I’m a fan of Vince Vaughn and of Jon Favreau. Ever since they did the indie buddy movie “Swingers”, these two have had a really good time together on sets, and that is apparent because usually their comic timing is pretty great together.

Heck, Favreau has even turned himself into quite the director, and I think he has some producer credits to his name also.  They’ve both come a long ways since Swingers, and many of their movies provide laugh after laugh at inappropriate behavior and bawdy bathroom humor, but it’s also got intelligence to it, which is why so many younger people, but not too young, enjoy it.

Along comes Couples Retreat though, which I can say I actually enjoyed for about the first half hour to forty minutes. And then – well, and then I don’ t really know what happens to this movie, but somewhere it veers off from funny and slightly edgy to totally losing it’s edge and going into the land of sapdome, all for the sake of making itself the latest crap romantic comedy dujour.

Not that I don’t understand.  I mean hey, at some point, you have to lose the audience that hates this stuff and appeal to a broader, more chick flickish type of crowd and be more, I don’t know – safe might be the word?

Malin Akerman, who made her big film debut in the movie Watchers, and was great in that, plays Vince Vaughn’s wife. The two of them are a totally committed couple that get talked into going on a couple’s retreat with their friends who are played by Kristin Bell and Jason Bateman, a couple about to split up under the pressure of trying and failing to conceive a child.  They are also joined by Jon Favreau and his wife, played by Kristin Davis, who have been married out of wedlock since high school and now can’t stand the sight of eachother.

I think they are the high point of the movie. Then we have Faizon Love and his new twenty year old girlfriend (he just got out of a long marriage and this is his rebound romance).  There are some funny scenes at the beginning of the movie, and some really funny situations, however I should have seen the writing on the wall when the kids who played Vaughn and Akerman’s little ones sappily told their parents that they wanted them to go away so that they “wouldn’t get a divorce”. Oy vey, really?

Let me just sum up the movie by saying this. There are about fifteen minutes of solid, funny content. The last 40 minutes is sappy drivel that’s just agonizing to watch. I felt like I went straight from a comedy to a movie of the week on Lifetime, the comedy was just sucked right out of it.  I felt like I wasted 40 minutes of my life and would have liked the movie a lot more had I switched it off when it was still funny.

The Bruce Willis movie Surrogates started off very promising. In fact, the sci fi premise was totally up my alley, as that is one of my favorite genres in film.  The beginning of the movie definitely seemed promising, with the news stories and jumps forward in time showing a progression toward the human race using what they call “surrogates” to go out and essentially live their lives for them.

With a surrogate, which most humans had instead of going out and living their lives themselves by the time in which the movie took place, you could basically enjoy your every fantasy, dangerous lifestyles if you wanted, and look any way you wanted, and never leave your home. Since surrogates were just a body, even murder was almost nonexistent,since if a surrogate was murdered, the person’s body would still be safe and sound in their own homes.

The problem with this of course was that the human race was not enjoying things with their own eyes. They had essentially become robot operators, which is the premise for the movie’s twist.  Bruce Willis plays a cop who uses a surrogate, like just about everyone else, when a series of murders takes place amongst the surrogate population. The only problem with this is that the weapon that is used essentially fries the brain of the surrogate and it’s host, so people who were operating the murdered surrogate were killed as well.

Tom, Bruce’s character, makes it his mission to find out what’s going on behind the murders, and also to deal with his own personal life, where he can’t even see his real wife any more, because she has become addicted to using her surrogate and is afraid to go out in the real world due to her grief over losing their child in a car accident, and we also see, her scarred face from the same car accident.

Ultimately, there is about a half hour lull in this movie where you just zone out. Things are happening, but some how, this movie just never gets the adrenaline going or makes you concerned for the characters of the outcome of the plot.  The twist is kind of hokey if you ask me, and the acting in this movie really needs to be amped up a bit.

Bruce Willis is ok, but he just seems like he’s going through the  motions, even when he’s not in his emotionless, robot surrogate body.  I don’t know, there is just something missing from this movie that needs to be added, perhaps the studio butchered it, because it is pretty short.

I don’t care how many bad reviews the Diablo Cody-written movie Jennifers Body got, I absolutely was 100% entertained when I was watching it last night.  My husband and I rented the movie on the outside chance that it might be somewhat campy and fun, which is a genre that we really like, and this was definitely both of those, heavily in the tradition of movies like Gingersnaps, an indie film about two sisters, one dowdy and doting on her sister, the other, the one that’s bitten by a werewolf, more shallow and of course more “hot”.

Jennifer’s Body stars Amanda Seyfried, a relative newcomer, but a very talented actress from what I can tell by her portrayal of the frumpy, somewhat nerdy “Needy” in Jennifers Body, and also stars Megan Fox as her hot cheerleader friend. Of course, the two are total opposites, and Jennifer, played by Megan Fox isn’t always sweet to Needy, but nonetheless, Needy is loyal to her “friend since the sandbox” and dotes on her, even has a small girl crush on her it seems.

The two go to see a band called Low Shoulder at the only bangin’ (dive) bar in Devil’s Kettle, so Jennifer can hit on the lead singer who she thinks is “extra salty” which I guess is some hip term for hot.  This movie is chock full of kitchy catch phrases.  I particularly love when Needy’s boyfriend says that the band is lame, with their brooding and their “manscara” poser look.  Sometimes it also reminds me of the campy dark comedy classic “Heathers” with Wynona Ryder that way.

Long story short, the bar ends up burning down and Jennifer ends up taking a ride in a creepy serial killer-like van with the band, while Needy tries to talk her out of it and gets left behind.  The band ends up being devil worshippers who are willing to sacrifice Jennifer, who they think is a virgin, so that they may become rich and famous.

Jennifer comes back from the ill fates van trip with an insatiable hunger for boy’s flesh.  She rips through the small town, eating boys and then barfing up blood.  Needy recognizes that something terrible has happened to Jennifer, and only gets murderous when her friend sets her sights on her boyfriend Chip, who is played by another great kid actor, Johnny Simmons.

All the actors do a great job in this, and for those that razzed Megan Fox’s acting capabilities in this, I’d challenge them to say that she didn’t act the narcissistic bimbo like she was supposed to, she was perfect in the role, so I don’t see why she got skewered for this role in some reviews that I read. Everyone played the role they were supposed to, and the lines were great, the scenery and the kid’s dialogue was pretty spot on for the angst feel they were going for, and goshdarnit, I was HIGHLY entertained!

Ok, so we watched the second episode of the much awaited spinoff to BSG, or Battle Star Galactica, for those of you unfortunate souls who have not become familiar with this awesome series yet. We actually had it recorded on our DVR for a while, maybe two weeks, and we finally got around to watching it, because the first one, the season premier, was just really boring and anticlimactic. I know that it’s supposed to be a drama more than a sci fi specatacle, but I guess I keep hoping for more of the intriguing characters and masterful acting and story lines of Galactica.

I keep reminding myself that it’s only the second episode, however, I remember when BSG first came on, I was addicted from the first episode, and it just got better and better from there, and that’s what I was hoping for with Caprica. We’ll give it a few more chances. Hopefully I won’t be watching the clock when we see the third episode!

The HBO showing of BBC original “Extras”, another Ricky Gervais original comedy that has he same flavor as his original “The Office” show, was a very smart idea.  Not because it gives us Americans another flavor of the smart, awkward situational, eccentric comedy that Ricky Gervais is known for, but because it also helps to diversify their shows into difference genres.

For those of you who are not familiar with Gervais, he is the British creator of the original hit series “The Office”. Yep, you’ll see his name in the credits for the American version, which I hate to say, is not quite as funny as the British original, but definitely hits some of the right comedic notes with leading man Steve Carell. You just can’t out do Ricky’s perfection as an awkward, yet always wanting to be loved character who tends to always say and do the wrong things.

Ok, so enough about my obvious admiration for Ricky’s comedic genius, let’s talk about the show “Extras” that aired a while ago on HBO.  It’s a show about Ricky, who is a forty something guy that has acting dreams, but can only seem to get the lowly work of being an extra, over and over again. He continuously rubs elbows with the famous, and there are some pretty hilarious cameos by several very big actors and actresses. To name a few, Kate Winslet, David Bowie, Orlando Bloom, Ben Stiller, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and more.

They are parody themselves, which is hilarious in itself. For instance, Orlando Bloom is obsessed with making Ricky’s bumbling female friend, Maggie, think he’s hot and desirable, because he’s an ego maniac. Patrick Stewart parodies himself as an actor who is obsessed with making awful, pointless films where women’s clothes are being ripped off the whole time.

Just the guest stars are hilarious, and they really show their acting chops by getting into poking fun at themselves a bit, you can just tell that the set must be fun and open, because everyone is at their best acting and showing their comedy chops.

Just as in The Office, Gervais plays a misunderstood, and yet constantly self loathing and self sabotaging awkward guy who can’t seem to get ahead in life or get the acceptance that he so craves. It’s funny, because as with his Office character David Brent, you feel awkward for him when he messes up, but you also feel like you wanna see the guy succeed, and you actually start to care for him.

I highly recommend checking out this witty, heady comedy, it’s a comedy with some intelligence and sarcasm to it, which is exactly my cup of tea.

I was a HUGE fan of the BSG, better known as the Battle Star Galactica, series on the Sy Fy channel. When the series ended, you’d have thought my best friend died. I actually went through a mourning period and didn’t think that any show could ever live up to it.  I was right, nothing has quite lived up to it yet to fill that genre for me, but I was hopeful when first the movie came out “The Plan” which was basically a huge disappointment and waste of time because it was all recapping stuff you already knew, and which was also why, when Caprica was coming on the airwaves, which is a spinoff of the the show, I got more excited than a nerd waiting in line for a Star Trek Convention.

And hey, I’m not knocking conventions, believe me, my hubbie is a huge comic book and sci fi fan, so I naturally have to be a bit nerdy myself.  I liked the idea behind Caprica, and I really liked the original tv movie that served as the pilot for the show also.

I thought the cast consisting of mainly Eric Stolz and Esai Morales, with relative newcomer as the young daughter of Eric Stolz (a scientist who has invented cylon technology) who died in a terrorist attack on a subway, making a positive splash as the outspoken rebel of a daughter whose belief in “one true god” defies the current conventional wisdom of several gods that rule the earth.  All a very interesting concept, no?

And the true, die hard BSG fans who miss the show no doubt will get some much pined for background about what caused and led up to the Cylon war and the ultimate invasion that destroyed all known inhabitable planets for man.

However, there is definitely something lacking in the show that needs to be addressed if they want to lure new viewers in and please the ones they already have, many of whom no doubt were avid fans of Battle Star.  First off, it bored me.  We were actually glad when the first episode was over, it was excruciating slow and boring, and didn’t seem to give us a lot of answers, or even any reason to believe we’d see any action in the next few episodes.

It didn’t leave me feeling like I couldn’t wait to see the next episode, and that is what I felt when I watched the pilot for BSG, so I was hoping they could duplicate that originality and sense of excitement with Caprica. Not yet. We can only hope it gets better, I really need a fix!

I love Netflix for the most part. It delivers movies right to your door, and their organization of your DVD cue is perfect, making it easy to find movies by their search feature, and adding them with the click of a button is phenomenal. I do however have a few complaints about them. My biggest complaint about Netlfix is that if you have a Blu Ray DVD player, it seems like you have to wait FOREVER for a movie to become available on Blu Ray for you to rent.

If it’s a new release, we have had to wait up to a month to get it. It just keeps saying “long wait’ or very long wait for weeks.  An example is that we have been waiting for Public Enemies ever since it came out, and we still haven’t gotten it. It’s almost not even worth it to rent the Blu Rays, but we have found that we love our Blu Ray player’s picture and sound quality so much more than when we play a regular DVD that we don’t like renting regular DVD’s now if we can get them in Blu Ray format.

I think that Netflix must not have enough Blu Rays in stock, and that is what causes the problem. Well, since a lot of people are converting to Blu Ray players, they really might want to invest in adding more Blu Rays to their collection of available rentals.

I also don’t like how you can’t find any new releases that were just released. It seems like all the movies in their “new releases” section aren’t really new releases, but often have really been out on DVD for months at that point. If I want to figure out what it truly a new release, I go to Amazon.com to see what their new releases are that week, then go and plug that in to the search bar on Netflix to get the movie added to my cue.

Netflix is very affordable and a great service otherwise, but they should try to correct these inconveniences so that they don’t rub people the wrong way and have them defect to the dreaded competition, Blockbuster online.

So, we finally got to see the first episode of Lost from this final season. We had DVR’d it, and we didnt’ get to watch it until just recently because we had obligations out the wazoo, and frankly I was just too tired to get through all 2-3 hours of it in one night after work. So we finally watched all of it, the recap, the episode 1 and then episode 2. It was great, of course, in typcial Lost fashion.

I’m really glad I watched the recap, because there are so many nuances, and so many characters even, that I had forgotten about from seasons past.  I had all but forgotten about characters like Ana Lucia and Boon and his sister (by the way, I did notice that Anna Lucia and Libby, both actresses that were fired from the show, conveniently didn’t show up in any of the flashback scenes).

If you haven’t seen the season premier, then spoiler alert, don’t read this.  We see now that with the new season, the bomb going off worked in putting them back to where it never happened. Except, wait, there are really two realities now, contrary to what they first led us to believe, that everyone was now safely on a plan headed home from Australia.  Of course, nothing is what it seems on this show, and you’ll rack your brains trying to figure out what’s truly going on.

I hate to break it to anyone who thinks we’ll have all the answers at the end of this show, but they can never tie up every single loose end they created.  For example, what about the strange animals that were on the island, and what about the big monster that chased them a few seasons ago?  I’m not sure that we’ll ever see those things.  Maybe it’s some sort of alternative reality where everything that has happened in the past shows up there, like creatures from the past, people that are dead, etc. etc.

But as I said, I don’t think it’s all going to be tied up for us in a neat package at the end, no matter how much we hope for that.  That’s kind of the draw of the show too though. Everyone has kind of assigned their own theories to what’s going on with the show, from religious theories like limbo and purgatory to time space continuum theories, to science fiction theories. That’s the fun of it, each person attributes the show to whatever their own belief systems are.

We watched the latest Cohen brothers movie “Burn After Reading” a couple of days ago, and I must say, it was surprisingly good. I laughed a lot, and thought that George Clooney and Brad Pitt – and let’s not forget John Malkovich and Frances McDormand, who is actually married to one of the Cohen brothers, were all brilliant in their offbeat, dingbat roles.  Everyone in this movie is in desperate need of some common sense and a little more intelligence, but that’s what makes the movie so darn entertaining. The only one with half a brain if John Malkovich, and he’s one mean SOB.

Brad Pitt may be the most “likable” character in the movie. He plays a hairbrained gym employee/trainer with an Elvis hairdo with a big skunk stripe through it. He is hilarious, and I dare say it’s some of his best work recently. I haven’t been a huge Brad Pitt fan for a long time, because it just seems like he phones in a lot of his roles and relies on his starpower to fill in the gaps. This one, he actually made you believe he was a dimwitted, if not well meaning dope who was trying to do a good deed and make a little money in the process. Of course, the whole “plan” goes haywire, and hilarity ensues, in the tradition of another Cohen movie, Fargo.

Here’s the plot line for Burn After Reading.  Malkovich plays a fired, disillusioned CIA employee who has more time than he can handle after losing his job. He writes memoirs of his time at the CIA, with names of some people that are high up, but nonetheless, it’s not really “classified information”.  When the disk falls into the hands of the dimwitted, naive Brad Pitt after being found on the Gym locker room floor where he and Frances McDormand are coworkers, they team up to return it to him, thinking he will be so happy to get this “classified” information back that he will pay them a handsome reward.

What ends up happening is a complex tale of misunderstandings leading to more misunderstandings, a fatal shooting and lots of other sequences that are both funny and dark, but all entertaining. Frances McDormand’s obsession with getting plastic surgery is especially funny.  It’s basically another story about common dolts trying to make money off of a situation and it leading to more chaos and complex chain reactions in the story line.  I’d have to say my favorite performance was by Clooney, who plays a horny married guy who’s retired from security duty.  He has a comic flair that I never realized before, and I think I like him more as a comedic actor than a serious one.

After hemming and hawing about how I didn’t understand how the Twilight books were so dang popular with women, because I quite frankly thought it sounded like somewhat of an ammature, teeny boppish foray in to a romance story that may have been a bit too sappy and overdone for my taste, I saw the movie Twilight. From there, because the movie held my attention and I was thoroughly entertained, I decided that reading the book might not be such a bad idea after all.  So, my husband got me the first three books in the series of 4 books (the fourth is not available in soft bound yet, and I hate hardback books, just a weird preference of mine).

I have finished the first one in the series by Stephenie Meyer called “Twilight”, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. It’s very entertaining. Now, I will say that I think this is way more of a junior sort of romance, rather than a supernatural or thriller book, and at times as a woman who is 35 years old, I do cringe and think of how unrealistic this all consuming love is, and how it set these poor young girls up for disappointment in real love with the main character Edward (the teen vampire) and his constant attentiveness. I mean, come on, as we get older, we know that men – and women for that matter – just aren’t like that. Heck, I doubt even a vampire could be so perfect!

But that’s also the sheer fun and escapist part of this book also. Of course, the story follows Isabella Swan, Bella for short, as she moves from dry, arid Arizona to live with her dad in a cold, damp town called Forks in the pacific northwest. The imagery is pretty cool that the author uses to describe the sheer green-ness fo the place, and the start contrasts between Forks and her hometown in AZ.  I love the descriptions of mossy tree trunks, and how the air is virtually green because of the lushness of the place.  I like how it transports you to Forks.   I think one of the best things about the story is the setting and how it’s sort of set apart from everything else.

She uses this as part of the story as to why the Cullens, Edward’s given vamp family, have settled in here.  Basically, this is really a romantic story about first love and it’s intensity, and intensify that by about a thousand times, the first touches, the first kiss, first feelings of bowled over love, and that’s what you have between Edward and Bella.  The rest is just back story and setting, it’s really more about these two exploring their love for eachother and trying to reconcile their two very different worlds – between the human and the supernatural world.

All the while, I can’t help wonder, is Bella going to eventually decide to turn vampire, so that she stop aging and live with her beloved Edward forever?  That’s the biggest question for me, and I don’t know how the second, third and fourth books go, so don’t tell me, I want to read them for myself!  I’m hoping to get around to the second book in the series, New Moon, when I have a few days off in a row again.