Silent Hill

I love horror movies. If I had to pick a genre to be the only one I was allowed to watch for the rest of my life, I’d pretty much have to go with this one. Now, there are two categories of horror movies for me: the ones that are good and are supposed to be taken seriously and the ones that are slopped together for the very reason that there are people like me who will go see pretty much all of them. Ones I would place in the quality horror movie category are things like the remakes of Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes. (I’m going to leave the older, classic horror films out of this – I apply these categories to the new ones.) Crap category? Pretty much anything that has to tout “From the producer of [fill in the name of a horror movie that was actually good here],” with the ability to put Michael Bay’s name here the notable exception. A recent example: the remake of The Fog. Also in this category goes most sequels and anything rated PG-13 unless it’s a remake of a Japanese horror film, though those are still better when they are rated R.

I’m usually pretty good at figuring out which horror movies belong in which category before I actually watch them. There are a few that I originally expect to place in the latter category, and that really, if I’m being honest, belong there, but that I still enjoy (like House on Haunted Hill or 13 Ghosts, for instance – belong in that category, but I still enjoyed them a lot and own them on DVD).

But my purpose here is to review Silent Hill. The purpose of that long preface was to say that this one was one of the rare ones that was sort of a question mark for me. The previews looked promising, but I had this nagging suspicion that the parts we were getting to see in the preview were the only good parts in the movie. I was still psyched about getting to see it, but I had myself braced for disappointment. But disappointed I was not. I don’t think I’ll ever go around saying this is the best horror movie ever, but it was good.

I don’t play the video games, so I’m not sure how the plots compare, but the movie plot goes like this: a couple has adopted a girl named Sharon, Sharon is creepy and sleepwalks and talks about a place called Silent Hill while she does so. Apparently there are other problems, too; there are references to medications she’s supposed to be taking and how they are no longer working. Mom thinks that the best way to solve it is to find Silent Hill and take Sharon there. And naturally, this is a big mistake. Silent Hill is a ghost town in West Virginia that was burned up by a fire about 30 years earlier, and the fire apparently continues to burn in the coal mines beneath the city. A car accident leaves mom and Sharon and a policewoman on the outskirts of town, Sharon has disappeared into the town, and huge chasms have opened up on all the roads leading away from town.

What you soon find out is that in this town, every few hours a siren sounds and then The Darkness comes and the place turns into what is essentially Hell, with horrid creatures trying to do the characters harm at every turn. And a lot of these things are DANG CREEPY!!! This is where I’ll begin with the opinion portion of this review. There were some stunning visual moments in this movie. One of the things that creeps me out most in horror movies is the weird motion thing (one of the reasons that House on Haunted Hill works for me, actually), and this movie has weird motion galore. There are at least five different types of these creatures, all distinctively different. One of my concerns was that they had already shown all the moments like this in the preview and that no surprises remained. I was totally wrong about that one – there were tons of great moments along these lines, and even more of those “Oh, holy crap, PLEASE don’t show me what that thing looks like… CRAP!” kinds of moments.

The plot was fine. I can’t really complain about it, but I also have to say I was kind of disinterested in it. It was fine, it made sense by the end, but the visual creepiness was way more important, and the storyline never managed to be quite as captivating as the rest of the elements of the film.

And The Ring’s David Dorfman is going to have to give up his Creepiest Kid In A Movie title to the little girl from this one. I wasn’t all that impressed by her at the beginning of the movie, but as it goes on and there are about three different parts for her to play, not only is she demonstrating a wide range of ability, but playing this totally evil entity as one of them. Example: a woman is wrapped tightly in barbed wire and suspended above a church floor. The girl looks up and sees this and starts to skip around in a circle in celebration. That’s going to be the thing I think of first when I remember this movie, I believe.

I don’t know how fans of the game might respond to this movie, but as someone coming in just wanting a well-made horror movie, I was satisfied and have no qualms about recommending it.

The Hills Have Eyes

I begin by saying that I’ve never seen the original version of this movie, done by Wes Craven in 1977. In fact, somehow I never even saw a preview for it. I’d seen a few clips of it on the “100 Scariest Movie Moments Ever” series on either AMC or Bravo a while back. However, I knew the premise, I knew it had a reputation as a very scary movie, and so therefore I had high expectations.

I can’t say I was really disappointed in the movie, but it wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting. I think that comes from my getting very easily pissed off when characters do stupid things; that reasoning is why I disliked When A Stranger Calls so much – I had a hard time dredging up much sympathy for a character who apparently has an IQ in the 2-digit range, as demonstrated by her choosing the stupidest option at every turn. In order for us to be really pulled into a horror film, we need to care what happens to the characters. That’s why the stupid and immoral ones die first and the killing progresses to the smarter and better people for whom we have some sympathy, giving us more time to worry about the fates of these nicer, stronger, more sympathetic characters. In this remake of The Hills Have Eyes, it isn’t always the obvious next victim who is the actual next victim, which is actually a nice change of pace, but there were still problems of people doing stupid things that make you scream at them, “You’re a moron, and if you get killed now, you deserve it! Say, hasta la vista, gene pool!”

Before I get too much into my complaints about the movie, I want to start with the good things, of which there are many. It’s a decent premise: around the time of the nuclear testing out in the southwest desert, families of miners refused to leave the testing areas they had previously called home and instead of leaving, hid out in the mines in the mountains, dooming themselves and their descendants to deformities and birth defects and apparently insanity. The movie concerns a family on a cross-country trip for the parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. They’re en route to San Diego, but the dad wanted to take a (really long) gander at the desert, and so they find themselves directed by a gas attendant in cahoots with the crazy mine people down a dirt road right into a trap. They crash and are at least eight miles from the gas station, even further from any other semblance of civilization. Cell phones? Oh, that’s been thought of. There’s no signal.

The family consists of the mom and dad (Kathleen Quinlan and Ted Levine), oldest sister (Vinessa Shaw) and her husband (Aaron Stanford) and baby daughter, and two teenaged children Brenda (_) and Bobby (Dan Byrd). They all make it through the accident unharmed, Dad decides to walk back to the gas station for help while sending son-in-law in the other direction to see if he can find the freeway. As we all know, splitting up in horror movies equals badness afoot, and this situation is no exception.

I don’t want to go further into the plot from here. One of the cool things about this movie is that you don’t know who, if anyone, is safe from harm. There are some scenes that are the most intense I’ve ever seen in a film. You also can’t count on it NOT showing you certain things, and those moments are quite shocking. Anyone wanting to know how to make a good, intense horror film should definitely study this one to see how intensity is done right. I also have to say that this is one that should definitely be seen in the theater for the fantastic job done with the programming of the digital sound. This is some of the most effective use of surround sound I’ve ever experienced.

All of the acting was superb, but I wanted to take a moment to praise two especially good performances. First, Aaron Stanford, who plays the son-in-law. I won’t say anything about his character’s fate beyond the fact that he didn’t die as soon as I thought he would, but I have to give props to Stanford for making the character way more complex than I was expecting him to be based on his introduction. Stanford is on his way to being one of those great chameleon actors, I think: when I watched this, I had no idea he was the same guy who played Pyro in X2. The other standout to me was Dan Byrd as the youngest family member Bobby, who really becomes the film’s main character. I saw him on TNT’s Salem’s Lot miniseries but didn’t think much of him then, but I think this may be the film that really gets him noticed and leads to more awesome roles like this one.

Like I said before, there were several moments in this movie where I was really aggravated at characters’ stupidity; I found myself saying, “Dude, how could you possibly think this is a good plan?” quite frequently, and anytime you do that, you’re yanking yourself out of the movie’s reality and into your own. This equals bad, particularly in a horror movie where the whole point experiencing it like you’re actually there, and feeling fear because of it. I think the middle of the movie is the strongest part of it because it had the fewest of these moments. You generally understand why everyone does what they do until about the last twenty minutes. During that last bit, which should probably have been the most intense of all, I kept getting pulled out of the moment because I was so irritated with the character in question for the choices being made. Yes, let’s run up some stairs instead of going outside. Yes, lets leave a loaded gun a the feet of this guy who appears to be dead and yet is in a horror movie so can’t possibly be. It didn’t ruin the movie, but a character making slightly smarter or more understandable decisions would have made this section of the film as good as the rest.

I would not say that these issues I have with the last act of the film are reason to avoid the Hills Have Eyes. Horror movie fans should definitely catch it. Anyone else, particularly those who have a hard time with really intense scenes, should probably avoid it unless they are a glutton for punishment.

Failure to Launch

If you’ve read any of my other romantic comedy reviews, then you know that I don’t care much for them, particularly when they fall into the same pattern:

-boy and girl meet
-one is deceiving the other (or on occasion both are doing the deceiving) for some stupid reason, and you want to scream at them, “Hey, have you not ever seen a romantic comedy before?! Don’t you know everything will be much easier if you’re just honest right now, from the beginning?!”
-they fall in love but believing in the deceptions
-the big reveal happens and one or both find out the other was not being honest
-there’s a big fight and it seems like there’s no way the two can possibly reconcile
-the two reconcile anyway, almost always way too quickly to be realistic

I can’t say that Failure to Launch deviates much from this pattern, but it does have some things going for it that do make it at least slightly more appealing to me than most other RC’s I watch.

The plot goes something like this: Tripp (Matthew McConaughey) is thirty five and still living with his parents. His love life is fairly screwed up. Either girls find out he still lives at home and take off on him, or he freaks out when they start to look to him for a serious relationship and purposely uses his home situation to get out of the relationship. So his parents (the hysterical Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw) hire a woman named Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to date Tripp and manipulate him into moving out. Naturally, Paula really falls in love with Tripp instead of just pretending to, Tripp finds out about her being hired by his parents and gets pissed and breaks up with her, and then the family and friends all team up to try to get them back together again.

None of that is particularly new to the genre, now is it? But the main thing this movie has going for it is the cast, particularly the supporting cast. My favorite is probably Zooey Dashanel (previously in Elf and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) as Paula’s roommate and polar opposite. She’s sort of what a goth chick would be like after she grew up a little bit and changed the wardrobe some, too. In this movie, she reminds me a lot of Janneane Garofalo, but less abrasive. A lot of the best laughs in the film come from her and her antics. Two other great parts of the cast are Bartha and Bradley Cooper as Tripp’s friends Ace and Demo. The way the three guys play off each other also provides much of the film’s laughs.

There are also quite a few animal attack gags in the film which are pretty stupid but made me and my movie-watching-mates laugh quite a bit, and they manage to explain the unusual number of them an a semi-reasonable way by the end of the film.

If you are a romantic comedy person, you’ll most likely enjoy this one. If you’re not, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway, especially if Kit’s sense of humor is the type that really makes you laugh, but you may not wish to go out of your way to go catch it.

Just Like Heaven

If you read my review of Must Love Dogs below, then you know that I dislike romantic comedies. And I thought this movie was going to be one. I thought that the fact that they feature Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder so prominently in the preview despite an obviously minor role was a strong indication that this movie was going to suck and they knew it. I watched the preview and said, "Well, obviously she's not dead. This is just like that Bill Cosby movie Ghost Dad."

You'll have to watch the movie to find out whether Reese Witherspoon is alive at the end of the movie or not, but I will say that if you are avoiding this movie because of a dislike similar to mine for romantic comedies, then you might want to give this one a shot. In retrospect, this movie is more like a modern-day fairy tale with a good bit of comedy thrown in than what most of us think of as a romantic comedy. A lot of it was very funny, and while I'm sort of neutral on the matter of Reese Witherspoon, I think Mark Ruffalo is fantastic in this movie.

An enjoyable film, even (I imagine) for guys.

catching up: The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Based on the previews for this movie, I would have expected it to be pretty scary. And if you are a Christian who believes in demons and spritual warfare, it still is. But I would not be surprised if people who do not believe are utterly disappointed. The purpose of the film is not so much to scare the audience as it is to open their eyes to the possibility that some of the things we explain away with science might possibly be spiritual/demonic in nature. The girl who plays Emily Rose is dang creepy and can do some very unusual physical things. I think she did a phenomenal job, as did Laura Linney in the role of a lawyer who really wants not to believe these things but slowly gets pulled into a world where demonic possession is at least possible.

And let me tell you, if I ever start waking up at three a.m. on a consistent basis, I will remember this movie, and I will be scared to death.

catching up: Transporter 2

I haven't seen the first Transporter movie, but now I want to. This movie was cool as heck. There's a marked suspension of disbelief required for its enjoyment, but action movie fanatics will no doubt leave happy. And they'll never look at a fire hose the same way again.

catching up: Sky High

I really didn't think I would like this movie very much, and was quite pleasantly surprised by it.

On the downside, it was overly predictable. You see virtually every plot point and twist coming five minutes ahead of time.

But on the upside, it was a really creative movie. I enjoyed the characters and the actors and most of the humor. It's, of course, a lot like Harry Potter or X-Men, but I like both of those, too. Perhaps explaining my satisfaction. So if Hogwarts and/or Xavier's Academy are your scene, Sky High probably is, too.

catching up: The Brothers Grimm

I should probably be harder on this movie than I was. But the fact of the matter is that I enjoyed myself quite a bit watching this movie. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are not exactly my favorite people, but I enjoyed them and their characters in this movie. It's Terry Gilliam's work, so you know that it's going to be visually distinctive.

I guess the main complaint I have is that they took the idea of slipping in the fairy tale references WAY too far. See, Shakespeare in Love is a fine example of doing this sort of thing well; there were great "inside jokes" like Will practicing his signature over and over, encountering Kit Marlowe and John Webster, and the incredibly complex way they interwove elements of many of Shakespeare's plays but most notably Romeo and Juliet. But with Shakespeare in Love, you felt smart if you got these, and that made them more rewarding. With Brothers Grimm, they hit you over the head with it and do it WAY too much.

It's a strange little fantasy/horror/adventury movie, and not as smart as it could have been, but if you go in understanding this, you'll probably enjoy it all right.

catching up: Skeleton Key

I'm really behind on posting my movie reviews, so I'll keep these catchup ones short and sweet.

I liked Skeleton Key. It wasn't scary like the previews made it seem, but it was a cool story, well-made. The best part is that I didn't figure out the ending ten minutes in like I tend to do. I only got it a minute or two before the reveal, and I'm always impressed with a movie that manages to do this. It was no Amityville Horror, but it was a good flick.

The Dukes of Hazzard

I didn’t go in to this movie with any sort of expectations. I’ve never seen the tv show. All I knew was that I think Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott are funny and I like laughing at Jessica Simpson. I was hoping to be entertained, and I was.

This movie was made by the same people as Super Troopers, and a lot of them make appearances in the film. I got a kick out of Knoxville and Scott as Luke and Bo Duke, particularly the jokes the two play on each other. That, along with the car chases and stunts, made this like a two hour episode of Jackass with a plot and less crude humor.

Aside from being funny and having some good action, the movie had a surprisingly coherent plot (even though it ultimately functions as an excuse for car chases, including some in downtown Atlanta). It involves the Dukes trying to stop Boss Hogg from turning Hazzard County into a strip mine. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but it gave me over an hour and a half of laughs, excitement, and entertainment.

I also got quite a kick out of seeing bits of Atlanta in the movie. It’s always cool to see things in a movie that you see in real life on a regular basis.

And like Ryan Pinkston got to ask Amanda Peet on Punk’d a few years ago, I wish I could find a way to ask Jessica Simpson, “How did it feel to play someone smart?”

In short, it was kind of a stupid movie but it was never trying to be anything more, so it was hard to be disappointed. If you go in with expectations similar to mine, you should leave satisfied, too.

Must Love Dogs

I begin by saying that I don’t really like romantic comedies much. Of all the movie genres out there, it is the most formulaic and least enjoyable to me. The only genre that tends to be as formulaic on the whole is horror movies, particularly slasher films, but I enjoy those far more.

So this, like almost every other romantic comedy I have ever seen (far too many), has a guy and a girl who meet and fall in love, but one is keeping a secret from the other, the other finds out, the fallout occurs, but they inevitably get back together in the end. Bleh. The only romantic comedy I really like is also one that kind of breaks the above formula, and that is When Harry Met Sally.

In this movie’s case, the girl is a middle aged woman who has just gotten a divorce, the guy is a (younger) middle aged man who has gone through the same thing. They meet through an online dating service that the woman’s sister secretly registered her for, and the secret ends up being that the woman is also sort of seeing another man, the father of one of her first grade students. The first guy finds out, is hurt, and gets out of her life, but of course, she decides that he was the right one for her. If you’ve seen more than two romantic comedies in your life, you know that they end up together in the end, so my writing that here should not be ruining anything for you.

Don’t get me wrong – the movie was entertaining enough. The acting was pretty good; John Cusack was the main bright spot, but there were other decent actors, too. Stockard Channing’s was one of the more memorable of the supporting cast performances. The movie had its funny moments, too. But there’s no real reason to watch this over any other romantic comedy that’s been made in the last twenty years. You know the whole plot going in, you know how it’s going to end, and the genre does not lend itself to astounding filmmaking creativity and ingenuity.

And that’s why I don’t go out of my way to watch romantic comedies. Generally speaking, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. If I’m going to watch a predictable movie, I get a lot more entertainment in exchange for my time with the a horror film, guessing when the scares are going to be, figuring out who will be the one to survive to the end, seeing what kind of creativity the filmmakers can bring to the scares and death scenes, and, if I’m lucky, a few good scares and jumps.

If you like romantic comedies, despite the Groundhog Day sensation, then this is probably a decent one to watch. If you’re like me and think that someone needs to rethink the genre and come up with something original and new, then you should not spend your time on this movie.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The last review I posted was for The Bad News Bears, which was a good illustration of how a remake can screw up by trying to be too much like the original. Well, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good example of how trying to make a completely different movie can make a remake into quite a success.

The original movie is a sort of morality tale. Charlie wins the factory in the end because he passes Wonka’s honesty test. The Burton version ends up being about the importance of family and friendship. So in its message, this film is already setting itself apart from the original.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with the acting in the original film, but the acting in this one, by all the actors but especially Johnny Depp and Freddy Highmore, is outstanding. Johnny Depp’s Wonka is hilarious, creepy, and pitiable all at once. Other reviewers have remarked that it almost seems to be based on Michael Jackson, and while I don’t know that MJ was an influence in Depp’s acting decisions, I do think that both are good examples of what happens to people who don’t have normal, healthy attachments to others. Some of Wonka’s lines are just priceless and great departures from the original. In the original, you have Wonka’s introduction to the chocolate room: “Everything in this room is eatable. Edible. I mean, you can eat almost everything.” Burton’s Wonka: “Everything in this room is eatable. Even me. But that, dear children, is called cannibalism, and is frowned on in most societies.” As for Highmore, this film isn’t as demanding of him as Finding Neverland, and I think he’s pretty much just playing himself, but he’s good anyway. You can’t help but love him to pieces and want the best for him.

I’m not big on musicals, so it was nice that the only songs in this one were the It’s A Small World takeoff “Willy Wonka Here He Is” and the Oompa Loompa songs. They’re kind of annoying, but they’re supposed to be, so it worked for me.

Perhaps most of all, I love the look of this film, as I do all of Burton’s films. Every set is just awesome. My favorites are the chocolate room, a Nightmare Before Christmas version of the original movie’s, and the Buckets’ house, which is just fabulous.

Oh, and my seven year old nephew liked it enough to watch it twice, and he doesn’t do that much.

This is definitely one to watch.

Bad News Bears

To start with, I LOVE the original Bad News Bears. I would say it's probably one of my favorite movies of all time. Generally with me, if there is baseball in the movie, and particularly if it isn't ruined with a stupid love story, I tend to be satisfied with said movie. So I was pretty much set to be happy with this one.

That said, I still like the original Bears better. Remakes tend to work best when the filmmaker does not try to flat-out recreate the original movie with a new cast. And when the cast of the original you are remaking is as good as the cast was for the original Bears, you're setting yourself up for failure going this route.

There's no way to replace people like Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal, Chris Barnes, and Jackie Earle Haley. The only two characters who I felt like stayed in the mold of the original movie versions but were played equally well or better were Lupus (the weird kid, or as Tanner calls him in both versions, a "booger-eatin' moron") and Engleberg (the fat, obnoxious catcher). The 2005 Lupus is more than just the quiet loner who everyone declares is weird (aside from his shyness, there didn't seem to be much wrong with him in the 1976 version except that he didn't wipe his nose very often); in this version, the things he says are just plain nuts, and the kid playing him, Tyler Patrick Jones, pulls it off really well. Engleberg, played in this version by a kid named Brandon Cragg, is pretty much the same as the original version of the character and played just as well (though this time around, Engleberg is "on Atkins").

Sammi Kraft as Amanda and Jeff Davies as Kelly never escape the shadows of their charismatic predecessors. Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earle Haley had personality out the wazoo in these roles, and the two new actors are kind of boring. Timmy Deters does ok as Tanner Boyle, my favorite of the Bears from the original movie. His best moments were the ones that were a departure from the original, like when he starts tackling Yankees as they pass him at shortstop on their way around the bases. But he, too, is lacking the charisma of Chris Barnes.

Billy Bob Thornton is ok. The problem is that he did such a good job being a creep that I didn't buy him at the end as a decent guy and good coach.

This movie was at its best when it was breaking free of the original and doing new things. Greg Kinnear's character was a hoot, and one of the best things about the movie. He took the character and made it his own. Of the rest of the kids, one of my favorites was K.C. Harris as Ahmad Abdul Rahim. This character was very different from the one in the original; the 1976 version was obsessed with being Hank Aaron, while humor in this version is derived from the fact that Ahmad's favorite ball player is Mark McGwire, a white guy. K.C. Harris is one kid I would expect to see acting in more movies in the future because he seems very at ease with himself, a natural actor. The other kid I expect to see go on to bigger and better things is Jeffrey Tedmori, playing another of the new characters, Garo, who is the most interesting of the kid characters in the film.

Like I said, this is a baseball movie, so I was happy, but it did not live up to the quality of its predecessor. I think that if Linklater had played looser with his source material and made a film that captured the spirit of the original without trying to remake it so closely, I would have been happier with it. Cause when it comes down to it, there's no reason to watch this one instead of the original.

Wedding Crashers

The simplest way to convey my opinion of Wedding Crashers is this: after it was over, I was asking myself why I spent two hours of my life watching it. It's hard to be too picky when you don't have to pay, but it was really that bad. There were about 2-3 jokes in it that I could laugh at without feeling guilty.

This movie couldn't decide if it was going to be American Pie or just your typical romantic comedy, tried to do both, and failed at both.

See, it couldn't go the American Pie route successfully because one of the major appeals of Pie was that you sympathize with the main character Jim. It's a raunchy sex comedy, but in the end you like the movie because of your sympathy for Jim; there are real emotions (the character's and the audience's)involved in his embarassing sexual experiences, so in the end the audience is left with more than just something to laugh at. So embarassment was a key part of the comedy in Pie that just never made an appearance in Wedding Crashers. Plus, I did not find either character, Vince Vaughn's Jeremy nor Owen Wilson's John, sympathetic in the least. They are a couple of scumbags who go to weddings to get women to sleep with them. They don't deserve for things to work out for them in the end. So unlike Pie, where you root for Jim at least a little bit, these are not guys to root for. American Pie this was not, though I had the very strong impression it was trying to be.

Nor did it work as a romantic comedy, and for a lot of the same reasons. I kind of liked the female character that Owen Wilson's character falls in love with precisely because she's not a stereotypical romantic comedy female. At her sister's wedding, she is practically killing herself to keep from laughing at the cheesiness that is her sister's wedding vows. This was early in the movie, actually, and I kind of had high hopes for Wedding Crashers at this point. I would say that her character, up until the last 20 minutes or so of the movie, is one of the two redeeming qualities of the movie (the other being Christopher Walken, whose mere presence makes me regret spending time watching this movie just a little less, though I still would never pay money to see this movie). But all those things that made her character interesting and different at the beginning of the film eventually fade so that she becomes just another cliched romantic comedy female who is pissed off that she was lied to but eventually is convinced to give the guy a second chance.

The plot of this movie pretty much follows the standard romantic comedy plot outline, but its failed attempts to be American Pie keep it from working in the end, since that kind of humor doesn't really work in a romantic comedy, especially that kind of humor done badly.

Vince Vaughn, I'm so disappointed in you.

My New Movie Review Blog

I'll start posting reviews of the movies I watch on this blog. The first will probably be Wedding Crashers, which I watched on Thursday.