I deserve a medal!

The one upside to being sick is I manage to catch up on my backlog of shows and movies I have to watch. I borrowed the HBO series Rome from my brother and watched the whole first season. I enjoyed that show. Lots of political backstabbing (literally) and intrigue.

I watched a few movies as well. Let's see....

The Village: Every since enjoying The Sixth Sense, I have ranged from dissapointed to flat out disgusted on M. Night Shamalamadingdang movies since. Wayyyyy to predictable. But the upside is it was also very slow!

Michael Clayton: Older movie with George Clooney. The lawyer that goes crazy has a great rant. Overall, enjoyed the movie. Not great, but entertaining enough.

The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emporer: Watched this one with the boys as we were moving through the series. Movie was entertaining and had the cheesy humor that made the first two great. There is a scene where a Yeti nutkicks a bad guy over this building between two columns and then looks at the other Yeti and puts his arms in the air like he was signaling a good field goal. The boys were practically snorting in laughter over that. Both the fact that the bad guy got nutkicked by a yeti and the fact that the yeti are apparently football fans.

Rendition: A little slow at parts, but it was an interesting look into the dark side of what governments do in the name of protecting the country sometimes. Its a fictional story, but one that I imagine is not all that far off the mark of things certain organizations within the government are capable of doing in the name of national security, especially with the hightened terrorist threats over the last few years.

In the Name of the King (A Dungeon Siege Tale): Shoot Ewe Boll. Shoot him now. Take a look at the Lord of the Ring series and see what can be done with a good director and some amazing story possibilities. This was the opposite of that. There was so much potential for a good movie.. for a good script. Apparently that was not the goal. The story, script, acting, directing and overall flow of the movie were ALL BAD. There were an assortment of ninja wannabees from Crouching Tiger, tree chicks sliding down on vines to fight like someone right out of Cirque du Soleil and the fairly hot but completely untalented Leelee Sobieski. The dialog was awkward and some of the normally talented people in this movie were reduced to bumbling idiots as they tried to work their way through over 2 hours of this nonsense.

The bright spots were the comical fighting scenes (which were supposed to be serious and all bad-ass) and the fact that Burt Reynolds plays the king. Ever since he got old and then showed up in the movie Striptease wearing nothing but shorts and cowboy boots and covered head to toe in vasoline talking about how he liked the way it squished between his toes, his career has been on the fast trac again! He was never a great actor, but what little acting ability he had was forgotten long ago. He seems confused most of the time, but it works with the rest of the script and direction of this movie.. so way to go Burt!

If you don't want to take my word for it, here are some exerpts from various reviews of the movie on netflix:

Like actors in an amateur stage play, the large, mostly all-star -- or has-been star -- cast of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale look, rather dazedly, to be playing dress-up.

This is the worst film I have ever seen. I rated it a 1 because there was no option for zero. With a cast like this, I expected better but when the writing is bad there is no hope. Everything about this film stinks: the acting, the directing, the writing, the editing. This film should be shown to all film students on how NOT to make a movie

Open letter to Uwe Boll: Mr. Boll, I have to hand it to you, how you got all those well known actors to star in this film is beyond me. I mean, this movie looks as though some college student pulled out his video camera and recorded people LARPing.

An impressively pathetic excuse for a movie. Don't be fooled by reviews claiming this is a great movie for a laugh. I've seen some good cheese and this is not it. I watched this movie for free and had to fast forward through most of it, it's that painful. I really hoped to find some redeemable qualities to justify my time but none presented themselves. I can't figure out who to fault for the terrible acting but must assume it's the directors. I don't even know what to say about Ray Liotta.


Now I could go on.. there are 987 reviews on netflix.. and most of them are like that. I am just floored that Ewe Boll still manages to get a budget in Hollywood and that he can still get people to act in his movies. He should be restricted to budgets the size of the Blair Witch Project and only be allowed actors I designate. Like Snaggletooth and the guy who plays Spiderman. He can keep Matthew Lillard as he is a tool. And Ray Liotta. He can also have the Wayans brothers. Oh, and Ben Afflek. Give him 60K and that group of actors and let him just go to town. They could spend 50K on a cast and crew drug and booze bender weekend, film the whole party with a camcorder and sell it to a studio as "Cloverfield 2: The Quickening". Can't be any worse.

I think anyone that made it through the whole movie should get a medal, and the opportunity to nutkick Ewe Boll through a goalpost. The Yetis will be there to signal that its good.