Before Sunset (chick flick): Set nine years after Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise”, the original characters get a second chance to get to know each other. Even though this is solidly in the chick flick arena, it’s not one of those fucking “Jennifer Aniston stands in a cold room and acts like a confused moron” movies. It lacked that Hollywood slickness and dialog flowed along so smoothly that it seemed less like watching a movie than being allowed access to a private conversation. B+

March of the Penguins (duckumentary): This is a documentary about just how far emperor penguins have to go to get a little tail. Honestly, it shouldn’t have been interesting at all, but it was relatively entertaining for an educational film about penguins. C+

Miller’s Crossing (gangster): A 1930’s gangster ends up caught between two rival gangs in a dispute over the fate of a bookie. It wasn’t amazingly original, but it ended up being a good double-cross gangster flick. B

Flavor of Love Season 1 (TV): After watching the entire second season of Flavor of Love, #1GF! and I had to queue up the first season from Netflix. Mating “The Bachelor” with “Jerry Springer”, this show was an absolute train wreck of television. If you’re a fan of Springer-style insanity, then I can tell you this was awesome. If you’re not, it will only prove that Western Civilization is in decline. A

The Puffy Chair (drama): A dude wants to take a trip across the country to pick up a recliner that was exactly like one that his Dad had years ago. He was to deliver the chair for his Dad’s birthday, but everything goes wrong. This movie just sucked. It did. Sure, it’s an indy flick, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good. I spent most of the time waiting for something to happen, and the other half aggravated that nothing did. D-

Nacho Libre (comedy): What was the last good movie that Jack Black was in? High Fidelity? I think so. I would also say that it was probably his only funny role. He’s a talented guy, and if you give him some good writing and let him work around the structure, Black is funny. If you take away that structure by pairing him up with the guy who directed “Napoleon Dynamite”, you get a big steaming pile of crap called Nacho Libre. D-

Mule Skinner Blues (documentary): Netflix failed me again. Their description began, “A quirky cast of characters makes this unusual documentary by Stephen Earnhart an interesting spectacle.” Sounds interesting doesn’t it? Give the greeter at the front door at Wal-mart a video camera for the day and I can guarantee a less self-absorbed and infinitely more interesting documentary. The thing went nowhere, said nothing, and ate my time. F

Firewall (thriller): Oh, it’s another movie where the kidnappers have some guy’s family held for ransom. This time, the guy is Harrison Ford, who is being targeted for being a security expert at a bank. Holy crap is this movie a bunch of bullshit. Ford rewrites firewall rules of a major bank in two seconds to thwart someone hacking in, uses a piece of a scanner taped to a screen to get account numbers downloaded into a friggin’ IPOD, and talks in a voice that is so falsely tough that it actually made us laugh. In no movie did I want the kidnappers to shoot the family more than this one. D-

Hard Candy (suspense): A young girl gets her revenge against a murderous sex offender. The movie was a little slow and had a graphic anatomical testicle dissection, but it wasn’t bad. C+

Orwell Rolls in His Grave (documentary): “This is making me paranoid, so it can not be good for you.” - #1GF! This was a documentary on how we have slowly slipped into an Orwellian-style new world order through the marriage between the American state and media. They will control all that you see and hear… B+

Waking Life (??): There wasn’t really a story to this one. It was more of an onslaught of philosophy with a cool visual. There were just so many ideas being thrown out that I was going over the movie in my head for for days afterward. One of my favorite quotes was, “The gap between Plato and the average man is greater than the gap between the average man and a chimp. If most people will never realize their potential, would you say that the most universal human attribute is fear or laziness?” I figured out the answer, but I’m a little too tired to explain and a little afraid that I might be oversimplifying. A

Oldboy (foreign): A Japanese dude is locked up for 15 years and has to figure out why. This movie had incest, the worst fight scene that I’ve ever seen, and some of the longest stretches of nothing really happening that I can remember in a film. Besides not seeing the twist coming and seeing a close-up of a tooth being pried out with a hammer, this movie was a waste of my time. I give it a big, fat (what the) F

Criminal Two small-time criminals get together to make a big score. I spent so much time trying to guess who was double-crossing who that it was over before I knew it. Although I admit that I didn’t see the conclusion coming, it might have been a little more convenient than logical. Still, I think it was a pretty fun film. A-

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