low expectations

lately, the netflix queue has been mostly populated with fare that is, well, not intellectually stimulating, but mildly amusing, and because i can, i'm going to write about that today.

vanilla sky: well, i guess this was mildly thought-provoking. i kinda liked it, and it looked great, but it also seemed to be really bending over backwards to 'blow your mind' or some other back-of-the-dvd-case term, and as such it kinda diminished the revelation of the end. besides which, they really telegraphed the ending the entire way through. and furthermore, i couldn't help but be reminded of futurama and poor ted williams. the shit of it is, when all is said and done, not too much really happens, over a longish movie. soundtrack is good, though.

the fast and the furious: now here's a movie that built careers on its exceeding of low expectations. and as a result, we had to sit through an entire year of the film industry assuming we all somehow wanted everything to be like this movie, and everything to have vin diesel in it. notwithstanding the cool 'max power' name, he doesn't do much for me. he has a couple of good lines in this movie, but they're far outweighed by the ones that land with a thud. and as a result, we had to hear how 'xxx' was going to out-007 james bond, or whatever. horse pucky, i say. this movie was, uh, worth a netflix rental. and not an entire waste of its 90-minute running time (a nice car chase is never a bad thing). and paul walker? he couldn't even do justice to the material in the skulls. the bt songs on the soundtrack are decent, though.

enigma: oh, okay, here's another non-dumb one. this was a good movie. i liked the fact that it did a fine job of minimizing the dumbing-down of the cryptography that was described. not only that, but they actually took some steps to shed some light on the process, explaining why it wasn't enough to simply have the machine. well-acted and engrossing, not anything big or important, but a damn good way to waste 2 hours. incidentally, it reminded me a lot of a bond movie, but then i noticed that the score was by a 007 veteran.

orange county: forgettable. tom hanks' kid has an amazing resemblance to the young, funny tom hanks. i miss that tom hanks. dragnet. big. splash. the underrated classic, the burbs.

sorority boys: i laughed. really, that's about all one can ask for out of a movie such as this. it's all been done before, but it was nevertheless funny, so, uh, yeah. good enough. i will save myself the trouble of copying and pasting this paragraph, and just say van wilder was about the same thing. a decent waste of time, by my admittedly low standards for movies like this. crap, but good crap.

the count of monte cristo: a pretty decent swashbuckler, good swordfights and stuff. it looks real nice, too. the passage of time in it is kinda hard to swallow, but that's a function of the source material, so i guess can't be helped.

abraxas, guardian of the universe: too horrible for words. jesse ventura should stick to politics, although he was okay in that one episode of the x-files.

they saved hitler's brain: ugh. it's a bad sign when the title is the most amusing thing about the movie.

bad taste: sucked. impressively gross, but just too long, too boring. i have no idea why having this on his resume helped peter jackson get the whole lord of the rings job. everything that was so good about those movies (well, at least fellowship), sucked about this, and this was supposed to be a comedy.

america's sweethearts: cute, but not funny. and it's a sad thing when billy crystal has to resort to dogs+'nads jokes. honestly, though, this is the first movie i've seen where i can totally get the whole julia roberts thing. pretty much any other movie, she never seemed like anything special, but she's ok in this. it's still pretty unremarkable though. it might've been a better movie if they didn't seemingly cut out an important 5 minutes around the 2/3 point.

the italian job: not to encourage remakes, but this was pretty decent. it had a good car chase or two, and the ongoing 'napster' gag was reasonably amusing. marky mark is not horrible, but edward norton totally seemed to phone it in. i think it's kinda amusing how much screen time the los angeles subway system seems to get (think speed and earthquake and volcano among others), given the fact that it's most famous for not being used.