bayou_hannibal

For being arguably the most popular hobby since the invention of the television, there are scant few comprehensive documentaries about video games and their rich, immense history. You could easily identify 20 hours of solid historical content for this medium and still leave another 20 hours on the cutting room floor. That is why it is so disappointing that this series spends so much of its precious time on inane crap that you won't care about watching and clear "woke" diversity stuff. Between old clips of 1980s Nintendo gaming tournaments and a major portion of the episode being devoted to a gay video game that absolutely nobody has heard of, this series wastes way too much time on nonsense.

Rather than tell you what is in the series, let me give you a tiny sampling of what is not in it

Every other Atari 2600 era console besides the Atari 2600 Commodore (C64, Amiga) The Dreamcast Fallout The Playstation God games (e.g. Populous, Sim City) Bethesda's RPGs Early experiments with virtual reality Starcraft Age of Empires Thief, MGS, and the rise of stealth The rise of MMORGs like Everquest

Also, anything after the year 2000, which includes: Grand Theft Auto III and the rise of the open world game, The Nintendo Wii, the entry of Microsoft into the console market, the death and rebirth of PC gaming, the rise of user-made content, the explosion in popularity of E3 and its decline, Halo, the list goes on.

What is in here is still surprisingly fluffy and uninteresting compared to some of the other documentaries out there. If you want, for instance, to see an excellent documentary on the early arcade and Atari 2600 era, I highly recommend World 1-1, a great film produced by a couple of amateurs on a shoestring budget that came from crowdfunding.

I see that this show has gotten tons of great reviews. I wonder how many of the 9s and 10s were written by people who didn't watch all 8 episodes. If I had reviewed this show after the first two episodes, then I would have given it a 9 or a 10. This show is largely a murder mystery, and lots of mysteries start off as 9s and 10s. That is because it isn't that hard to start a great mystery. It is easy for a writer to dump a bunch of strange clues on the viewer to create the mystery. Finishing it is another thing altogether, and this show starts on a massive downhill slide about halfway through the season before it hits bottom in the very unsatisfying last couple of episodes. At the end, it leaves all kinds of plot holes an unfinished story threads, not because it is leaving them for a future season, but because there was never any substance or depth in the story to begin with. The incredible suspense that the story creates in the first few episodes is a cruel hoax. The story eventually turns into a crushingly clichéd conspiracy tale that never explains in any detail who exactly is in on it, why, and what exactly their motivations are. This problem seems to be getting more and more common nowadays – poor storytelling and plot holes, and then the unsatisfied viewer (like myself) being told that story isn't important because "It's about the characters".

I might be willing to buy into the idea that this is a "character study", but the show doesn't succeed in that area either. True Detective spans 17 years, and there is little change or character development that takes place. It also never gives you any background for how they got to be such cold-hearted jerks in the first place. At one point, the two main characters meet, not having seen each other in years. I was really hoping that it would be an opportunity for them to show how much they had grown up, changed, and improved as human beings, but nope. Other than their appearance, they are the same people that they were at the show's start. For all of the insanity that these two guys have experienced, it hardly seems to have affected them much. The only evidence of an arc for one of the characters occurs in the final five minutes of the last episode. The show occasionally sprinkles in some themes like God, timelessness, and life after death, but it does absolutely nothing with them until that final scene. The occasional sprinkling in of these themes feels more like a teaser to make the story look smarter than it is.

Another big problem with the "character" portion of this show is that a big chunk of it involves Woody Harrelson's crappy marriage. His wife is a crabby bitch (and a poorly acted one at that) and he is unfaithful. Every scene between the two of them basically sucks, and there wasn't a single family-related scene that I think added value to the series.

Make no mistake though, Woody Harrelson (who I have thought for a long time is underrated and under-appreciated) and Matthew McConaughey provide a couple of incredible acting performances. Especially McDonaughey, who is virtually unrecognizable here. I have never seen him in a role like this -- I have only seen him play cheery romantic cowboy types. In this series (which alternates between flashbacks and present day), he is made more unhandsome than I thought was possible. Woody Harrelson is also excellent in this series, although his character horribly annoying and unsympathetic. I still think that each of these characters is good in a vacuum, but unfortunately, they don't work as a "buddy cop" pair. The "buddy cop" thing needs contrasts and opposites – see Benson and Stabler (Law and Order: SVU) or Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. In True Detective, they occasionally get it right, but more often than not, it's a contest between the two of them to see who can be more of a horrible human being. They are both detestable, with the only difference being that McConaughey is straightforward and honest about who he is.

The other highly redeeming quality of this show is its production values – more specifically, the music. The music is highly unsettling and it contributes heavily to the uneasy atmosphere that pervades the entire series. I just wish that the music had been put into a great horror movie instead of having been wasted on the mediocre story in this series. The cinematography is also really good, and the way that almost every scene has an oil refinery in the background is a peculiar (but accurate) twist on the Louisiana visuals. That stuff falls into the "style" category though, and unfortunately, there is not enough substance here. I'm giving this series a 7 because despite its low points and its disappointing resolution though, because it kept me entertained. It is worth watching just to see Matthew McConaughey's occasional dark brooding soliloquys and the puzzled reactions of those around him. It is worth watching to see Woody Harrelson in action and to see the occasional brilliant exchange of dialog between the two actors. I don't agree with the 9s and 10s for this show, but I can understand why some people love it as much as they do. True Detective has redeeming qualities, but if you ask me, it comes up too short in the story department to be one of the all time greats.

It seems like everyone loves the early Sean Connery Bond films, and it seems as if most people at least like one or two of the Daniel Craig films. I can't, however, find many people who like either of the Timothy Dalton films. It's a shame, really, because The Living Daylights, to me, is an underrated gem. It is easily my favorite Bond film since the Sean Connery era, and in some ways, it is my favorite.

Why is The Living Daylights so good? The number one reason is action. Out of the top ten action scenes in the Bond series, at least two of them are in this movie. The first is a spectacular car chase with the best Bond car ever, a beautiful sports car upgraded with missiles, skis, spikes for ice, and lasers. ("I've had a few option extras installed" – one of my favorite Bond lines). Every other car in the Bond movies, save the one in Goldfinger, is dull compared to this one. The other great action scene comes near the end. I won't spoil it for you, but it is one of the wildest and most thrilling death struggles I have ever seen. When I first saw this film in the theater, there was a mixture of gasps and excited laughter from the audience at the craziness of it. This was, in some ways, a golden age of action scenes in movies. It was when budgets were big enough to do cool stuff, CGI was still ten years off, and directors weren't too lazy to choreograph great action scenes. This movie is an example of how great action can be.

The second reason this movie is so good? Gadgets. I already mentioned the car, but Dalton's bond in this movie had a couple of other nice ones as well. I'm always disappointed when a Bond movie doesn't have at least one or two gadgets. They are part of what makes the movies so cool, and what makes every heterosexual male fantasize about being James Bond. Who wouldn't want to have all kinds of little futuristic, secret toys in their pockets?

I have never understood why Timothy Dalton didn't catch on with audiences. So he wasn't quite as macho and charming as Sean Connery – big deal. Compared to Roger Moore the Clown, he was fantastic. He was serious, tough, and dark enough, but he still retained a sense of humor, and so did the movie. Dalton had great range – imagine Bruce Willis, if Bruce Willis was a classically trained British actor. During the action scenes, he retains a sense of calm and confidence, without cracking a dumb joke every five seconds (but maybe the occasional smirk). That is why the crazy action scenes work so well. I found Timothy Dalton to be way more enjoyable than Pierce Brosnan, and I like him better than Daniel Craig too.

This movie had some pretty decent villains, although the plot was unnecessarily convoluted. The big henchman, who Michael Fassbender reminds me a lot of, is one of my favorite Bond henchmen of all time. He isn't just a big brute or a bodyguard. He is also an assassin, with capabilities about on par with Bond. If there is a true weakness in this movie, it is that the Bond girl is pretty weak. Granted, most Bond girls are pretty weak, but this one (other than being very easy on the yes) is kind of a nuisance. She does some retarded stuff sometimes, and doesn't do much besides shout stuff like "look out" with her eyes wide open.

I recently saw Skyfall, and I was thoroughly disappointed by it. Bond movies have fallen so far from what made them so enjoyable – James Bond uses gadgets, kicks ass, foils the villain, and gets the girl. He doesn't need to be a clown, and he doesn't' need to be a dark, brooding hero either. Instead of constantly reinventing this formula, I wish that somebody would make another Bond movie like this one.

Up until now, I thought that Moonraker was the worst Bond movie ever made. Skyfall might be worse. It's bad. Really really bad. I realize that taste is purely a matter of opinion, but I am simply aghast at the great reviews that this stinking turd received. I can't fathom any reasonable explanation for this, other than that massive amounts of payola were involved. There is absolutely no way that somebody with a modicum of intelligence and movie-going experience could watch this movie and come away from it thinking that it is some kind of masterpiece. My forehead is still pink from all of the facepalming I had to do during this idiotic movie.

Where to begin, where to begin? Skyfall has a script so bad, that it might as well have been scribbled out on a napkin by a bunch of drunk college students. Plot holes abound, and major events go unexplained. I'm supposed to believe that a villain has an entire island to himself because he convinced some people that there was a chemical leak? Nobody above the age of six could possibly be stupid enough to swallow that. This is the kind of moronic garbage that makes the Star Wars prequels look ingenious, by comparison. Almost every significant event is ripped off from another movie from the past two decades, but put to disastrous effect here. Specifically, Skyfall completely rips off The Dark Knight repeatedly. Let's count the ways…

1. The protagonist is a dark, brooding, psychologically disturbed hero. Bond has a drinking problem. Bond fails his psych evaluation because of unresolved childhood trauma. Yes, folks, he is Bruce Wayne now.

2. The villain is a homegrown terrorist with Godlike omniscience, who has the ability to predict exactly where somebody will be standing years in advance.

3. The villain plans his own capture as part of an ingenious scheme, which could not possibly be accomplished without the Godlike omniscience in point #1.

4. The villain and his henchmen kill a bunch of people by impersonating cops.

5. The villain has a soliloquy with the protagonist, where he tries to explain that the two of them are actually a lot alike.

6. Every single person in the movie besides the villain is a complete retard. The villain is the greatest terrorist in the history of the world, but he is guarded by only two guys before he escapes into a subway hatch. Then, he rushes to a government building with about as much security as a Burger King and kills about a dozen people before escaping cleanly.

7. The villain has unlimited resources and tons of henchmen. At the end of the movie, he tracks down Bond and M with his own private army, while Bond and M defend themselves with booby traps and old hunting rifles.

8. The villain also looks ridiculous. This worked in the Dark Knight, because he's The Joke. Javier Bardem, on the other hand, has the world's most ridiculous looking blond hair dye job, which provides lots of unintentional comedy.

There's also the undercover agent list being stolen (ripped off from Mission Impossible 1). Idiotic scene after idiotic scene. IMDb, unfortunately, does not allow me to write a review long enough to list everything that is wrong with this movie. Suffice it to say, it is easily one of the most overrated movies of all time. This, unfortunately, seems to be the dominant trend in movies nowadays. Make a "gritty", "dark", "realistic" movie with a brooding hero, and everyone praises it as a masterpiece, regardless of whether the script could have been written by a five year old. This movie gets two stars instead of 1 because it has one or two really good, well choreographed action scenes. Other than that, it is a complete catastrophe.

Attack of the Clone is the low point of the disastrous prequel trilogy. The action is bad. The plot is bad, and the contrived romance between Padme and Anakin is so awful that it essentially ruins the story of the prequel trilogy (since it rests so heavily upon the romance between those two). It has a little bit of value in the first viewing, largely because you expect its nonsensical plot to lead somewhere. Instead, however, it remains a mess that does almost nothing to advance the trilogy's story.

The biggest failure with Attack of the Clones is that it leaves so much unfinished that the third movie had to cover every bit of ground that was supposed to be covered in three separate movies. The prequel trilogy fails its main task – to tell a convincing story about how the once noble Anakin Skywalker was seduced by the dark side to become one of the most heinous movie villains of all time. It fails miserably, and the biggest culprit is this lousy second movie. Instead of progressing this difficult story, Lucas spent this entry of the trilogy keeping computer animators employed and boring the audience.

The plot of Attack of the Clones is broken. It starts off with a mystery – who is trying to assassinate Senator Amidala? The answer, which you are given about 3/4 of the way through the movie, is disappointing and nonsensical. The entire assassination plot makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, assassinating Padme would actually hurt the cause of the bad guys. This part of the plot is a disaster of epic proportions.

The original trilogy made Obi-wan and Anakin out to be best of friends. It is this friendship that made Anakin's betrayal that much harder to take. In addition, the original trilogy implied that it was partially Obi-wan's fault, because he arrogantly tried to train Anakin himself. Thus, Obi-wan ended up as a somewhat tragic figure who achieved redemption through Luke. Does Attack of the Clones do a good job of telling this back story? No, it does not. Absolute, pure 100%, unadulterated fail. Anakin and Obi-wan never come across as friends. What little screen time they share is mostly spent bickering. The element of tragedy that comes from one friend betraying another is completely ruined. In addition, Anakin is simply going through typical Jedi training. The guilt that Obi-wan feels over Anakin turning into Darth Vader is ruined too.

The Phantom Menace had some pretty bad writing and plot holes, but Attack of the Clones is worse in every way except for the de-emphasis of Jar Jar. Lucas, though he never admitted it publicly, clearly realized his mistake with Jar Jar after the first movie, and made him a very minor character in this movie. Other than that though, this movie is a step backward in every way except for the CGI budget.

Especially weak is the action in this movie. Attack of the Clones doesn't even provide shallow entertainment. The first action scene is an overly long, pointless, boring chase where Anakin and Obi-wan chase a bounty hunter across a crowded CGI sky. The Phantom Menace had CGI, but it generally supported the story. The lame Coruscant chase scene is where the trilogy crosses the line and the story starts supporting the CGI. Later, there is one good scene where Obi-wan faces off against a bounty hunter. Then, at the end, there is a massive CGI lightsaber orgy involving a hundred jedi and a few hundred robots. It is incomprehensible and unexciting. There are so many lightsabers, so many laser blasts, and so many enemies on screen that there is no way to follow the scene. That scene is followed by another gratuitous CGI battle between two large armies. Like the lame lightsaber fight, it is full of flashing lights and explosions that mean nothing to viewer, who can barely tell the good guys from the bad. *Yawn* There is a poorly choreographed lightsaber fight at the end between two Jedi and a dark side dude too. It features lots of close-ups and quick edits in an attempt to hide the fact that the elderly actor in the scene has no business being in an action movie.

Is there anything that works in this movie? There are a few parts that aren't horrible, I guess. As I mentioned above, the battle between Obi-wan and the bounty hunter is pretty exciting. Christopher Lee's Count Dooku character is a bright spot too. He has one great scene, in particular, where he tries to tempt Obi-wan to join him by revealing that the evil emperor is behind everything. Keeping Count Dooku's loyalties a mystery to the viewer until the end is the lone successful accomplishment of this movie.

Attack of the Clones could have been okay if the romance between Padme and Anakin had been even slightly convincing. It isn't. It is terrible. It is apparent to the viewer throughout the movie that the romance is entirely contrived for the sake of continuity with the original trilogy. After all, somebody has to have Anakin's babies, right? The two characters have no chemistry. When they finally declare their love for each other, it is one of those moments where if you are watching the movie with somebody else, you feel embarrassed, as if that person will think less of you for watching this schlock. The lousy romance affects the next movie too, because Anakin's turning to the dark side depends on it. If the romance isn't convincing, then neither is Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader.

It is mind-boggling that a movie with a script this bad could be put into production. The CGI budget could have been cut in half, and a tenth of that money could have been used to hire a decent writer. It would have made for a much better film. Attack of the Clones is horrible.

Out of the three prequel movies, Star Wars: Episode 1 has taken the most heat over the years from Star Wars fans, and is widely perceived as being the worst of them. I disagree pretty heavily with this sentiment though. I believe that Episode I was perceived that way because, at the time of its release, the expectations were much higher. It is, actually, a decent movie, because it retains more elements of the Star Wars formula than the two movies that followed it. It has some strong points which made it somewhat popular when it came out, and it has, by far, the best action scenes of the prequel trilogy.

Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat. There is absolutely no defending the Jar Jar Binks character. None. He is probably the worst character in the history of film, and a product of the grossest miscalculation ever made in the medium. He is a terrible annoyance, and every single scene where he has dialog is a failure. Jar Jar is one of the many examples in this trilogy of how Lucas desperately needed some devil's advocates to impose some restraint, instead of toadies who refused to question his godawful decisions. Sadder though, Jar Jar is also an example of something that could have gone right in the film. Star Wars: Episode I is a story about two completely different races of beings finding common ground to fight a common foe. Jar Jar, at some level, should have been an important story link. Instead, he is the product of George Lucas's obsession with slapstick humor that nobody above the age of four could possibly enjoy.

This is an important point that I am trying to make. Lucas is almost universally criticized by Star Wars fans as being a sell-out with this trilogy. Every bad decision is chalked up to a desire to sell toys. However, when I listen to the commentary on the DVDs, I get a sense that this is not the case. I get the impression that George Lucas wanted to tell a great story with some consistent themes. The problem is that Lucas seems to have the mentality of a five year old when it comes to telling those stories. A couple of these themes are: 1. Symbiosis – beings in nature working together for a common good 2. A technologically inferior army defeating a technologically superior foe The concept of the Gungans and the Naboo banding together to fight the droid army fits both of those themes. It could have worked, but Lucas bungled it by making Jar Jar a retarded version of Bugs Bunny who talks like a slave.

Let's talk about what does work in this film. The best part about it is that it has a few terrific action scenes. The action scenes in the Phantom Menace are vastly superior to the action scenes in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith for two reasons:

1. The move along the story. There is a clear purpose and objective to each one of them. The other two movies of the trilogy had pointless, boring chases and battle scenes that could have been removed from the story without losing anything of value.

2. Choreography. Like the scenes in the original trilogy, the action can be followed by the viewer. It isn't a blur of meaningless CGI where you can't tell how many good guys or bad guys there are, where everyone is, and who is winning. The lightsaber fight at the end is spectacular. I love the pod racing scene, despite the conventional wisdom that it was a scene manufactured to sell video games. Even the large scale CGI battle between the Gungans and the droid army is watchable.

The Phantom Menace has never gotten its due credit for being a great action movie. For that matter, the original Star Wars trilogy has never gotten enough recognition in that department either. So much commentary gets devoted to the characters and stories of Star Wars that people forget how cool and exciting they were. The Phantom Menace doesn't match up in terms of storytelling or characters, but it does match up when it comes to action.

If you aren't convinced, then watch the lightsaber fight at the end of The Phantom Menace, and compare it to any scene with a lightsaber in Episode II or III. Casting a martial arts expert as Darth Maul was a wise choice. If you ask me, the prequels would have been better with more martial arts-inspired lightsaber fights. The duels in Episodes II and III suck. The scenes with lightsabers in those movies are poorly choreographed garbage between guys who look like kids playing with glow sticks.

Another part of this movie that works is the two Jedi, Obi-wan Kenobi and Qui-gon Jin. They are the pillars that keep the story from collapsing into a pile of infantile garbage. They have good chemistry, and the master-student relationship is much better realized in this movie than in the latter two movies. Liam Nesson brings a great presence to the role of Jedi Master – a role that he is now typecast in because of his success in this movie. Ewan McGregor brings some presence as a young Obi-wan too, although he is badly underused in this movie.

Does the Phantom Menace have some pretty big flaws? Yes. Do these problems make Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace a bad movie? Absolutely not, unless you are looking for that to happen. Jar Jar isn't in every scene, and the action is really good. If you are young and watching this whole series for the first time, or if you watched it once a long time ago and your memory of it is a little faded, then give this movie another chance.

The Hunger Games movie is like a lot of book-to-movie translations. It is at least watchable, largely because of the quality of the source material. But, also like a lot of book-to-movie translations, it suffers badly from the need to take all of the background and story that you get from a novel and cram it into a movie of acceptable length. In this case, it has to be date movie length. The usual result is a mediocre effort where you can see the brilliance of the source material around the periphery, but which still makes major sacrifices out of necessity. The Hunger Games is a little worse than the usual result, because it also has possibly the worst camera work that I have ever seen in my life. I guess that's what happens when you hand the keys to the Hunger Games Ferrari to a director whose only accomplishments are Pleasantville and Seabiscuit.

I hadn't heard of the book series until the movie was about to come out, and then my wife told me the general outline. My reaction was "Holy crap that sounds cool? Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?" It is a futuristic, semi-post-apocalyptic story where an oppressive government stages a horrifying gladiator match between 24 children once per year. It is The Running Man, but this time with innocent kids, and it is much more disturbing. The best part about The Hunger Games is how unsettling it is. The movie gives you a brief background of how this came about – A few generations ago, some of the country rebelled against the government, resulting in a terrible Civil War. The rebels lost, and, as punishment, each district must now offer up two kids as "tribute" every year. You can tell while watching that the movie gives you the thumbnail version of this story. It's enough to make the movie work, however.

At every moment, regardless of what is happening on the screen, the movie's premise sits at the back of your mind. The kids are addressed as "tributes". The privileged elite take bets on the contestants and watch it like the Super Bowl. How could a society become so cruel? How can some parts of the population become so dehumanized that they delight in watching teenagers hunt each other like animals and slash each other with knives and swords? If you win, are you so scarred for life from having to kill other kids that you would have been better off losing? You might be asking yourself that after seeing Woody Harrelson's character. As the lone winner from District 12, he is famous and now part of the elite. So what does he spend the day doing? Drinking away his misery.

The movie works. That is about the best thing that I can say about it. The raw material is good enough to at least keep you from switching if off. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. The biggest problem with The Hunger Games is that the movie is completely unable to deliver its events with the emotional weight that they need. Characters follow their actions in the book, but they make no sense on the screen because we haven't been given adequate background. Characters die with sympathetic music and tears, but none of these deaths register with you, as the viewer. Why? Because everyone other than Katniss hardly gets any screen time. The actual death match only lasts about an hour on film. In that time, lots of people get killed, but none of them with enough buildup or suspense to pack a punch. We never get enough information to understand the dynamics between the contestants. Even when the movie's "villain" bites it, if you want to call him that, there's less of a feeling of relief, and more the feeling of "eh, I guess this means the movie's over now?" Time after time, I had to swallow something that seemed implausible at the time, thinking to myself "the book probably explains this better". According to my wife, it does.

A good director could have made this movie better. Unfortunately, the camera work in this movie is a disaster. I am flabbergasted by how bad it is. A major part of this movie, if not most of it, appears to have been shot with a hand-held camera. Unlike lots of other "shaky cam" movies though, it's not just the action scenes that will hurt your eyes. Dialog and exposition scenes also feature this terrible camera work. The camera constantly drifts or shakes. The angles are poor. You get close-ups when you want to see wider shots, and you get wider shots when you want close-ups. I don't go into movies looking for reasons not to like them, but five minutes into this one, I was already annoyed. By the halfway point, I wanted to punch the director in the face.

Is The Hunger Games worth watching? I guess so. I don't regret watching it, but I have little desire to see it again. What I really wish is that this book had been made into a TV series ala Game of Thrones. Then, it could have been given the time that it needed to better develop its characters and background. The Hunger Games movie feels a lot like the Cliffs Notes version of the novel.

Blue Chips was a movie that was at least a decade ahead of its time, and its story is more relevant today than when the movie came out. It presents a question that other sports movies, including amateur sports movies, haven't explored. Namely, why should you bother to follow the rules when cheating is already widespread? Is it wrong to cheat if that's what it takes to compete? Is widespread cheating in amateur athletics the inevitable result of fans' obsession with winning? This movie would seem to suggest that the answers to those last two questions are "no" and "yes". Almost every other sports movie of the past 50 years has had some kind of uplifting ending, but this one ends mostly on a downer.

Nick Nolte plays a college basketball coach, coaching at a major California basketball school (which might as well be UCLA), clearly modeled after Bobby Knight. He's a hot-tempered, aging and increasingly frustrated, old-school guy whose record has slipped in recent years. A shady booster enters the picture, trying to convince him that if he wants to be on top again, he has to start playing "the game" with recruits. He has to start making deals. Coach Nolte is initially hostile to the guy, but after it looks like he's going to get shut out of getting three huge recruits, he reluctantly changes his mind. Nolte gives an excellent performance in this movie. Everything that he does in the movie, whether it's angry tantrums against refs or the occasional dose of humor, he does well. He is convincing as a guy who just wants to mold student-athletes and coach the game that he loves. The speech that he gives at the end is priceless.

The more I read about recruiting, especially basketball recruiting, the more I feel like I need to take a shower. This movie perfectly captures the sleaze of the sport during its recruiting scenes. There's the scum bag "deal maker" mother, who tries to peddle her influence to the highest bidder. There is the superstar white kid, who recognizes his value and demands a huge pile of cash. One kid eventually gets a new car. The movie ultimately presents a pretty revolting picture of college athletics, and if you have followed the scandals at places like Auburn, you know that it is pretty accurate.

This movie could have been a failure, but it has that one important trait that all great sports movies have. It was made with a genuine love and respect for the sport. There is a lot of basketball porn in this movie, perhaps even too much. There are scenes that show Nolte coaching Xs and Os. The coaches yell out a bunch of terminology during practices and games, as opposed to 95% of sports movies, where coaches never sound like actual coaches. Blue Chips tries to be one of the more realistic sports movies ever made, and it largely succeeds. It perhaps goes a little too far though with the basketball porn, showing tons and tons of slam dunks and three pointers. If you watch this movie, you would get the impression that 90% of the scoring in basketball is due to these two plays. It also has a somewhat annoying appearance by Dick Vitale, which serves no purpose except to remind you that you are watching a basketball movie. The movie also shoehorns a few too many current basketball stars into it. That might have made it sell better at the time, but do you really care now whether Penny Hardaway and Bobby Hurley appear in it? (And Hurley plays for Indiana in this movie – LULZ).

The worst part about this movie, ultimately, is the casting of the basketball stars in it. Namely, Shaquille O'Neal, who can't act his way out of a paper bag. To make matters worse, they give his character the most interesting background story, that of a Gulf War veteran with a "Black power, we shall overcome" type attitude. He's awful. He's really awful. It's as if he had a part written for Ice Cube or Denzel Washington, but then the studio decided that they needed a big name star in the case. He doesn't have many lines, but the ones that he has are not good.

Blue Chips is one of those sports movies that you should see at least once. It's unlikely that you will remember it amongst the best that you have seen, but if you follow college athletics, you should at least find it interesting. Blue Chips shows us the hypocrisy of college athletics, and the seemingly futile endeavor of trying to keep money out of the hands of athletes. It is though provoking, albeit a bit preachy. Given the current debates about whether we should be paying players, this movie is now more relevant than it ever has been.

The Road Warrior is one of my favorite action movies of all time. The ending scene is possibly the greatest action scene ever filmed. Even though it has long periods without action, it has great fiction go along with it. I continue to be amazed that a movie so great is actually a sequel to a movie that is so terrible. Mad Max is so bad that I had to try three separate times to finish it – during my unsuccessful attempts to do so, I could only get halfway. I'm sad to say, my persistence wasn't rewarded. Mad Max doesn't get better as it goes. It's pretty bad through the end.

This movie is described as "post-apocalyptic". Somebody should have told that to the script writer, the cameramen, and the director. There is scarcely a hint of "apocalypse" in this movie, and you would never know that's what it is if you weren't told. People have morning coffee in a diner. An oil refinery is shown up and running in the background. Max wife's takes their son into a small village to buy him ice cream. The scarcity and bleakness depicted in great post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior isn't shown here. False advertising abounds with this movie, since it is also usually described as a revenge tale. That description is only fitting for the last 15 minutes of the movie.

The only good action in this entire movie is the car chase at the very beginning. It is in that brilliant opening that you get a hint of the techniques that would make the next movie so good: great camera work, tons of speed, the loud sounds of engines, and a bunch of cars getting smashed. The rest isn't very entertaining, which is okay, I guess, because there isn't much of it. At the end, the main villain gets punked – not by Max, but by the director and the script writer. Max hardly engages anyone in this entire movie. In between the beginning and the end, there are no real showdowns between the good guys and the bad guys -- just the bad guys torturing people, burning people alive, and intimidating people.

The film spends for more time on boring, sappy scenes with Max and his wife than it does with anything that advances the plot -- a plot which, by the way, essentially takes an hour off. Here's a tip if you are watching this movie for the first time – skip everything between about 10 and 70 minutes. It's nothing but 60 minutes of poorly acted, poorly-paced drama that sets up an anticlimactic revenge in the end that falls flat. Here's a better tip – skip the movie altogether. If you don't, you might end up like Max – filled with vengeful bloodlust – at the person who recommended this stinking turd to you.

Ever since the horror genre reached its peak in the late 70s and early 80s, it has almost completely dropped off the map. There are movies branded as "horror" films, but they are either crummy rip-offs, sequels, or lame "slasher" movies that provide no atmosphere. Or, they are psychological thriller types like Silence of the Lambs, which is a great movie but barely fits into the genre. The truly great ones have told interesting stories while frightening us with the ugly side of our nature. The truly great ones, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Exorcist, are unsettling enough to make a grown man like me have a little more trouble sleeping that night.

The Ring is one of two horror movies of the past 20 years that I think are legitimately worth owning (the other being The Sixth Sense). It is a great movie for the same reasons that The Shining, The Omen, and The Thing are great movies – because it is creative, it tells a great story, and it has great atmosphere. It also features a threat that you can't hide or run away from. The monster is scary because you don't get to see it for most of the movie. When you finally get to see the "monster" at the end, it is a spectacular, surprise climax – one of my favorite horror scenes of all time. The Ring is highly unpredictable, and at the end, it has a meaning that is completely different from what you expected it to be. It is a movie that gets better the second time that you see it, because once you know how it ends, you notice the themes a lot better – themes that are relevant and play off of the things that we see in our life that scare us.

I have seen mixed opinions about whether The Ring is better than the original Japanese Ringu. It is rare that I say this, but in this case, the remake is better. If you ask me, a lot better. Why? In my humble opinion, it is because of the outstanding cinematography and production values that this movie showcases. The vibe of this movie is "David Fincher meets Twin Peaks". The sound effects, especially, are fantastic. The movie revolves around a mysterious videotape that is supposedly fatal to watch. When you finally get to see that tape, we see that it is nothing but a bunch of short, black and white video clips spliced together. But boy, is it creepy, and that is because of the sound that comes out of it. It is so creepy that if you hadn't been told how dangerous it was during the movie, you would immediately figure it out on your own.

This movie does have one big weakness and that is the acting. Bryan Cox is in a brief supporting role, and he is good. Naomi Watts gives a somewhat flat performance as the main character. When she has to step up and show a bit of emotion, she doesn't do it very well. For the rest of the cast, it's no-name city. Watts's son and ex-boyfriend are equally "meh" in their performances. I don't mind that much though, because Watts's character dominates the screen time, and she is almost a passive observer. Although she has a personal stake in solving the movie's mystery, she spends almost all of the movie just asking people questions, researching, and watching.

The Ring is a movie that deserves a score higher than the one that it has here on IMDb. I would give it a 10 to try and prop it up, but it's not quite a masterpiece like The Thing. I think that The Ring suffers a bit, public perception-wise, from having started the short-lived "Japanese horror" fad of the mid-oughts. Creepy ghost children became old hat almost immediately, so now this movie looks like just another flick that tried to score cheap thrill points by following along. What none of the other "creepy ghost children" movies like "Dark Water" and "The Grudge" ever had was an interesting reason for the creepy ghost children to exist, or an interesting story. The Ring has those in spades, along with the ability to make itself linger in your mind for a long time after you turn off the TV.

The first time that I watched A Clockwork Orange as an adult old enough to understand it, I really loved it. Then I read the book, and I loved the movie a little bit less. It is a great movie when it follows the source material, but the Kubrick-i-zation of A Clockwork Orange makes it merely good. This is because Kubrick adds all kinds of ridiculous style to the movie, as well as the occasional bad joke. It's worth a watch, and the humor mostly works. However, it's not the masterpiece that Kubrick's thralls insist it is.

A Clockwork Orange covers a lot of themes. Mostly, it deals with modern society's utter ineptitude when it comes to managing and eliminating violent crime. Society tries brutal punishment while psychoanalyzing psychopaths. Nothing seems to work. Both of these extremes are shown in a darkly humorous manner in A Clockwork Orange. Although it is a "comedy", there isn't any point in A Clockwork Orange that is laugh-out-loud funny. The humor comes from the absurdity of it all. A Clockwork Orange has the same sense of humor as Dr. Strangelove -- portraying everyone as either evil, dogmatic, or stupid, interested only in themselves, and not humanity as a whole. The politicians and cops in A Clockwork Orange don't care about finding real solutions that make society better. They care only about applying band-aids, and phony solutions that look good. Like Dr. Strangelove, the story feels like a great big sick joke, but with a strong message behind it.

Malcolm McDowell does give a great performance as Alex, the "humble narrator". Alex is a total sociopath, and he narrates the violent events of the story with a stoic indifference. When the violent tables get turned on him in the movie, McDowell perfectly plays the phony victim that Alex becomes. The one problem that I have with McDowell though is that he is too old for the part, but perhaps that was inevitable since a more faithful portrayal would have been too disturbing for the studio. Unfortunately, McDowell gives the only real good performance in this movie.

My biggest problem with this movie is with some of the absurdities that Kubrick introduced. For starters, the style throughout the movie is absolutely ludicrous. Old sci-fi movies about "the future" are notorious for having a bad sense of fashion, but this movie really takes the cake. In A Clockwork Orange, "the future" looks like somebody's gaudiest '70s nightmare taken to an extreme. Interiors of houses are full of blindingly bright colors and crazy artwork. Every other woman has brightly colored hair. Alex and his droogs wear tight white clothing with derby hats. Maybe in the early '70s this looked edgy. Now, it looks stupid.

Another problem with the movie is that it was just too far ahead of its time. It isn't Kubrick's fault -- it is just the reality of making a movie based on an incredibly violent and sexual book. Even now, in 2012, the public would have a hard time accepting a perfectly faithful translation of Anthony Burgess's masterpiece. But because of this, a lot of the content falls flat. For instance, a scene in the book where Alex rapes a couple of young girls becomes a scene in the movie where Alex has consensual sex with a couple of women. The book scene illustrates what a horrible monster Alex is. The movie scene is just pointless soft core porn. (No I don't think that the movie should have portrayed that scene faithfully -- it should have just been left out). I am probably one of the few people on Earth who thinks that the movie isn't disturbing enough and, the violence, not visceral enough. If you think that I am crazy, watch the Goodfellas scene where Joe Pesci stabs the guy in the trunk of the car. In the 40 years since ACO was made, it is startling how much more realistic movie violence has become.

I still own the movie, and this is one that I can definitely recommend. To me, the book is a 10, and the movie translation is a 7. Given how horrible the majority of book-to-movie translations are, I'd consider that a win. With that said, I think that this movie, more than any other, would benefit tremendously from a remake.

I don't know how many stars to give this movie, because a 1 tells you not to see it, and a 10 tells you that it is an excellent movie. Truth be told, this is one of the worst movies ever made, and that is why you absolutely must see it. It is more unintentionally funny than most actual comedies, and it provides as much entertainment value by accident as lots of movies do on purpose. It is like a train wreck, but with this wreck, the passengers are all slipping on banana peels as they exit the train.

Here is what I think happened – the producers decided that they wanted to cash in on the franchise one more time, so they decided to bring back Mr. Miyagi and Daniel for one last hurrah. The script writers cooked up another story about Daniel fighting the Cobra Kais, getting beaten up, competing in the karate tournament once again, and then winning in the end. Then Ralph Macchio showed up for day 1 pudgy and out of shape, and panic erupted. Quickly, the script was rewritten with all of Daniel's fight scenes taken out, and the tournament rules changed so that all Daniel had to do to defend his title was show up for the last fight. I find it next to impossible that anyone associated with this movie honestly expected the audience to buy this, but they were far enough into the project that they had no choice but to finish it.

So what do we get? We get an hour and a half of poor Danny getting abused over and over again. He's chubby. He's pushing 30, but he is still 17 in the movie and he sounds like he is about 13. He gets punched. He gets taunted. He gets kicked in the balls. His, uh, "girlfriend" gets harassed and almost assaulted as some bullies trash Mr. Miyagi's shop, but Mr. Miyagi does absolutely nothing but push the bullies out the door. At no point, does it cross anyone's mind to call the cops. At some point, we start sympathizing more with the bullies than Daniel. He is such a wimp with no defensive instincts, and at this point, Mr. Miyagi seems like an insensitive dope because he makes Daniel get beaten to a pulp multiple times before he will finally agree to train him.

You can tell that just about everybody acting in this movie knows that it's a stinker, so why bother trying? Ralph Macchio totally phones in his performance, and so does Pat Morita (Miyagi). The minor actors in the movie, like Thomas Ian Griffith (the evil pony tail guy) and Martin Kove (the big evil trainer from the first movie) seem to get the joke here. They play over the top, exaggerated cartoon villains, whose only function is to be pointlessly mean. They are grown men, but their lives revolve around torturing a 17 year old boy as revenge for winning a karate tournament. At the end, Daniel finally faces down the big bully. Only this time, he doesn't try to throw any punches or block anything. He just stands there like a doughboy punching bag, yelping out in pain with his girly voice. I have always thought that the greatest achievement of the first two movies was that they made Daniel's triumphs believable and convincing. Since Mr. Miyagi focused on defense and maintaining a positive attitude, Daniel could survive a fight against a privileged bully and a brutal Okinawan street fighter who did not have this kind of positive influence. But in this one, it's just a massive beating. It is just so hard to take seriously that you get a sadistic pleasure out of it, kind of like watching somebody get hammered with a 2X4 in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Maybe the worst thing about this movie is that deep down, somewhere buried underneath the terrible acting and the awful script, there were some good ideas here. A Vietnam vet befriending Daniel and teaching him the darker side of martial arts – sounds like a story with a lot of potential. Maybe the world isn't inherently a good place. Maybe life has predators and prey, and maybe a Vietnam vet is an appropriate guy to teach that to Daniel, who up to this point is still pretty naïve. Maybe a movie that questioned the idealism of the first two and dug into some gray areas could have been really good. But, nope! We just got a tired rehash of the lessons from the first two movies, but they don't even seem to make sense here. Our Vietnam vet is actually just a villain – so cartoony that he even goes around a corner for a sneaky evil laugh while he listens to Daniel punch a piece of wood. Ouch! This one shows up on cable somewhere every once in a while, and if you can catch it, I highly recommend it. Invite some friends over, have a few beers, and have a few laughs at the expense of this tire fire.

Heath Ledger's Joker is the main reason why the first 90 minutes or so of this movie is so great. However, after an explosive action scene at that mark, the movie hits its climax, and then stumbles badly after that. Dark Knight is a movie that is about an hour too long. It has too many side plots, too many characters that we only marginally care about, and way too many outlandish and impossible Joker schemes. When I read all of the glowing reviews for this movie from both critics and fans alike, I am baffled by how these big problems have been overlooked. Maybe it was just the hype of Heath Ledger's performance and his tragic death. Whatever the reason, I think that in another 10-20 years, when people reflect on Christopher Nolan's career, this movie won't be thought of as highly as it is now.

As The Joker, Heath Ledger gives a performance for the ages. He kills and causes chaos, but you can tell that he's having fun doing it. He seems to be immune to fear, and even when his schemes are foiled, you can never tell whether it's because he has actually failed, or because he has something else up his sleeve. I can't believe that people even compare Jack Nicholson's performance in the original Tim Burton movie to what Heath Ledger does in this one. Jack Nicholson was just Jack Nicholson with some makeup, stupid dialog, and bad jokes. In "Dark Knight", Heath Ledger creates an entirely new take on the sociopathic criminal mastermind that fits in perfectly with Nolan's more realistic take on this series. Unlike Nicholson and all of the other criminals from the '80s and '90s Batman movies, you would never guess who this actor is without his name in the credits.

The Dark Knight opens up with one of the greatest crime scenes that I have ever seen. The Joker robs a bank with a gang of thugs, and brilliantly concocts a scheme whereby he gets away cleanly as the only survivor. The scene is suspenseful, with a streak of dark comedy. This is what I was hoping the entire movie would be like. Unfortunately, The Dark Knight is a slog when The Joker isn't on the screen. Perhaps the biggest problem with this movie is that it introduces numerous side plots and characters that should have been left on the cutting room floor. There is an utterly worthless and mostly unresolved side story of an unscrupulous accountant who threatens to reveal Batman's true identity. The movie leads you into thinking that it's going to be significant, but instead, it's just a waste of time. Batman kidnaps a mafia accountant, which provides some cool spectacle, but then goes nowhere. Worst of all though, is the introduction of a second villain at the 2/3 mark of the movie. It does nothing but unnecessarily complicate things and take away screen time from the two characters that we want to see the most. I haven't seen much of Aaron Eckhart before, but if this movie is any indication, he's a terrible actor. As Harvey Dent, his "angry and emotional" act was so bad, I thought that it was part of an act within the movie, and that a plot twist later would have him working with the Joker. I was wrong. It was just legitimately bad acting.

Some scenes drag on badly, as if Christopher Nolan doesn't trust you to understand what's going on without you getting beaten over the head with it. It's the same problem that he has with Inception. I can't give you much more detail than that without spoiling the movie, but I can tell you that I found myself looking at my watch at least a few times. Especially during the agonizingly long "explosives on the boats" scene.

In addition to a meandering plot and a script that should have gone through a couple more revisions, The Dark Knight features Joker schemes that grow increasingly implausible by the minute. The bank robbery scene at the beginning comes across as genius, but as the movie goes along, the crimes get more and more far-fetched. The movie goes out of its way to point out to you how The Joker works with mental patients and other crazy people, but he still pulls off some of the most ingeniously executed schemes of all time. By the time that this movie ended, I no longer thought of The Joker as a genius, but as a beneficiary of lazy script writing. The Joker's absurd schemes are a Deus Ex machine that Nolan uses to keep The Joker out of prison while endangering innocent civilians. I realize that it is a comic book movie, but this is supposed to be a gritty, "realistic" take on the genre. If you are going to have a monologue in which The Joker recalls a traumatic incident that he experienced as a child, don't turn around and enable him to rig up thousands of pounds of explosives at a hospital without anybody noticing.

After I saw this movie a second time, I watched "Batman Begins" for about the tenth time, and it is striking how much Nolan's work has deteriorated since then. Batman Begins has a much better script, with a much tighter story and a lot fewer scenes that should have been five minutes shorter. The Dark Knight is widely regarded as the better movie right now, but as time passes, I think that people will view it differently. With that said, I did enjoy a lot of it, but this movie is mediocre, at best, aside from Heath Ledger's performance.

I generally don't find political comedies or dramas to be too entertaining, largely because the political bias of the writers and actors can't help but make themselves obvious on the show. I do find myself enjoying Veep though, and watching it on a regular basis. This is largely because of the performance of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She absolutely steals the show as Selina Meyer. Having once been a rising political star with Presidential aspirations, Meyer is now the vice president. Rather than being a stepping stone, it feels more like a humiliating demotion. Dumb, bumbling, and narcissistic, she tries to preserve her career and her ego by making the most out of the unimportant tasks that she is handed as vice president. The president never calls her, but constantly undermines her limited agenda and sends his errand boy to deliver orders. Her character isn't very original, but she is well written. Her phony public smiles followed by behind-the-scenes meltdowns almost perfectly fit the cynical picture in our heads of what politicians are actually like.

One of the constant sources of comedy is the triviality of everything that happens. Meyer and her staff are constantly scrambling to finish tasks that seem like they would have no effect whatsoever on the country. Filibuster reform? Meh. Who cares? Meyer's Green Jobs initiative gets undermined so that she can get filibuster reform done, and then filibuster reform gets dropped. The occasional gaffe ends up on the news in highly embarrassing fashion. It is bureaucratic inefficiency at its worst, and it can be doggone hilarious.

While I generally find the writing to be funny, I often feel like I'm watching the movie Juno or an episode of Gilmore Girls. If you have seen this type of comedy, then you know what I am talking about – usually witty, often quick exchanges of dialog, filled with pop culture references (word of advice – make darn sure you have subtitles turned on!). As often happens with that brand of comedy, sometimes the writers try a little too hard. An exchange of jokes will go on about two or three lines longer than it should, as if the writers don't trust you to get the joke right away. Another problem is that there is too much profanity. It doesn't seem like a realistic portrayal of behind-the-scenes politics, as much as an occasional lazy attempt on the part of the writers to generate comedy. If anything, cleaner dialog would have probably made the show's cynical hijinx funnier.

Overall, I can recommend Veep for people who follow politics, but tend to hold their nose while doing so. It is ultimately a show that lets us have a laugh at the expense of the people who we feel have screwed up the country. For the most part, the comedic hits outnumber the misses, and Veep ends up as good entertainment.

My wife introduced me to "Mean Girls". She told me what a lot of people told me: "It's a lot like Heathers". In some ways, it is. Both movies are like a "Revenge of the Nerds", but when we watch, it is we, the viewers, getting revenge. We are getting our revenge on the beautiful but vapid, shallow, and narcissistic characters in the movie by having a huge laugh at their expense. The protagonists in the movie are not our heroes because they are downtrodden victims who rise up and fight back. They are our heroes because they dish out social justice to bullies and stuck up bitches by making them victims of their own ego and stupidity. Both "Mean Girls" and "Heathers" capture this zeitgeist, although "Heathers" does it a lot better, for reasons which I will explain below.

Mean Girls, for the first half of it or so, is great cynical nerd comedy. Granted, the main character, Cady, (played by Lindsay Lohan) isn't an anti-social geek or, for that matter, a victim of bullying. Rather, she is beautiful and socially adept, as well as smart. Her three "friends", Regina, Gretchen, and Karen, are as beautiful, popular, and stupid as they come. Mean Girls is at its best when Cady is exploiting that stupidity as we all observe and snicker, such as when she tricks one girl into gaining a bunch of weight by telling her that high calorie energy bars will help her lose weight.

At some point though, Mean Girls goes horribly wrong. Either Tina Fey did not have enough cynicism in her heart to make this movie the ugly picture that it should have been, or the studio didn't have the courage to let her write that screenplay. Whatever the cause, Mean Girls suddenly becomes a feel-good, "uplifting", clichéd story at about the halfway point. Instead of what could have been a brilliant, Coen Brothers-ish, dark and misanthropic comedy, it becomes a feel-good piece. When you start to see this happening, you are probably best served to eject the DVD from the tray and write your own ending, because it gets pretty bad. The satire ends and the movie starts preaching a "can't we all just get along?" message. A totally implausible twist strains the relationship between Cady and her teacher (Tina Fey), and then Cady spends the rest of the movie trying to redeem herself. The way in which it ends is downright painful to watch. Oh, Tina Fey, you are one funny-as-hell woman, but boy did you ever screw up the second half of this script.

I could watch movies that accurately portray how horrible high school is all day long. Unfortunately, Mean Girls doesn't do a very good job of this. It starts off well but then it tries to be something that it shouldn't. Unfortunately, this is something else that it has in common with "Heathers". Both movies could have had a better ending, although the brilliance of "Heathers" lasts somewhat longer, and it doesn't hit bottom as hard.

When I first saw this movie at the ripe old age of 9, I was beyond terrified. John Carpenter's sci-fi horror masterpiece about a shapeshifting alien gave me nightmares for years. After another 30 years and about 50 more viewings, it isn't frightening to me anymore, but that hasn't diminished the value of this tense and suspenseful classic. The critics liked Starman more, and Halloween was more influential, but The Thing is John Carpenter's best movie – no frigging contest. Considering how many great movies Carpenter made in the '70s and '80s, that's saying a lot.

In the late '70s and early '80s, the horror genre hit its peak. Ideas were still fresh, but the taboos that kept the truly horrifying movies like The Shining and The Exorcist off the screen were gone. Young directors like John Carpenter brought inspiration and energy to the medium. Without $100 Million CG animation budgets, directors were free to focus on storytelling and script. This is the stage in which the film industry found itself when Carpenter made The Thing. The script is almost air tight, leaving virtually no plot holes or loose threads, other than a couple of mysteries that are better left unanswered. The cast was perfect, and the direction was excellent. Most of the actors were no-namer types who didn't do much after The Thing, but there are no weak performances in this film. The soundtrack is also a huge asset to the film. I still get chills whenever I hear it during the introduction and over the closing credits.

Best of all is Rob Bottin's absolutely incredible work on the film's visual and special effects. The monsters don't get a ton of screen time, but when they do, they are gruesome and horrifying. The practical effects in the movie still trump any computer generated garbage that has been made in the past 15 years. Although they are a product of a wild imagination, the monsters in the movie seem incredibly real, and because they seem so real, they are also threatening. In the recent 2011 prequel, the monsters simply weren't as scary, in large part because you couldn't shake the idea that you were watching a high-tech cartoon.

The movie begins with two crazy-looking guys hunting a dog from a helicopter, shooting at it as it flees across the Antarctic. It is one of the best opening scenes of all time, drawing you in immediately. There is a whole rich backstory at work, and at the start of The Thing, you get to see the aftermath. After the dog incident, the story unfolds almost like a Lovecraftian version of "Ten Little Indians". Once The Thing is first truly revealed, the rest of the movie is filled with tense paranoia and fear. Adding to the tension is the extreme isolation of Antarctica, and the knowledge that nobody can come to rescue the scientists. All the while, we realize that these men are not the only ones in danger. If the Thing kills them all and escapes the continent, the world is doomed. At one point, The Thing also gives you the best jump scare in the history of film. I have introduced this movie to about a half dozen people, and the "test" scene has made somebody jump out of his or her chair every time.

Another of the great qualities of this film is the memorable cast of characters. Even though there are lots of them, they all look, sound, and behave differently enough for you to get to know them almost immediately. After only one viewing, you can probably remember that there was the cowboy-ish MacReady, the cook on roller skates, the guy who loved dogs more than people, Wilford Brimley going crazy, the doctor, the weak-willed radio operator, the crazy guy, and the big tough looking black guy. Unlike almost every other horror movie with a body count, every death feels significant, because even minor characters are well developed.

In my humble opinion, The Thing is one of the Top 10 greatest movies ever made, and the #1 movie of its genre. This is why the movie has such a strong cult following despite its lukewarm reception on release, and why if you see it for the first time, you will probably still enjoy it even though it is 30 years old. If you want to see the best of the true horror genre (i.e. not the idiotic slasher genre misclassified as "horror"), The Thing is absolutely essential viewing.

In the 1980s, Scarface screenwriter Oliver Stone came up with two complete masterpieces that were years ahead of their time – Scarface and Wall Street. Both movies portrayed negative trends in America long before anyone was recognizing them or making commentaries about them. Both of them had heavy influence on their genre for decades to come, and both of them have held up over the years and are appropriately recognized as the masterpieces that they are.

With Scarface, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma gave us an entirely fresh look at organized crime and the war on drugs. Far from the romanticized portrayal of organized crime in the Godfather series, Scarface showed us a brutal, unforgiving, and shockingly violent world where the ambitious have a short life expectancy. Years before America started wavering in its support for the war on drugs, Scarface showed us how futile it was. It showed us the hypocrisy of allying ourselves with third world, drug-dealing dictators while trying to stop them from flooding our streets with their cash crops. The movie almost predicts the stories of men like Panama's Manuel Noriega, who was our ally until the Cold War ended, at which time he became public enemy #1 because of his association with the drug industry. It showed us how drug production, distribution, and selling was a machine-like business that stretched from the plantations of South America, through the offices of "respectable" bankers, and all the way to the halls of Washington D.C. Unlike many other movies since 1983 that are critical of our foreign policy or the war on drugs, Scarface is never ham-fisted. It shows you how our world is, and it lets you come to your own conclusions.

Ultimately, Scarface plays out like a Greek tragedy, with our antihero on the rise until he reaches the climax, at which time he commits a critical mistake and his world begins to fall apart. The movie is paced somewhat slower than it probably would be today, and that is part of why it works so well. Tony's change from a hungry, street-smart thug on the rise to a coke-addicted millionaire on the decline is shown at a pace where it is believable. Specifically, Tony's gradually escalating use of drugs is brilliant. When we first see him use coke, he inhales a little pinch off of a toothpick. In a later scene, he's doing a whole line. By the end of the movie, he is burying his face into a pile of cocaine on his desk and coming apart at the seams. While we watch Tony's rise and fall, we are torn. We want him to succeed, but we also hate what he does, and that in the end, everything that happens to him is his own fault.

Without Oliver Stone's brilliant script, this movie might have been irrelevant, and without Brian De Palma's brilliant direction, it might have been mediocre. Every actor and actress in this movie gives the best performance of their careers. Al Pacino as Tony Montana is brilliant. Nothing that Pacino has done has ever approached the personality that he gives Tony in Scarface. His facial expressions, his swagger, and even the way that he leads with his crotch when he walks – it's all part of making Tony into the greatest antihero in the history of film. Scarface is the only Al Pacino movie that I have seen that makes me forget that I am watching Al Pacino. Steven Bauer, who slipped into obscurity after this movie, gives a great performance as Tony's more laid back BFF. Robert Loggia plays an outwardly chummy drug kingpin who lacks the cutthroat instincts to survive, and Michelle Pfeiffer plays his incredibly cold, unfriendly, and self-centered, anorexic-looking trophy wife. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio also gives an excellent performance in a supporting role as Tony's sister.

While Scarface is a great drama, it also has three of the greatest action scenes ever filmed. All of them feature an agonizing build-up of suspense as we watch the danger develop over a period of minutes, while the good guys indulge themselves in other activities. After what seems like an eternity, an explosion of gunfire and violence erupts in a short (by today's standards), well choreographed shootout. Despite being a drama, Scarface has about five minutes of action that easily rival the best scenes in any action movie ever made. Whenever I watch this movie, I usually watch these three scenes one extra time to get my fill.

If you have never seen Scarface, then chances are, you have seen numerous pop culture references to it, as well as movies and video games that draw heavily from it. The Grand Theft Auto series, Blow, Traffic, New Jack City – all of them in some way trace their lineage to Scarface. Scarface is easily the most influential crime drama of the past 30 years, and there is a good reason why. The movie is a masterpiece, both in its storytelling, and in the meaning of the story.

I only started subscribing to HBO a few years ago, so I never got to see this show when it was live. However, after watching the first season of Game of Thrones more times than I could count, I wanted something new. I had heard great things about this show, and to my delight, I found the Blu Ray set for Season 1 one day for only 25 bucks. I immediately started watching it with my wife, who loves a lot of the same HBO original series as I do (Sex and the City, The Sopranos, True Blood, Game of Thrones, etc). After watching the first few highly unsatisfying episodes, we looked at each other and my wife said "I'm not captivated". I said, "me neither". Meh. What am I missing here? Why did everyone go completely ga-ga over this series? Was it just fresh at the time? Maybe I'm spoiled by Game of Thrones, so when I see an inferior political/war drama, I can recognize it.

I must be totally missing what made this series so popular. One of the biggest problems is that the script and acting are terrible. This is supposed to be an authentic portrayal of ancient Rome, but it is littered with tons of British slang that sticks out like a sore thumb. The show constantly reminds you that you are not watching actual ancient Rome, but a bunch of British actors acting like one-dimensional, uptight jerks. The show feels like a daytime soap opera, and not the brilliant, realistic narrative that I was expecting. This show makes backstabbing, insulting, and betrayal about as boring as it could possibly be. Julius Caesar comes across to me as just another unemotional stuffy British guy, when he should be a guy that oozes charisma in buckets. This show utterly failed to convince me that this was a genius who led grand armies.

Another major problem with this show is that the most significant events often happen off screen. The worst example of this problem is halfway through the first season when Caesar's army is badly outnumbered and surrounded, and it looks like it's curtains for Julius. But then a massive battle happens off screen, and somehow Caesar wins. How he won is never actually explained. Clever tactics? An inspiring speech? Luck? Weather? All that we know is that the suspense, fear, and drama that was built up during the previous hour was all meaningless. This is a pattern repeated throughout this show. How am I supposed to care about what happens on this show when I don't even get to witness the most significant events? To me, that is like taking the great action scene at the end of "The Road Warrior" out of the movie and replacing it with some voice-over saying "the good guys won". Rome also does a poor job of giving you context for the major historical events that it portrays. I think that it might assume that the viewer is already an expert on ancient history, and it is merely filling in the blanks dramatically. I'm not an expert on ancient history, so I don't understand how Julius Caesar and Magnus Pompey got to be such bitter enemies. I almost felt like my Blu-Ray set was missing five crucial episodes of exposition.

Rome also really goes over the top when it comes to the sex. Rome has about as much sex as True Blood, but unlike that show, the sex in Rome isn't comical, and it usually isn't appropriate for the story either. It is more contrived and gratuitous. In one short scene, we see a Roman soldier nailing some lady from behind against a tree, not having seen how they met or how he seduced her. That was another moment where my wife and I kind of looked at each other like we were missing something.

Rome does at least have a couple of decent plot lines. The stories of the soldiers Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo are entertaining, and they supply the only (effective) comic relief. Vorenus is an uptight guy who can't do much besides fight. He is a lousy husband and he fails as a businessman. Pullo is more of a happy-go-lucky, crowd pleaser, woman pleaser type. The friendship that they strike up is interesting, as is the story of teenage Octavian, who possesses cynicism and knowledge beyond his years.

I watched ten episodes of the first season, and I don't feel all that strongly compelled to finish it. It has its moments, and I find the subject matter interesting despite its bungled presentation. Still, after hearing so much about how great this series was (from people whose opinions I usually agree with), I was very disappointed. I was hoping for a drama about war, politics, and the harshness of ancient life that featured good storytelling and realistic behaviors. In other words, I wanted something as good as Game of Thrones. I guess I'll stick with that.

As Christopher Nolan's budgets get bigger, his movies get worse. He is an excellent director when he is given a project that isn't overly ambitious. With his more "epic", "blockbuster" films though, he shows a lot more weaknesses. Nothing illustrates those weaknesses more than Inception. It is a movie that starts off at the same level as Memento, but declines and hits rock bottom on the same level as the recent Transformers movies. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the last 45 minutes or so of the movie is that bad. It is nothing but the same loud, poorly shot, poorly choreographed, and boring action that has spread throughout movies nowadays like a disease.

For at least the first hour, I could see why this movie got such great reviews. It presents itself initially as a dark and surreal Ocean's Eleven. The first act is spent acquainting us with the rules of dream thievery while the main character, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), assembles his "safecracking" team. In typical caper movie fashion, he finds the specialists that he needs, all of whom have their own talents and personalities. There is the chemist who will whip up the special cocktail needed to sedate everyone for this special job. There the dream actor who can impersonate anyone. There is the financier who hired Cobb and wants to come along to monitor his investment. There is the architect responsible for building the dreamscapes in which the "safecrackers" will pull off their caper. The target of this scheme is Robert Fischer (Cilian Murphy), the sole heir to a huge corporate empire. The purpose of this scheme is not to steal anything, but to implant the idea into Fischer's head that he should break up his father's empire. To do that, Cobb and his buddies concoct an incredibly complex scheme that involves a dream within a dream within a dream.

For a while, I thought that I was in heaven. But then, in Act II when the caper officially starts, I began to feel doubts. Within minutes, there is a massive car chase and the bullets are flying from all directions. When the dreaming starts, you get a taste of what the rest of the movie is going to be like. Tons and tons of shooting, chases, and action that drags on and on despite having almost no relevance to the plot. It's bad in the dream, it's pretty bad in the dream within a dream, and Holy Jesus, is it ever awful in the dream within a dream within a dream.

As the movie progresses, the action becomes more pointless and the action scenes become progressively harder to follow. Dozens of guys who dress like Secret Service agents are gunned down or karate chopped to death. Approximately a half hour is one gigantic non-stop action scene that takes place across all of the dream levels. While the idea of a half hour of non-stop action might sound nice, it drags horribly. Almost no plot development takes place this entire time. There is a shot of a van slowly falling towards the water. Across the long action scene, that van is shown about five or six times. By the time that you are done with this movie, you will be sick to death of seeing that stupid van falling towards the water.

Why is it that this movie can't make gunfire and car chases exciting? For starters, the action is very poorly choreographed. You get no sense of location. The challenges that the good guys are facing aren't clearly laid out. Who is where? How many bad guys are there? What you do get is good old shaky-cam, loads of CGI, Matrix-inspired floating, and close-ups of dudes shooting guns. In other words, you get the crap that has virtually destroyed action movies nowadays. Today's directors could learn a lot from action classics like Commando and Die Hard.

Speaking of CGI, this movie also has tons of that, and it is technologically impressive, but mostly pointless. The one scene that everybody seems to rave about is the Paris scene where half of the city gets folded in over itself. Eh – whatever. It looks cool, but – who cares? When did this become part of having a great movie? And why is it that the Road Warrior and the original Star Wars still look cooler to me than modern movies with five times the budget?

While I enjoyed most of the non-action parts, this also is probably Nolan's most pretentious movie. The movie starts with the line "What is the most resilient parasite?" The answer: "an idea". What is this twaddle? Ideas aren't like parasites. I'm constantly seeing ideas brought up, shot down, and forgotten about. And why do you need to tell me this – to look smart? Inception is constantly throwing new dream rules at you, and by the end they are a confusing mess. It is these kinds of problems that inspire people to criticize Inception as being a dumb movie that tries to position itself as a smart one.

To sum it all up, I think that Inception, in 20 years, will not be viewed by Christopher Nolan fans as one of his best. In fact, I believe that it is his worst film. This guy cannot do good action, and when he has a budget to spend, it seems to just make the movie longer and prettier, but not better. From these criticisms, you might get the impression that I hated the movie. I didn't. Even during the most boring scenes, I wanted the whole scheme to work, and I cared about Dom Cobb enough to be hoping that he would triumph in the end. I did enjoy it enough to watch the movie a second time, just to see if I would like it better. I had the same feelings again – falling in love at first, only to be disappointed in the end.

The first time through, The Prestige is just a sort of intriguing film to watch, where the pageantry of the magic shows is about half of the attraction. When an implausible sci-fi twist comes along and makes the last half hour a great big WTF experience, it can be kind of disappointing. But if you watch it again, you'll see a lot more in it. This isn't just a movie about magic and figuring out how Robert Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) perform their greatest tricks. This is a story about the self-destructive nature of obsession and revenge, and about how you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. The second time through this movie, with a bit of perspective on what it all means, it gets better. You realize the massive sacrifices that Borden and Angier will make in an endless attempt to one-up one another.

From the beginning, the movie does a great job of setting up Borden and Angier as rivals. Borden is great at the technical aspects of being an illusionist, but he has no charisma or style. Angier, on the other hand, understands the "show" part of show business much better. It is almost painful to watch Borden perform his show with no personality in front of small crowds, while Angier dazzles much larger audiences with charm and pizazz. At some point though, Angier discovers that Borden has come up with a new magic trick. He becomes obsessed with finding out how Borden is doing the trick, resorting to extreme measures before finally coming up with his own version of it. From there, the feud continues to escalate. To say that this movie is wholly unpredictable would be putting it lightly. From the beginning, you never have a really good idea of where it is going or whether there is a formula at work. The last half hour will definitely surprise you. It might not satisfy you, but you won't see it coming.

The Prestige is strong evidence that the quality of a Christopher Nolan film is inversely proportional to its funding. Lacking the $100+ Million CGI budget of a film like Inception, Nolan focuses more in this movie on script and atmosphere. There are about a half dozen magic show scenes in this movie, and every one of them is a treat to watch. Unlike the loud (and sometimes obnoxious) Hans Zimmer scores that have populated Nolan's last couple of movies, The Prestige has a low key score, much more in the style of Memento.

The big drawback that I see to this film is that in typical Nolan fashion, the time line bounces around, to the point where the movie can be confusing the first time that you see it. Unlike Batman Begins and Memento, however, it's kind of pointless here. I can see no reason why this movie wouldn't have been better if it had been shown in chronological order. The film is complex enough as it is. It kind of hints that it is an allegory for the bitter feud between Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, which occurred during this time period. It is one of those movies where you will probably notice something new every time that you see it, even after five viewings.

If you haven't seen The Prestige, then I highly encourage you to see it. If you saw it and you weren't very impressed, then I highly encourage you to give it a second chance. I enjoyed the movie on my first viewing, and it gets better every time that I see it.

Having seen almost every classic and influential crime drama of the past 30 years, I finally got around to seeing Heat. Having heard about how influential it has been in other movies and video games, I couldn't believe that I had waited so long to see this movie. Boy, was I disappointed. This movie is far from the masterpiece that I was led to believe. Other than a couple of great crime scenes (and a little bit of great action), I can't think of much that this film had that would make me want to see it again.

While I wouldn't characterize the acting as bad, I can't think of anyone in this movie who gave a performance that is among their better ones. Al Pacino is practically a caricature of himself the entire time. He overacts in every scene and he yells about half of his lines. Robert Deniro has the same scowl on his face and speaks in pretty much the same voice for the whole movie. Pacino and Deniro fans looking for some "tough guy" porn will find plenty of it here.

Ultimately, Heat is a movie that could have been made better by cutting about half the content. It is loaded with characters that are poorly developed, but are dramatically presented as if you are supposed to give a crap about any of them. One of them gets killed after about four minutes of screen time, and after that, we see his grieving wife. Rather than cry with her, I just kind of rolled my eyes. Another gang members death is presented with the drama akin to a squad mate getting killed in a war movie. I could have cared less. Val Kilmer's subplot centers around the tenuous relationship that he has with his wife. Al Pacino has a lousy third marriage and Robert Deniro somehow manages to have a romance side plot that is neither relevant nor believable.

There is even a suicide attempt scene that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story – a diversion that will have you scratching your head, wondering why so much celluloid was wasted on it. Without exception, every single scene with a female in it could have been left on the cutting room floor, and not one shred of value would have been lost. None of the characters are sympathetic or well developed enough for you to want to see their romances work or to be able to share their pain. It would have worked well maybe in a television series where you would have more time to develop the characters, but here, all of the side plot material is really boring.

One of the draws of this movie seems to be that it is a "realistic" and non ideal take on human behavior. Okay, I get that, but if you are going to go with the "realistic" approach, then don't ruin it with the occasional unbelievable scene or plot hole. The biggest offender is the famous bank robbery scene in the middle of the movie. It would have been spectacular in an action movie that didn't take itself seriously. But in Heat, I couldn't stop thinking about how absurd it was that a few guys with automatic weapons were able to cut through the entire LAPD like a hot knife through butter, escaping clean in the process. I still greatly enjoyed that scene, largely because it's just a great action scene that is well choreographed and shot. However, it's sort of out of place in this film.

I'll give Heat some credit for not being a by-the-numbers cops and robbers movie. Maybe it is this uniqueness and the time of its release that made it so popular. Upon reflection though, there have been many crime and caper movies over the past few decades that are more entertaining than this one. Scarface, Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects, to name but a few. While I didn't hate this movie, I certainly don't think that it deserves a place in the Top 10 greatest crime dramas.

When I watched the first few episodes of this show, I was immediately hooked. The sci-fi premise was fascinating, and it looked like the show was accurately capturing the effect that a massive unexplained scientific event would have upon society. Just about everyone in the show had interesting flash forwards, and I was eager to see how the events in their lives would play out to make them come true. After the first few episodes though, the series stalled, and by the time that it ended, it was so bad that it was downright painful to watch.

The biggest problem with this series is that the main plot – i.e. the most intriguing reason to keep watching the show – never goes anywhere. Flash Forward reeks of a series that was being made up as it went along, with plot twists coming from further and further in left field until the show just ends without explaining any of it. When you watch a movie or a show like this, you are captivated at first, but then you gradually become disappointed as you slowly realize that the mystery will never be even partially explained. And that is because the authors themselves have no explanation. There never was one to begin with. The events in the story are not manifestations of an underlying phenomenon. They are just twists that were made up to keep you guessing. At the end, when the credits roll, you feel cheated, because you invested so much time and thought into it all, and all that you got were vaguely suggested conspiracies and a new unanswered question every week. Instead of a brilliant scientific mystery, you get a bunch of twaddle that a high schooler could have written.

Defenders of this type of trash will say "but it's not about finding out what happens, it's about the characters and their stories". Or, they will say that "it's more fun not knowing and deciding for yourself". This is like saying that the Harry Potter series would have been better if you cut out the last four chapters of every book, or that an Agatha Christie mystery would be better if it never revealed "whodunit". It's hogwash. The brilliance of a mystery is in its ability to have a relatively simple underlying explanation for a bunch of bizarre or unpredictable events. The Dr. Who series manages to do this somewhat. Each episode contains a mystery, and then there is often a greater mystery in each season that is wrapped up well in the finale.

What's actually in the series becomes progressively more idiotic with each episode, passing through mediocre and descending into painfully predictable and unintentionally funny. The characters don't garner any of the sympathy that they are supposed to. Lots of them, especially Joseph Fiennes and his wife, are imbeciles. A big part of the hook in the series is finding out how some of the strange flash forward visions come to pass. A recovering alcoholic is drunk in his flash forward. A wife is with another man. A guy with cancer meets a love interest. A single woman is pregnant and having an ultrasound. To my disappointment, the story arc that led to all of these being fulfilled was horribly contrived and lame.

While all of these characters are experiencing their lives (which we don't care about), a massive conspiracy story develops to explain the blackout event. Conspiracy after conspiracy unwraps in front of us. Some ultra secret organization with pretty much unlimited resources is basically responsible for it all. Why did they do this? Who are they? What was their ultimate goal? What are these experiments that they have been doing? Nothing is ever even remotely explained. The series ends, with a cliffhanger that was obviously intended as the lead-in for season 2. There never was one. If there had been, it would have just been more stringing along the viewer until the ratings finally couldn't keep the show afloat. Good riddance.

I went into the first episode of Girls with pretty low expectations. I figured that it would maybe be another Sex in the City, with some pointless softcore porn here and there, but I decided to try it out. It is now, along with Game of Thrones, one of my favorite shows on television. In fact, when we get a fresh set of shows on the DVR, Girls is always the first show that I want to watch. It is fresh, funny, and also a bit depressing at times. This is definitely not Sex and the City. That show was glamour and lightheartedness. This show, on the other hand, is about that bad experience that lots of people have coming out of college called "the quarter life crisis".

The tone of "Girls" is somewhat dark, cynical humor. It is about four young women out of college a year or so. They live in New York City, but unlike the Sex and the City ladies, they are struggling financially and, overall, they aren't very happy people. There are Sex and the City posters in a lot of scenes, as if to remind you that you are NOT watching that show. Their jobs are deadend-ish in nature, or just plain nonexistent. They have lots of what looks like unsatisfying or awkward sex. There is an undercurrent of disillusionment and shattered dreams with all of the plot lines. Graduating from college and moving to New York City, isn't the world supposed to be your oyster? Since you still have youthful good looks, freedom, and income, shouldn't your 20s be the most fun part of your life? Maybe for some, but that's not how it works for a lot of people. For some folks, either men or women, the years immediately after college are when you find out that the world truly doesn't care about you, or that you don't have the talent to do what you wanted to do. It is when you grow apart from your college boyfriend or girlfriend and wake up one day to find that you have nobody of significant romantic interest in your life. It is when you find out that there are jobs out there that are horribly boring and unsatisfying.

I normally get annoyed by the excessive (and often boring and pointless) sex in HBO's original series, but it fits into this series just fine. This show centers around the trials and tribulations of young women in their early to mid 20s, and one problem that they all share is an unsatisfying sex life. Having been raised and gone through college with today's "hookup" culture, the men in their lives are lazy. They barely have to lift a finger to get laid and they don't need to be romantic to seduce a woman at all. They have sex and then somebody goes home right after. If you are looking for one big feature to distinguish this show from Sex and the City, I think that this portrayal of modern sex culture would be it. Sex and the City portrayed it as glamorous and empowering for women. This show (and I am not sure if this is intentional) portrays it somewhat the opposite. Hannah has been having sex with her partner, Adam, for a long time, but she barely even knows him. Marnie has a long time boyfriend, but she's not turned on by or in love with him. The relationships that these women have are shallow and unsatisfying.

The themes are interesting, and the writing is clever too. The one liners are usually funny. The hijinx are sufficiently wacky and unpredictable. If you have shared experiences with the characters in this show, then I think that you will "get" it, and that you will find it funny. If you haven't, then this show might not appeal to you. If you were turned off from the show by its marketing or because you didn't want to see another "Sex and the City", then I highly encourage you to give it a look. Especially if you feel that you can identify with some of the characters. As a 38 year old man, I still could, despite being older and, well, male. This show doesn't appear to be too popular, and that disappoints me, because I really want there to be a second season.

I characterize "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" as a martial arts movie loved by people who normally don't like martial arts movies. It's mind boggling how much mileage this movie got out of its crappy, clichéd plot and annoying floaty fight scenes. The movie critics who gushed over this movie wouldn't know a great martial arts scene if they were karate chopped to the face with it. Before I saw this movie, I heard about how it had not only how it had a great epic plot, but also had excellent fight scenes. This movie has neither.

Let's talk about all of the floating. There is no gravity in this movie. The fight scenes have as much in common as footage of man walking on the moon as they do with the fight scenes in truly great martial arts movies. Ang Lee went crazy with wire tricks. Half of this movie is spent with people floating around on wires. Somebody takes a gentle jump off of the ground and floats across the room. It's ridiculous. When I saw this movie in the theater, there were numerous audible laughs from the audience at all of the unintentionally funny floating.

To make matters worse, the fight scenes are mostly a waste of time. There is no drama or plot advancement to them. For any action scene to work, there has to be a point to it. The good guy kills the bad guy and we rejoice, or the bad guy kills the good guy and we cry. Every great action scene in the history cinema has had some influence on the plot. Whoever made the dozens of cheap, cheesy Kung Fu movies that I watched on late night TV as a kid understood this. Ang Lee apparently doesn't. In many scenes, two people float around an arena fighting for five minutes, and nothing happens. You know that neither of them will get hurt, so from the beginning, it's a complete waste of time. This, unfortunately, is an epidemic in action movies nowadays. Action scenes seem like more of a tool to show off CGI or cinematography than to advance the plot in an exciting way.

This movie's plot is laughable. It easily ranks among the worst of any martial arts movie that I have ever seen. It's just a tired old cliché about an old master wanting to guide a young arrogant whippersnapper, with some "I want revenge on you because you killed my master" thrown in for good measure. The characters don't behave realistically and by the time that you are halfway, you won't even care what happens to them. When I first saw this movie, I almost felt like a practical joke had been played on me. I walked out of the theater saying "wow, is that it?" If this movie had been made in the 1970s with cheesy dubbing instead of subtitles, nobody would be giving it the praise that it has received. This is why I have labeled this movie as "a martial arts movie loved by people who normally don't like martial arts movies." People who see this movie don't realize that they are getting an old cheesy film on artistic steroids.

Do you want to see some great martial arts? Go to Wal-Mart and see if you can find some really cheap DVDs of old Chinese films from the 70s and 80s. Or, check out some Jackie Chan or Jet Li movies on Netflix. For a modern combination of great action and drama, I highly recommend Jet Li's Fearless. One of half a dozen fight scenes in that movie produce more adrenaline than all of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and its simple plot works really well too. If you normally wouldn't be caught dead watching a movie like that, then maybe you'll get something out of this one.

My wife and I are big fans of The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, True Blood, and Sex in the City. Needless to say, we were excited about the arrival of a series with a pedigree like Luck. Hooray -- a totally unique drama, with interesting subject matter, starring more big names than a typical Hollywood blockbuster. After watching the first and only season, I'm amazed at how utterly awful this series turned out. Luck is a completely garbled mess with a disastrously bad script, which it tries to cover up with lots of style and music. If you are thinking about watching this train wreck, I have one word of advice – don't. If you have watched a few episodes and you're checking in to see if this series gets better, then let me tell you – it doesn't.

Where to begin, where to begin? Should I start by telling you about the horrible theme song? It's the first HBO theme song that I have ever had to fast forward through. Should I start by telling you about all of the characters who mumble and are painful to listen to? Or should I start by telling you about the endless parade of side plots and undeveloped ancillary characters, whose fates we're supposed to care about, but don't?

Nope. I think that I'll start by telling you about how none of the plots in the show make sense, and how they don't even overlap. Luck could almost be split into five different TV series, and you wouldn't miss anything. There's the feature story, that of Dustin Hoffman getting out of prison and scheming up what appears to be some kind of revenge against his former partners in crime. Dustin Hoffman is totally unconvincing when it comes to being a wealthy, gangster-esque criminal. Then there's the #2 story, the story of four racing junkies who practically live at the racetrack and sleep at a nearby motel. Then there's an Irish jockey, Rosie, and her boss Nick Nolte, who owns a fast racehorse and mumbles about the "horsekillers" who killed that horses father. Then there's the story of Leon, a young jockey trying to break into the business who has trouble losing weight, and his stuttering agent Joey. Then there's the talented old jockey Ronnie, who has had problems with injuries and drug addictions. Then there's the insufferable jerk trainer Escalante and his bitchy veterinarian girlfriend.

There's almost no dialog overlap between any of these groups. I don't remember Dustin Hoffman sharing screen time with much more than Escalante and a few characters I didn't mention. The four racing fans buy a horse with Escalante as their trainer, but they pretty much stick to their own story. This is par for the course. You know how in True Blood and Game of Thrones, the first season started with essentially all of the main characters in one place as part of one big storyline? It's the complete opposite of what happens here.

Within each of these little groups, there are all kinds of convoluted little stories -- stories where it sounds like there are years of background that is never given to you, and stories loaded with nonsensical behavior and huge plot holes. Do you want some examples? Here, I'll give you examples… A. The Four Guys talk about buying a cheap horse. One of them thinks it's a terrible idea. The next day, they chip in for that same horse for FOUR TIMES THE COST, and everyone is suddenly hunky dory about it, with no explanation as to why this one guy changed his mind.

B. Dustin Hoffman's story centers on some huge scheme, whose workings we never understand. It has something to do with buying a horse track and casino gambling. We never learn if he really wants to buy a track or if it's just a ruse to get his enemies to invest in it. It doesn't make sense. His entire swindle/revenge plot is a confused mess.

C. Dustin Hoffman hires a young hotshot to work for him as a go between for this scheme. He states that he hires the kid because he's both naïve and annoying. But then he's genuinely upset when the target for this unexplained scheme (Michael Gambon's character) angrily kills the kid. Why? Is Dustin Hoffman a complete moron?

D. Rosie is in the last turn of a tight race. She has a fast horse, but she thinks that she might not win. So she whips it, and wins easily. Nick Nolte (the owner of the horse) explodes with anger, grabbing her riding crop and throwing it into the garbage. Rosie cries and apologizes a million times but she still gets sacked. She won the race, but apparently she wasn't supposed to work the horse that hard, or something. What if one of those other horses found a burst of speed and she lost? What did I miss here?

Those are just a few examples of something that happens in every episode. You expect to learn something later that explains what happened, and you never do. In addition to the stuff that makes no sense, there's all kinds of stuff that you don't care about. Ronnie snorts painkillers. *yawn* The horse trainer is pregnant. *yawn* Dustin Hoffman has an awkward, completely devoid of chemistry romance with Joan Allen. *yawn* The only entertainment value in that part of the show is looking at Joan Allen's wrecked face.

The only good parts of this show are Dennis Farina's character and the story of the four horse racing junkies. They have good chemistry together, and you actually care about what happens to them. That's the kind of quality that you expect when you watch an HBO series. Other than that, Luck is a complete fiasco.