Archive for the reviews Category

The Movie Board: Worst Movies of 2007

Posted in Academy Awards, humor, Movie Board, movies, pop culture, reviews with tags , , on January 15, 2008 by Paxton

Movie Board

Allright, last week I gave you my 5 favorite movies of 2007. Now it’s time to unleash upon your delicate sensibilities the 5 worst movies I saw in 2007. Be warned, these movies are bad. Some of them may be bad enough that I’ll recommend watching them, but only for the bold. Do you have the stones to sit through 2 hours of crap? We’ll see.

Here they are in no particular order:

Kickin it Old Skool
Kicking it Old Skool– You’ll find that most movies on this list are here because they had a ton of potential, but completely squandered it. This movie has a funny premise; Jamie Kennedy is an elementary school break dancing king in the early ’80s. During a particularly dangerous move, he falls and is put in a coma for 20 years. When he wakes up he has to adjust to the fact that all his friends have grown up and break dancing is no longer cool. Classic fish-out-of-water premise using the ’80s and break dancing. I love it. Except the movie is terrible. Almost unwatchable. The best part of the movie is about 5-10 min in. Jamie Kennedy’s doctor is played by Alan Ruck (Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Ruck’s character in this movie is named Doctor Frye and he even mentions paying off his father’s Ferrari. Steph and I about died. Great stunt cameo, this movie is gonna rock, right? Wrong. DEAD wrong. STAY AWAY.

Shoot 'em Up
Shoot ’em Up– This looked so good in the trailer. Clive Owen is a mysterious “nanny” that gets caught up helping a woman and a baby escape hired killers. It looked like a cross between Pulp Fiction and Lucky Number Slevin; lots of action and funny dialogue. Well, this movie is weird. Monica Belucci plays a prostitute who lets grown men breast feed from her. Paul Giamatti plays a hitman with an overbearing wife. The dialogue is ridiculous. I had serious issues staying “in the movie” if you get what I’m saying. Just weird, with a few good action scenes. This is here mostly because it should have been much, MUCH better.

Knocked Up
Knocked Up– Oh Seth Rogan, you magnificent bastard. What happened here? The cast for this movie is pretty much part and parcel from the very funny TV show Underclassmen (if you remember the 1 season it ran back in the early ’90s). Seth Rogan is on a roll lately and the premise seemed amusing. However, Seth and his friends in this movie are lame. Seth’s character is even somewhat of an A-hole. Katherine Heigl’s character is a little witchy (with a ‘b’). I could not laugh at this movie because the whole thing is so tragically sad. Paul Rudd saved the 5 minutes of the movie he appeared in. Other than that, I say go see Superbad instead. I really wanted to like this one, too.

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The Movie Board: My Favorite Movies of 2007

Posted in Academy Awards, Movie Board, movies, pop culture, reviews with tags , , , on January 10, 2008 by Paxton

Movie Board

Well, 2007 is over and the Oscar nominees are being decided as we speak (the 2008 Oscars are supposed to air on February 24). When the nominees are finally announced, I’ll be sure to let you know and I might even give a little review of how the Oscar committee did like I did for last year’s Oscars nominations. Did I get to see everything I wanted to see this year? No. Of course not. My wife and I love movies and there are several movies we missed this year. However, we did see a lot of movies in 2007.

In Dec 2006, I decided to keep track of all the movies released in 2007 that I got to see. Whether it was in the theater or on DVD. I started this because I would read all of these “Best Movies of the Year” articles and wanted to write my own. However, by the end of the year, I’d forgotten all the movies I’d seen except for a select few. So, I decided to keep a running record. I set up a white board in my cubicle and wrote down every movie I saw throughout the year. I called it “The Movie Board”. People would come over and check it out to see if I’d add any new ones over the weekend. It was fairly popular. Well, now that the year is over, let’s take a look at the final tally. Remember, these are only the movies released in the 2007 calendar year. My wife and I saw many more movies, these are just movies released within the current year.

2007 Movie Board

There it is above, The Movie Board (click the picture for a bigger view). According to its all knowing whiteness, I saw 57 movies last year that were released in 2007. Well, the board actually says 58, but I mistakenly put Knocked Up twice. And, well, crap, now that I look at it, the first two movies, Blood Diamond and The Good Sheperd, were released in December 2006, so that reduces the list to 55. That’s about 4.58 movies a month. Just over 1 a week. Not bad. That doesn’t include the older movies Steph and I rented and/or own that we watched.

So now it’s time to peruse this list and see what my top 5 favorite movies are for 2007. Notice I’m not saying these are the 5 best movies of 2007. “Best” is subjective. I’m not telling you one movie is better than another for whatever reason. Sure, I could wax philosophic about my favorite movie saying it’s the most important movie of the year. I could talk about how deep and profound the script is, how it tackles many issues on several different levels. I could discuss how lush and royal the colors and scenery are. I may even delve into the hearty tone, smart characterization and sweeping scope using flowery words that mean little but sound like I know what I’m talking about. The truth, I really have no idea what I’m talking about. You know it and I know it. The following five movies are the ones that entertained me the most. Period. I’m letting you know so that you may enjoy them too. Shall we begin?

Here they are in no particular order:

3:10 to Yuma
3:10 to Yuma– What a really good movie. Russell Crowe is a captured outlaw and Christian Bale is a poor rancher who is somewhat railroaded into helping escort Crowe’s character to the departing prison train of the title. Wonderful performances by Crowe and Bale as well as strong appearances by Peter Fonda and Ben Foster. Check this one out, seriously.

Stardust
Stardust– I wanted to see this in the theater because it looked fun, but I was surprised at how good overall it was. It’s a wild and crazy fantasy movie with many characters and a plot that is really hard to describe. I’ll try: A guy is in love with a girl who doesn’t love him. He promises to fetch her a fallen star if she would love him back. He goes to find the fallen star and his adventures in trying to get the star back to the girl is the main adventure. Such fun adventures with a lot of magic, witches, pirates, sword fights and danger. I highly recommend this. How old is Michelle Pfeiffer, by the way? She is still unbelievably beautiful in this movie (quick trip to IMDB tells me she’s 50 years old…WOW). See it.

Bourne Ultimatum
Bourne Ultimatum– This end to the first trilogy (hopefully there will be more) is a fitting one. Bourne returns to put a stop to the government’s dogged pursuit of him and what he knows. Damon was born (pun intended) to play this role. Exotic locales, unbelievable action sequences and smart dialogue make this one as good as the first Bourne movie.

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Pomegranate 7-Up in my BELLY!!!

Posted in reviews, soda with tags , , on November 27, 2007 by Paxton

Sodapalooza

BOO-YA!!!!!!! I found it.

Pomegranate 7-up

It finally showed up at my local supermarket. To say I was as excited as a 9 year old girl about her new Hanna Montana notebook would be an understatement.

It’s good. Try it, you will not be disappointed. And I love the Christmas-y colors and designs on the label.

SWEEEEEEEET!

AWESOME-tober-fest 2007: Some of my favorite scary books

Posted in books, Halloween, holiday, reviews with tags , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2007 by Paxton

Awesometoberfest banner

Let the Halloween season begin! I was going through some of my books at home deciding what I should keep, what needs to be thrown out, what needs to be taken to the local used book store or what needs to be put up on my Book Shelf at PaperbackSwap.com (great site, check it out). I’m a pack rat. Also, my wife and I love to read, so the paperback graveyard at our house is out of control. So, I was going through some of these books for the above reasons and found many “scary” books that I loved, both recently and when I was a kid. Several of these books seriously freaked me out. The type of book that has you staying up at night staring at the drapes wondering if a guy with a knife is just watching…and waiting. Since it’s Halloween, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few of these. Maybe you’ve read a few of them.

Scary Stories to Tell in the DarkScary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz; illustrations by Stephen Gammell. This was the first book in a series of three. The two sequels were More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. I read these in elementary school (the first book was released in 1981) and they seriously messed up my sleeping patterns. It wasn’t just the stories that were included in these books, Gammell’s illustrations lean intensely towards the macabre. The combination of the chilling stories and the illustrations helps to build the effect in your mind and it winds up decidedly stopping your ability to sleep for the next few days. Click on the book image to see a bigger picture. Look what they chose to put on the cover of the first book. How insanely creepy is THAT?! That’s the kind of mind job that awaits. Each of these stories is collected from American Folklore and have been passed down, in one form or another for generations. Because of this, you’ll get familiar stories like The Hook and The Babysitter, but there are other stories I’ve never heard of. The one that has always stuck in my mind is called Room for One More. BONE CHILLING. At least, it was to me as a kid. If you haven’t read these books, check them out at your library or you can get the collected set of all three books here.

This series of books has been one of the top ten most challenged books by the American Library Association for inclusion on school library shelves. The ALA feels it is too violent, insensitive and inappropriate for its target age group.

13 Alabama Ghosts13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey by Kathryn Tucker Windham. I was born in Birmingham, AL. I went to elementary, junior and high school in Birmingham. Kathryn Tucker Windham’s Southern ghost story series staring the titular spook, Jeffery, was extremely popular. Jeffrey supposedly haunted Windham’s Selma home and living with him inspired her to write her ghostly series. There were like 12 books in the series and it included other states like Mississippi and Tennessee. Each book told of a “famous” Southern ghost story in a different town of the state. Windham really tried to incorporate Southern lifestyles into the stories. She focused a lot on the characters and the times in which they lived, almost as much as the ghost the story was about. The stories were cool because they happened in places I’d heard of, but they were also pretty creepy. They all seemed to take place in old abandoned mansions or hotels. The most famous story in the book is about the Pickens County Courthouse in Carrollton, AL. This courthouse is famous for the ghostly image that is seemingly burned into one of its attic windows. Very cool book that is very respectful of Southern life and culture but adds the eerie element of long-ago ghost stories.

Monkeys PawThe Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs. Published in England in 1902, this short horror story is a literary classic. It has been retold numerous times in other books, comics, tv shows, movies, etc. The Simpsons even did a parody of it in one of their Treehouse of Horror episodes. In the story, the monkey’s paw is a magical talisman that grants wishes, but the wishes come at an enormous price. Very, very cool story, yet it’s extremely horrifying. If you want to read the short story you can read it in full on this website.

Monkeys PawThe Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Published by the New Yorker in 1948, it’s a short story that has come to be considered an American classic. I read this in high school and was fascinated by it. For the first two-thirds of the story I was baffled and a little bored about seemingly normal events. It’s the final third of the story that grabs and horrifies you. I liked it so much that for an eleventh grade Honors English project I chose to write a short sequel that I called The Last Lottery. It received very high marks from my teacher and she had me read the story to the class. I, unfortunately, do not have a copy of that story, otherwise I would put it up here. If you want to read The Lottery, you can read the text in full here. I’ll see if I can scrounge up the one copy of The Last Lottery that is in existence.

Whoever Fights MonstersWhoever Fights Monsters by Robert Ressler. True crime account by one of the first and leading criminal profilers. Ressler spoke at Auburn when I was in college and I was fascinated by the killers he has profiled. John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan and many others. He even describes some of the cases surrounding these killers. A truly chilling account of real life crime and how the serial killer thinks.

The Last VictimThe Last Victim by Jason Moss. Another true crime novel. This is even scarier. Teenager Jason Moss starts writing letters to famous serial killers. He tries to become their ideal victim from within his letters to see what makes them tick. He gets too close and actually visits John Wayne Gacy in prison. Absolutely terrifying. A look at how these real life killers think, but from the victim’s point of view.

Monkeys PawSkeleton Crew, Night Shift, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Everything’s Eventual and Four Past Midnight by Stephen King. Stephen King has a lot of scary stories, but his best stuff are his short stories. Not all of them are horror. Some are funny and some are random and weird, but some are chilling. And since the story is shorter, the eeriness seems to be even higher because the text is so concentrated. There are several stories in each of these 5 short story collections that were damaging to my calm. A few of my favorites:

“The Monkey” about a toy monkey that kills every time it beats its cymbals.

“Children of the Corn” about a small town inhabited only by children under 19.

“The Moving Finger” about a regular guy haunted by the appearance of a finger trying to claw its way out of his bathroom sink drain (sounds weird, but it’s almost maddening to think about when you read the story).

Autopsy Room 4 about a man waking up in a medical lab realizing that a doctor is about to perform an autopsy on his body, and he can’t move or speak to stop it.

There are others in the 5 King books that are haunting and chilling and wonderful. I love these collections more than King’s full novels. If you haven’t, and you love Stephen King, read them, please.

Well, those are some of my favorite scary books. What are some of yours?

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Octoberfest: My RateBeer.com ratings

Posted in beer, humor, ratebeer.com, reviews with tags , , on October 2, 2007 by Paxton

Well, it’s now October. Hard to believe. We are in the thrust of the college and pro football seasons and Halloween is right around the corner. Time flies when you are getting worked like a dog. The below article was written several weeks ago but I thought it would work better as the opening article for the month of October seeing as how it’s about beer. I have mentioned RateBeer.com before, but I thought it would be fun to delve a little deeper into it. Enjoy.

I joined RateBeer.com in 2005 with my friend Steve. We started rating our favorite beers and noticed that our tastes ran exactly opposite those of the most popular raters on the site. We like the light, American pale lager, whereas “beer snobs” tend to prefer the thick, dark sludge-like consistency of the European beers. So Steve and I started to write a bunch of “tongue in cheek” reviews blasting beer snob’s favorite beers and glowing reviews of the American lagers. It was all done in fun and even if no one else thought it was funny, he and I did.

Well, early in this blog’s life, I wrote about an incident I had with a beer snob at RateBeer.com back in 2005. He was an ass, we exchanged some emails, I got pissed and wrote a blog article about it. It was dumb, but it kinda got me off the site. Well, I went back recently to read some of my old beer reviews and I thought they were funny. These reviews were written before I had a blog, but it showed me I enjoyed writing and having fun with product reviews. I thought I would share a few of my reviews from that site so you can see what I was talking about.

RateBeer Profile

Here you can see the main account page at RateBeer.com. My reviews are in the right hand grey column. My personal details are in the left hand yellow column. I have 39 reviews posted as of today. My last one was dated in October 2005. On your profile, RateBeer has you put a Beer Philosophy. Here’s what I wrote:

I prefer the lighter, American macro-brews. I like my women dark, not my beer.

That about sums it up, I think. RateBeer.com is a fun site to use, but some of the members can be a little snotty. They were probably snotty because the hardcore members were just irritated that I wasn’t taking it as seriously as they were. Regardless, the site is interesting to look through and read reviews, so check it out if you get a chance.

Now let’s take a look at some of my reviews. Here are several of my favorite beer reviews I wrote on RateBeer.com.

Bud Light – “My favorite beer and what I compare all other beers to. Crisp, clean American taste. After a few bottles I feel like running for President and invading a small totalitarian government!”

Bud Ice Light – “I didn’t think it was possible, but Bud made a beer lighter than Bud Light. This is like drinking out of the faucet. Really good for bar-b-ques. Why nurse your bottles of beer when you can drink a case of this and still be able to pilot the red-eye from New York to LA the next morning?”

Keystone Light – “This would normally go directly towards my beer interests, but it’s more uninteresting than it is good. Cheap, which I like, but boring, which I don’t.”

Milwaukee’s Best – “Ahh, the Blue Can of Death (BCoD). This is only worth a try if you are short on cash since a case of this crap only costs about 20 cents. And that’s for a reason. I can brew better beer in a used prison toilet.”

Samuel Adams Boston Ale – “I’m actually embarrassed this is an American beer. WTF?! It tastes like someone took a spoiled keg of beer and puked in it. I wouldn’t clean my toilet with this crap.”

Samuel Adams Boston Lager – “Another catastrophic failure for the Boston Beer Company. Heavy ass lager that tastes like I licked the bottom of an oak barrel. The only reason this gets a 3 in Flavor is because I tried it in Colonial Williamsburg on draft and managed to choke it down without throwing up bile the rest of the night.”

Sapporo Classic – “[A very] nice, Japanese beer. Thick with a heavy aftertaste, but goes down nice with a plate of fried rice and a cup of sake. Drop your cup of sake into a glass of this beer to create a Sake Bomber. Not responsible for you getting your drunk ass kicked out of the restaurant. ”

Amstel Light – “Not surprised this is brewed by Heineken. Bittersweet taste, not in a good way. Like Heineken, if I want to feel pretentious and snobby, I’ll stand in a bar holding a bottle of this, otherwise I ask for Bud Light. Is there an Amstel regular?”

Natural Light – “Great if you are on a budget and enjoy drinking stale tap water. One of my friend’s favorites, I’m thinking of dis-owning him.”

Natural Ice – “For those of you who thought regular Natural Lite was too bold and hopsy, here’s your beer. Holy crap, I get more of a taste from swallowing my own spit. It will get ya drunk, but so will swigging Nyquil.”

Foster’s – “Australian for ASS.”

Olde English 800 – “”8-Ball” I bought this beer because of the NWA song enumerating the virtues of drinking it. I was slightly disappointed. No ghetto hoes were butt-dancing in my grill after cracking open this malt liquor. I’d rather cap myself gansta-style than drink another bottle.”

King Cobra – “I really wish I could rate the taste of this beer. I bought a 32oz bottle of it in college and it was unceremoniously stolen by one of my friends. He left only a note saying he owes me one Nattie Light. Needless to say, I killed this friend.”

When I wrote these 2 years I ago, I thought they were funny, and I still think so. Most of them were really “tongue in cheek”, like I said. If I bashed one of your favorite beers, I really am sorry, but I hated it.

But what do I know, I’m a wine snob. 😉

Hey, how about an update? I’ll write a few new reviews right this very moment. Let’s go.

Monty Python’s Holy Grail Ale – “What is your name? Pax.
What is your quest? To taste Monty Python’s Holy Ale.
What did you think? It’s like being simultaneously punched in the face and kicked in the groin. It was so bitter I felt like I drank a box of alum like I was in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Yes, Monty, you made a horrible beer, the joke is on me. Why dost thou forsake us?”

Miller Chill – “Is this what Miller thinks Mexican beer tastes like? Have they ever even BEEN to Mexico…..and I don’t mean the one at Disney Epcot. This beer tastes like lime Kool-Aid mixed with dirty water. While probably close to the taste of real Mexican drinking water, it tastes nothing like Mexican beer.”

LaBatt Blue – “Our Canadian friends have made a beer. That’s pretty much all I can say. This beer is like Chinese food. It’s good, but I forgot I drank it 5 min after I was finished. It’s the equivalent of a beer Etch-A-Sketch. Shake and erase…….then repeat. Although you got to love the commercials with the guy in the bear suit. Awesome.

That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the reviews. Till next time……BE COOL, MY BABIES!!!

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