6/10/2005

Nothing solves marital issues like a little espionage

A lot of different movies open this weekend, but honestly the only one that seems worth seeing is Mr. & Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It's a real shame a film that looks almost guaranteed to be the slickest action film this summer has been overshadowed with the nation's disturbing obsession with famous people's sex lives. The reviews of been really good so far and anything from the director of The Bourne Identity is gonna be awesome.

The other offering just seem like pure dreck. Hooneymooners is an insult to Jackie Gleason and Art Carney and everybody who made that brilliant sitcom that basically set the standard for guys like Fred Flinstone, Al Bundy, Homer Simpson and every lovable loser since then. The mere fact that the studio wouldn't even put in Ralph's famous "Bam! Zoom! Right to the Moon!" line (and all his variations on it) because they feared it would be seen as supporting violence against women makes it a certainty that this will be a humorless, painful affair to anyone unfortunate enough to waste money on it.

High Tension is yet another thriller from a foreign land, this time France. Now, the reviews have been solid, but any horror film I've seen over the last decade, American or otherwise, has been laughably awful at best(for some reason critics have a weird reverance for foreign & independent films, even though they make just as many crappy films as big budget Hollywood does). Plus it looks like a bad Texas Chainsaw Massacre rip off.

The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3D is the latest family offering from Robert Rodriguez, and like his other family offerings, it should fill you with dread. The Spy Kids series was severely overrated and Rodriguez just seems so much more in is element when he is doing extremely visceral and violent movies like Sin City, From Dusk Til Dawn & Desperado.

And then there's Howl's Moving Castle, the lastest from Miyazaki, which I think will be like all of his films-Brilliant animation, but thin plot and atrocious dialogue. More evidence of the sacred cow that reviewers to think foreign films are.

Video Game wise-two big releases are out this week-Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for Xbox, I more or less said what I thought about this way back when I first started up this blog, but I"ll expand on it a bit here. I think the GTA series has more or less peaked with Vice City. It had just about everything you could ever want to do in a violent crime game, and had incredibly cool nostalgia feel to it. San Andreas by comaprison, just felt like it added tons of stuff that wasn't necessary and was really boring-namely exercise & calorie-counting. It's bad enough we have to do this stuff in real life if we want to live past 40, we don't want it in videogames.

The other would be the latest WWII shooter Medal of Honor: European Assault. Forget banning violent video games, let's at least put some kind of moratorium on historical shooters. These things seem to be multiplying like tribbles, and they won't stop till all other genres are ingored completely.

All right, that's really all I have for todya, but I'll most likely have an update Saturday or Sunday as well.

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