Lately my friends and I have only gone to the ten o’clock shows and after it’s over I’m pretty tired, so I haven’t written written a review in a while. So I decided to write about my 3 latest DVD purchases. I originally posted this at my site, but thought you all might enjoy it too.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is the latest movie by the collaborative efforts of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. I was a huge fan of The Royal Tenenbaums, yet I had a hard time getting other people to see the utter humor in that movie. Life Aquatic is a bit more “in-your-face” humor than Tenenbaums, but still has that extremely smart, witty edge that I loved from the prior. Bill Murray puts on a spectacular performance and is making me wonder why this guy has not won an Oscar yet. Willem Dafoe had me rolling, his character is great. It reminded me of a little kid, in an adults body. This film is never slow, and the twist and turn it makes in expressing its point is always fun. The only disappointment was in Jeff Goldblum, in which I’m convinced that the only character he can play is Jeff Goldblum…not range…at all. I give it a 9.2. Oh, and did I mention it has a slew of David Bowie songs in Portugese?

National Treasure surprised me. I really thought this was going to be a bomb. I expected mediocre performances and a cookie-cutter Hollywood plot. And where the latter might be true, it kept my attention all the way to the end. I think the thrill of this movie lies in the puzzles. Each puzzle gave me a desire to figure out how to solve them. The history behind some of the statement, I’m told, are pretty accurate. So learning those tidbits of information was also nice. My favorite character by far was Riley Poole. When he said things like “Albuquerque!” or “Billions of books, all saying the same thing. Listen to Riley.”, I loved it. So I would have to say it exceeded my expectations. I’ll have to give it an 8.0. And somebody please tell me who taught Nicholas Cage how to run?

Finally, Flight of the Phoenix is the remake of an old movie now staring Dennis Quade, Miranda Otto, and Giovanni Ribisi. This was another low expectation film. And I have to say it was alright. Worth seeing, but not a spectacular film. Quaid does a good job and Otto puts on a convincing performance, but Giovanni Ribisi’s character acts so weird. It’s strange how this guy is portrayed. Ok, here are the things that I found distracting from the story. The director apparently was trying to make a more artistic film, but the story really didn’t allow for this. Some funny camera effects and runs were distracting. Also, Ribisi’s character. As I said, he acted weird, but the movie sets him up to be this power-hungry person that makes the viewer truly dislike this guy, but at the end he supposedly does somethings that makes it all better. Yet it’s not all better, they just want you to believe it is. I’ll have to give this a 6.5. Who still casts Tyrese, 2 Fast 2 Furious didn’t tell you anything?

The singular rating is an overall average of the three.

Growing up in west Texas and in a smaller town, I was instantly drawn to Friday Night Lights. Hereford is a smaller town in the heart of west Texas, supported almost totally by the cattle industry, and home of a consistently competitive high school football program. Through my high school career, I knew that football was king. The football team was known by all and anywhere they walked, they were given special treatment. I played basketball at a private school, so I became an objective observer on the ways of the team. Just as H. G. Bissinger watched all that happened in that ‘88 football season at Odessa-Permian, I understood what he saw. So I had pretty high expectations going into this movie; I wanted to be able to compare the situations to things I’ve seen first hand. I wasn’t disappointed.
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I may have said this before, but Movie 16 has brought back “Student Mondays.” Where students are allowed to get a ticket to a movie for $4.75, with proper ID. So every Monday, save last Monday, some friends and I go to Movie 16 to catch a flick. That night’s movie of choice was The Forgotten. I got to tell you, I was a bit under-whelmed by this film. I had some different expectations going into the movie than what the film actually produced. I’ll have to link to the trailer at the end of this, but keep in mind that the trailer does not accurately present the movie.
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Now I was planning on not posting anything, I had a really busy day at work and no time to really do anything this evening. Why, because I went to see a movie. This film was probably one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. The absolute best thing about it is that there is nothing “questionable”. It’s just strange people doing random things.
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