarer workprint (4th??) version, which we also had, and found the 950 deaths. The war machine footage was VERY long in the older version. Probably 800 out of the 950 extra deaths were a bunch of people covered by lava in the space of 2 seconds… I’m quite happy that we had multiple versoins of this laying around, so that it could be studied. There were still a good 50 deaths in the full (5th) version that we watched.

Wonderful Days – Anime. Some incredible animation, damn-near photo-realistic during a couple brief parts. Good story, good movie. Reminded me of another anime a bit… Was it Steamboy? Metropolis? Thanks for the loan, Sammy! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0353014/ I wish I had more to say about it…but I didn’t get a chance to write a review while it was fresh in my memory.

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PUPPET MOVIES
WATCHED IN DVD QUALITY

(YES, MORE THAN ONE!)

Garbage Pail Kids – OMG. 2.7 on IMDB! Partial puppet use: Only the Garbage Pail Kids were puppets. We watched this as a deliberate bad movie, and it definitely delivered a once-[too-many]-in-a-lifetime experience. We have now seen a Garbage Pail Kid be drunk. We have now seen a Garbage Pail Kid rap. What’s with the Garbage Pail Kid saying “nice ass” about the 14-year-old human boy? What’s up with that?!?!?! This was bad in soooo many ways, often multiple ways at once. Pain. NG. PAIN. PAIN. Avoid this unless you like pain, or collected Garbage Pail Kids like I did. I still have mine! And I have downloaded scans of every one ever. And now this. Hopefully I’m done now … I think Garbage Pail Kids ran their course.

Team America:World Police – Puppet use: Entire movie is 1:3 scale. Watched again while hanging at the bay in Cambridge. Good stuff. Nice to get a refresher after 3 years. GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, GREAT movie. Best puppet movie in the history of film. Hilarious, hilarious, hilarious, hilarious. I don’t see how any sane human being could watch this and NOT be laughing their ass off during most of the movie.

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LIVE-ACTION MOVIES
WATCHED IN DVD QUALITY

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A Midsummer’s Night Rave – We went into this with low expectations; this was a leftover movie we’d had for awhile and had been meaning to watch for 6 months. In the end, it completely exceeded our expectations, and turned out to be just about the funnest movie we watched all year! Yes, it was exactly the type of movie one would expect, given the title: A rave-culture adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream — which makes Puck a gay-acting drug dealer. (“On a scale of 1 to 10: Fabulous!”) This was a great party movie; an adventurous night out, with lots of characters getting wasted in lots of ways. One of our favorite kinds of movies. Plus, I’ve always found Shakespeare to be utterly and absolutely unenjoyable due to the seemingly purposeful obfuscation of every sentence and nearly every word. An adaptation that steals the plot, but re-does it in a way I can [under]stand, — that’s always a plus. Being able to get the story better lets me understand references to AND without having to know the original Shakespearean text-only work by heart. The HBO 30-minute animated Shakespeare stories were similarly accessible for me, but this movie was much, much better (party > cartoon!). LOTS of good laughs and people-high-on-drugs moments. The two guys who pass out, and end up sucking each other’s thumbs while asleep? The cops who just leave them there? Frickin’ hilarious movie!

Bourne Supremacy, The – much better than the original, but it was still just a bunch of un-memorable generic action as far as I am concerned. This one at least got 3/5 stars Netflix, 6/10 IMDB. But I still don’t see why everyone else is impressed with the movie. The character is not fleshed out enough for me to care about. It’s just a bunch of fighting.

Bridge, The – Anti-Scientology film – I thought that the creator of the film was actually beaten (legally) by Scientology lawyers such that the movie could no longer be distributed in its original form, but it is true that you can find this on Netflix, so I’m thinking the offending parts were removed. Anyway, we only watched about 15% of the movie, but it was more than enough to get the gist of the plot. Scientologists are sinister motherfucking cult members, Scientology is a dangerous cult, the world would have been a lot better if that asshole L. Ron Hubbard had never born, and people who follow Scientology are some of the biggest fucking idiots in existence. Their lawyers must be even more insane than they are — or they just don’t care where they get their money from. But anyway, this movie already told us what we already knew: Fuck Scientology, and Fuck Scientologists.

Last Days – inspired by the Last Days of Kurt Cobain, this movie was indeed inspirational in the sense that we immediately wanted to kill ourselves upon watching it. IMMEDIATELY I WANTED OT DIE. Now I know how Kurt feels. BORED TO DEATH. We had to employ fast-forward within the first 10 minutes of the movie — that NEVER happens. We had to fast forward so much that the 1 hour, 32minute movie only took about 20 minutes to watch. And we STILL had to take a nap in the middle. I am not kidding or exaggerating here. The director (Gus Van Sant) must have been insane to think that movie was at all tolerable. VERY LONG SCENES WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS. Like, zooming in on a house for THREE DAMN MINUTES. I am not kidding. Or staring at the ground for a MINUTE or more. No dialog for the first 20-30 minutes at least. Cobain only ever mutters to himself the entire movie; you don’t gain any insights to his character, because he never actually says anything understanding. Nor does he have to actually ACT, sine he is muttering. THEY DON’T EVEN SHOW THE ACTUAL SUICIDE. This was lame, lame, lame, lame, lame, lame, lame. I’d watch the movie 300 (which we hated) 300 times before watching this again. For psychological torture, they should make prisoners of war watch THIS instead of listening to “Achy Breaky Heart” over and over again. This is far worse. I’d rather listen to “It’s A Small World” for an equal amount of time.

Little Prince, The (1974) – watched by Carolyn only. It was slightly entertaining, but a little jumpy in the story (like, why’d the pilot just assume the kid came from an asteroid?). I did have to fast forward through some of the longer drawn out songs. Homoerotic and sometimes pedophilic overtones.

Puddle Cruiser – An early movie from the makers of Super Troopers. Not nearly the laughfest of Super Troopers, most people say they don’t like this nearly as much. While it’s true that it doesn’t hold a candle to Super Troopers, it is still an entertaining movie. Average guy likes girl, girl has open relationship with douchebag high-school hulking jock of a boyfriend, guy joins rugby team to impress girl .. and everyone on their team is half the size of everyone on the competing team … A 6/10 at a minimum, but also a fun college movie featuring many parties, and thus our kind of movie to chill out to. I think Compn recommended this to me too.

Punch-Drunk Love – Adam Sandler’s character was definitely more humble, quiet, and quirky(?) than usual in this movie. Interesting, but as expected was not that great. A few laughs, a unique story, some memorable moments, but over all – Meh. I still don’t believe you could ever get enough frequent flier miles to fly indefinitely.

Shortcuts (1993) – Holy Christ, THREE FUCKING HOURS of this shit?!? Carolyn was entertained by the inter-relationships, but Clint yearned for the sweet release of death. At least stuff was actually, sort of, happening — unlike the piece of shit “Last Days”. But still — soooo many characters to keep track of, sooooo many relationships, sooooo many motivations… It just felt like the plot was an academic exercise to see how long of a movie can be made without any central theme whatsoever. The plot seemed intentionally obfuscated, as if this would be some fun David Lynch-ian “mystery” to unravel. It was not. I’m actually really starting to get damn sick of these “characters that have nothing to do with each other” movies. At least with “Waking Life”, some of the dialog was completely and utterly unique… At least with “28 Grams Later” (decent) and “Sex & Lucia” (superb), everything ultimately comes together and is explained in the end. But this was just more of the same, without any real resolution.. Kids getting hit by cars, suicide, substance abuse, blah blah blah… WHO CARES?!? WHY SHOULD I CARE?? WHO AM I CONCENTRATING ON?? AM I TO HAVE PITY FOR FICTITIOUS CHARACTERS WHO ARE ONLY ONSCREEN FOR 5% OF THE MOVIE?!?! With no main character, no overall theme, I found nothing to really be gained by losing 3 hours of your life. A *7.6* on IMDB? What kind of crack is everyone smoking? WHAT THE FUCK?!?! What the hell did I miss???!?!? Some of the moments were beautifully intense — but such moments are still better when they are within some sort of *PLOT*. Even a plot that is impossible to understand (see:David Lynch) is preferable to one that is purposefully so subtle that it may as well not exist! The title meant nothing. This was a LONG cut. A shortcut would have been a shorter movie that made sense. It’s rare to go in with NO expectations and be utterly disappointed to such a deep depth. The time spent on this can never be reclaimed. If you want to spend 3 hours on a mystery plot — go watch David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” instead. MUCH MUCH MUCH better.

Toxic Avenger 2 – Don’t have much to say except damn his blind blonde girlfriend has a nice ass + outfit. I think every insecure teenager that ever watched the Toxic Avenger secretly wanted a hot blind girlfriend. Anyway — We got what we expected out of this. A Troma-produced b-grade toxic avengin’ violence-fest-for-justice!

Trapped – watched on TV randomly during vacation week. Was actually decent, although the end was a bit of a stretch what with the plane landing on the highway and all the car accidents and what-not.

Tromeo & Juliet – a typical Troma grade-A B-movie. This had so much senseless sex, violence, and gore. And yet, spoofing (and quoting) Shakespeare at the same time. “What light from yonder plexiglass doth break?” HA! Watched with Tabbitha, John The Canadien, and Kipp. But Clint slept through 30% of it — not quite enough plot to stay engaged I guess. Skimmed through it the next day and it all finally made sense. The ending is actually funny.

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FAN EDITS OF MOVIES

Batman & Robin (1997) – De-Assified Edit – reducing an awful move to a mere 1 hour and 2 minutes, this was a fan-edit which tried to improve the movie. “It can never be a good movie, but now it can be a better movie” was what the editor [fan] said. Batman now “only speaks when necessary”, crotch/ass shots were removed, Bat-Girl was minimized, the henchmen no longer break into an idiotic song, and any obvious cheesiness that could be removed was. Yet, it was still quite cheesy nonetheless!! HA! ! Still, it was nice to see a more tolerable “mix” of the movie, and Carolyn didn’t remember it, other than Uma Thurman having the most horrible “acting” accent ever possible — she should not have taken this job!). Also, the guy who plays Lionel Luther in Smallville was a minor character, which made it more interesting.

Rocky Horror Punk Show – An amazing fan edit of Rocky Horror Picture Show, using punk versions of every Rocky Horror song. Rocky Horror has had a 30-year legacy in movie theatres, and a cult following that has yet to stop. Of course there are numerous tribute albums for the soundtrack, including an all-punk one. The punk versions of the songs were used here. Each song was PAINSTAKINGLY LIPSYNCHED to the new music. This required EXTENSIVE video editing. MAJOR MAJOR editing. Slower covers had to have filler footage inserted; faster covers had to have parts cut to keep the lipsync in sync. Quite amazing that someone took the time to do this. It would have been much less challenging to do the same thing with similarly-paced “straight” covers, but to do so with off-the-wall, different-sounding, different-speed punk covers was a technical triumph! We watched this during dinner for 4-5 days, skipping over most of the non-song parts, as we’ve already seen RHPS more than any other movie ever anyways. Good stuff.

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ABORTED MOVIES

TRIED TO WATCH FOR A 2ND TIME, ABORTED AGAIN, BUT WATCHED ALL DVD EXTRAS: Timecode – shot in four continuous takes, split into 4 screens, with 4 audio tracks (for each of the 4 screens), plus an “all audio at once” track, plus a “rotates to director-selected audio as needed” track … Actors improvised around the story as needed … This was simply too great an undertaking for us. After multiple tries at simply THINKING about watching it, and skimming through it, we had to get rid of it. We did watch the last 10 minutes or so, to at least foster a false sense of closure. Of course, they shot it 16 days in a row, and the ending wasn’t always the same. They just kept doing it over and over and over until they were happy with one. The director/writer, Figgis, had to actually use blank sheet-music paper to storyboard the movie, due to the lack of a method of writing down 4 screens at once in a conventional screenplay format. BRILLIANT IDEA. This allowed the storyboards to be synchronized, even though much of the movie was ad-libbed. VERY RARE OCCURRENCE: The dvd extras were apparently more interesting than the movie, as we watched most of them! It was fascinating to find out how the movie was created, even if watching the movie itself was not fascinating. And that’s a damn shame, because I believe it had Salma Hayek as a lesbian. (Note to self: track#6 is the rotating-audio.)

7 Lucky Ninja Kids (1989) (China) – After the horror of the Garbage Pail Kids movie, we attempted to test our resolve even further. We were found wanting. We only made it through 15-20 minutes of this movie, which featured vhs-quality, shittily-dubbed 7-year-old kids engaging in kung fu fights vs. full adults. This was a Chinese movie, and was just too terrible… Waaay too terrible. We could get through Garbage Pail kids no problem compared to this.

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AWARDS ARE SPARSE AND RANDOM:

BEST ACTION: Aachi & Ssipak
BEST ANIMATED MOVIE: Futurama: Bender’s Big Score
BEST ANIME: Howl’s Moving Castle, RUNNER-UP: Aachi & Ssipak
MOST HOMOEROTIC WITH PEDOPHILE TWISTS: The Little Prince (only watched by Carolyn)
BEST PARTY/FUN MOVIE: A Midsummer’s Night Rave
MOST POLITICALLY RELEVANT: TIE: V For Vendetta and A Scanner Darkly
BEST SCI-FI: Futurama:Bender’s Big Score
BEST SURPRISE EXCEEDING OF EXPECTATIONS: Aachi & Ssipak
BEST VISUALS: A Scanner Darkly
WORST NON-ABORTED MOVIE: Last Days, Shortcuts. RUNNER-UP: Garbage Pail Kids.

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COINCIDENCES

(real life, Testament concert) Okay, I admit this isn’t a “viewing” coincidence… But while reviewing a concert I downloaded to get the song lists (on 1/1/2007), Testament wishes the audience “Happy New Year”. Of course, I got this concert months ago and the recording is years old, so it’s weird that it would wish me a Happy New Year’s on the right day.

(Punch-Drunk Love, Bourne Supremacy) 2 movies with parades in a row

(my blog, 40 Year Old Version) After posting a blogpost about JtC humping our ottoman, we watched a deleted scene from the 40 Year Old Version where the beardy character talked about all the furniture he humped — including his ottoman!

(Sarah Silverman #6,South Park S11E01) Two shows in a row with clubs where people drummed on bongos and performed spoken word.

(South Park S11E01, Family Guy – Up Late With Stewie & Brian – #1) Two cartoons we watched in the same weekend that had an animated Michael Richards and dealt with his dropping of the N-bomb.

(Family Guy – Up Late With Stewie & Brian – #1, random channel flipping) For the first time in several months, and the last time since — Clint flipped TV channels around randomly. We settled on some RANDOM show to watch, just for 5 minutes while we ate. We then watched Family Guy – Up Late With Stewie & Brian – #1, which was released on the web a week earlier. It was a “talk show” hosted by Stewie of family guy. The guest, a real celebrity, had a clip from a show called “The Winner”. The clip was — the show we had settled on earlier!! The clip actually started within 3 seconds of when Clint originally flipped to the channel. This is absolutely one of the strangest coincidences EVER. Watching 5 minutes of realtime tv in 4 months, then 5 minutes later seeing that same 5 minutes in something you downloaded a week ago… WTF?!?!?!?!

(the last two) Two coincidences in the same show, Family Guy – Up Late With Stewie & Brian – #1. (Am I pushing it?)

(Tromeo & Juliet, The Simpsons: S18E15_JABF08_Rome-Old and Juli-Eh) Within a month, two Romeo & Juliet-based videos.

(Halfway Home #5, real life) Halfway Home was about camping. We watched it less than 2 weeks prior to camping ourself. As soon as the trip is planned and the evite sent, BAM! Camping is now on TV!

(Star Trek dvd extra, Family Guy S6E15) Two videos in a row with horses. Kinda weak.

(real life, Family Guy season finale) First, 4 of us had a conversation about going way back in time, living your life but remembering everything you’ve learned since. Then, we watched Family Guy, and Peter traveled back and got to live as his 18-year-old self for a night. That was very strange! How did we predict that?

(Heroes S1, The Mask:TAS #48:They Came From Within) Within a day, we watched 2 videos where characters saw themselves in a comic book. Oddly enough, Heroes has a comic book based on it, and The Mask is based on a comic book based on a movie based on an old movie. :) Something like that.

(StarChaser:Legend Of Orin,The Mask-TAS-#25, Tripping The Rift) During same day, watched two animated videos with spaceships that had personalities and were sort of like their own beings. Then later in the year we watched Tripping The Rift, and its spaceship had a personality too!

(real life 9/6/2007 links,Fantastic Four-TAS #19) I read the crazy news that in the comic book Fantastic Four #500-something, a super-villain named Klaw had been resurrected from the dead…. using bittorrent!! His powers were sound waves, and he was based on them…. So anyway, they downloaded a sample of him via bittorrent and re-created him. WTF. Strange way for bittorrent to be mentioned in Marvel Comics. That same day, we watched a recent episode of the animated FF Cartoon Network series, and they had Klaw in this episode! Strange, and one has to wonder if they do this on purpose…. If the comic book was approximately timed with the release of the TV episode. It would be smart business.

(real life,V For Vendetta) Imagine our surprise when, after meaning to watch this for well over a year, we watch it, and a character asks, “Do you know what day it is?” We find out it is Nov 4th — the date in real life!!!! The movie also came to a close just a few minutes AFTER Nov 4th [the following year]…and I don’t recall, but I’m thinking it was after midnight by the time the movie was over. Quite an awesome coincidence!

(Smallville S7E08, Justice League:#39-40:Eclipsed) Within 48 hours, watched 2 shows that starred Superman, had plots revolving around a crystal, with unexpected eclipses. This was kind of weird, as the Justice League episode was ~2 years old. So they couldn’t be doing this on purpose, could they?

(Smallville S7E08, Sarah Silverman S2E4) Within 48 hours, watched 2 shows that had a dead mom come back briefly (Clark’s, Sarah’s). Also: 2 coincidences within the same Smallville episode.

(real life, Hijikata Toshizo – Shiro No Kiseki) Snowed today, snow on show today. I would think this happens almost every year, though, so not very special.

(real life, Sweat Punch 2 – End Of The World (anime)) – came back from a concert kinda wasted and watched anime where they went to a concert!

(Simpsons??, King Of The Hill S12E9) Two shows featuring [name-changed] YouTube videos within the show. Don’t remember what the first show was, but it was within ~48 hours.

(Shrek The Halls holiday special, Holiday MP3 playlist) Shrek featured the song “Christmas Wrapping”, by The Waitresses, who are apparently the ones who sung “I Know What Boys Like”. This was in our holiday playlist due to the Dr. Demento Holidays In Dementia album … so it is a song that pops up perhaps once a day, during the Christmas season. So, first off, it is not something we normally hear, but 2nd off, we had heard it in the past day. So it was REALLY strange when it popped up in Shrek special. I actually thought Winamp was unpaused and the computer was playing music, fumbled around to pause the music, ended up UNpausing the music, so that there were 2 sound sources (Shrek + MP3), and then had to re-pause it, and realize that one of my playlist songs was in the Shrek special. What are the odds of that?

AND IF YOU READ THIS FAR …. I’M IMPRESSED

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