Much Ado; Nothing Done

Taking stock today of the movies and video games that I have that I have never completed/watched. So far here are the totals:

94 Movies
34 video games spanning 5 systems

I've lost the handle. Must regain composure. Gonna be busy for a while.

I-40 Dreams

While rocketing home at roughly 80 miles an hour somewhere in texas I had a musical dream where I was singing the following song.

"Why's my friend Ellen Page so fat?
Cause she's going to have a baby
She had some sex and now she's fat
She's gonna have a baby"

Birds take flight

I leave tomorrow morning for my trip out west. Lou and I are driving out in his Pathfinder. Lou is going to take lots of pictures of trains and deserts, and we'll meet up with Alan. We are all going to Laughlin to watch the first round of the NCAA's. After that we may head to Phoenix for some spring training. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to watching the tourney this year. It should have lots of good games. IU shit the bed and will get served up to UNC in the second round. I can't say it's not deserved after the Big 10 tourney debacle.

Lou picked up a new inverter for the car so we can run our laptops and whatnot when we are driving. That, coupled with the huge back seats that lay down into almost a full sized bed, we should be rollin in style. Hopefully the 24 hours there go by quickly. This will be like my 5th time traveling Highway 40.

I'm taking a bunch of movies to hopefully watch on the way there and back. But we'll see how that goes. It will be nice traveling with the laptop so I can maintain my high addiction to the internet. My first money league Fantasy Baseball draft is on Thursday. I have another one on Saturday.

I did win gas money down at Caeser's this past weekend, so that started the week off right. Spring break here I come!!!

A Player to be Named Later

This was a documentary that I found at the library that followed the Indianapolis Indians during the 2000 season. It focused on a group of five players that all had the potential to make it to the big leagues and their struggles to get there.

There is a huge difference for these players from playing Triple A ball and in the big leagues. The pay increase is a huge bonus. But the pressure that is relieved once they arrive to the majors is one of the biggest rewards they get.

There's also a bizarre feeling for managers and owners of minor league teams. While they want to have a good team and win, they are at the mercy of the major league teams they are affiliated with reguarding what players they get and for how long. You could be putting a nice run together and trying to win their championship and your best guys can be taken away from you at any time.

Alot of the managers and higher ups that were running the Indians at the time said repeatedly that their first priority was player development, and not win's and losses. But I can't see how you can be brought up all your life to play a game to win, and then hit a ceiling where you are instructed and expected to disregard everything you knew before and not care about winning and losing. No matter how good a player you are, if you are trying to become a better player I think it would be really difficult to stay positive if your team keeps losing.

I always assumed that if you were playing professional sports you were making alot of money. But the truth is that most of the players in the minors make about $40k a year in AAA ball. They play 144 games in 150 games. There is just no let up to their schedule. While $40k doesn't a pauper make, but it's far from well off. I was also surprised that most major league analysts predict only 6% of players that are drafted in baseball ever make it to the major leagues. Even smaller of that percentage actually maintain their careers in the majors.

The numbers are a huge obstacle to overcome if you are a young guy hoping to play pro ball one day.

It was a pretty entertaining doc that showed some of the ups and downs of pro ball. And I do loves me some good doc's.

42nd Street Forever vol. 1 and Hatchet

I get alot of my obscure Netflix suggestions through Aint It Cool News. They ran an article around the time that Grindhouse was coming out on DVD about this collection of trailers from the 70's and 80's called 42nd. Street Forever. I'm assuming that this is referring to some kind of old movie theater. At least that is what is on the cover.

What it really is about is 2 hours of trailers for all kinds of movies. They are loosely grouped together by genre and just go one after the other. There is sexploitation comedies, slasher horror, racial exploitation, euro sleeze, and old west genres that are explored here. Watching this many trailers back to back, about 30 in all, I started to feel a bit burnt out by the end, but damn were there some doozys packed in there.

What most impressed me were the tactics that the horror movies used to draw audiences in. There were many trailers that warned the viewer not to go to the movies alone, or that the filmmakers would pay a $2000 insurance policy to the family of anyone that dropped dead from fright during their movie. I would watch every single horror movie they featured on this collection. They appeal to my most base of entertainment values. And I think that the modern age of movies is missing the showmanship that these trailers put forth. I defiantly feel that I grew up in the wrong age when it comes to trash horror flicks.

There are two more of these collections to watch, but I'm going to space them out so I don't get burned out.

In the same vein as trash horror, I purchased a movie called Hatchet a while back when it was on sale. I had read some reviews of this on AICN and they said it was a modern slasher that featured every characteristic of the by gone cheesy horror that I loved. It didn't hurt that it also featured an all star cast of horror movies. Freddy, Candyman, one of the Jason's, and one of the guys from The Blair Witch were all in there.

We watched this with Adie, Ian, myself, and Katie. We were not disappointed as there were some extremely gruesome and over the top deaths within the first five minutes, some boobs following shortly after that, and then once the rest of the killing started up, it never stopped until the end. Everyone but Katie seemed to be enjoying the awesome gross fest that was unfolding on the screen. Repeatedly Ian and I were forced to High 5 after some particularly new and awesome way of killing people off. Katie was just confused and seemed a bit worried to be hanging out with such degenerates.

The thing that draws me to these kinds of scary movies is that while they are bloody and violent, they are usually so over the top with the violence and gore, it isn't believable. While I can enjoy movies like Hostel or Saw, it is much more cringe inducing as they strive to portray realistic and brutal deaths.

I rank Hatchet well up there on movies I have enjoyed this year. I'm still carrying a really hefty batting average for movies that I have seen in the theater this year. The bottom of the list would probably have to be Be Kind, Rewind or Step up 2:The Streets. And I really enjoyed both of those films. I'm really going to have to go out and see some shit films to bring the average down a bit. And for the record, I'm up to 25 movies for the year. A bit over the average I need to hit the magic 120. But I anticipate that number to grow mightily in the next few weeks.

Be Kind, Rewind & There Will Be Blood (2nd viewing)

I had been anticipating Be Kind, Rewind since I first heard of the premise about a year ago. I think that Michel Gondry has an amazing imagination and knack for creating interesting and new visual styles. While this is one of his more mainstream and commercial films, he still finds ways to sneak in his unique skew on the visual medium.

That said, his script here could defiantly have used some polish. While it was entertaining and funny in parts, it failed to stand up by on it's own. While it was an enjoyable movie that sent up some classic films well, it could have been so much more with some tweaking and polishing of the script.

Jack Black and Mos Def work well together in thier roles. I think that Mos Def is an under used talent.

Gondry has excellent talent and just needs to partner up with some good writers to get his ideas out.

I also forced Adie to go see TWBB. I wanted to see it again and used the fact that she didn't go with me the first time as an excuse. I still feel like this is one of the best pieces of film I have seen, and it just ran into bad luck running into No Country for Old Men when it came to all the awards. I really noticed the beautifully shot landscapes as well as some of the scathing writing. The first time through it I was just blown away by Daniel Day Lewis' performance, but upon seeing it a second time, I knew what was coming and could enjoy and listen more attentively. PTA has turned a corner I think in his film making and writing style. Unfortunately for him I highly doubt he'll be able to land Daniel Day Lewis for every movie he writes from here on out, but I could be wrong.

Murder Party

I can't remember where I heard about this movie. It may have been "recommended" to me by netflix and their crack formula or recommendations. It may have been from one of the few movie websites I frequent. Either way, my thanks go out to whoever or whatever steered me towards it.

I have seen plenty of "bad horror" movies in my life. A great deal of my social time with my friends from high school revolved around finding and watching new ones that we hadn't seen. We developed bets on how many boobs would be exposed during the movies, who would die and how, or other random bits of entertainment. I still talk about "House of the psychotic women" which was neither full of psycho's or women. In fact there was only one killing during that whole abomination, and it occurred off camera. But I digress.

Murder Party is set around Halloween. A group of psycho art students have decided to kidnap and kill a stranger. Who ever comes up with the "best" way to do so gets a grant from some rich art lover that they all know. Some lonely and sad individual finds the invitation to the murder party and decides to go sinc ehe has nothing better to do. Of course he doesn't know that he is going to be killed if he goes.

Once he arrives they tie him up and the rest of the movie unfolds basically in the confines of the warehouse they have holed up in. From here there lots of genuine laughs and scares. There are some new special effects that I had not seen utilized before. This movie achieved every criteria I have for an enjoyable "bad" horror movie.

Goofy ways people die. CHECK
Sight Gags. CHECK
Boobs. CHECK
Semi-realistic blood. CHECK
Intentional and Unintentional laughs. CHECK

The really cool part was after the movie I was watching some of the special features and they had a bit about how most of the actors and the director of Murder Party have been friends since elementary school and have been making their own home movies since then. It reminded me of "Pinky the Shadow Duster" that my friends and I all filmed one Thanksgiving break long ago.