I mentioned last time and review the uber popular, instant classic reality show Jersey Shore. I just finished the first season on DVD. Yeah, I’m behind the times. I finally gave in and had to see what everyone was talking about.

I was tired of seeing and hearing “GTL” and other references and not knowing what the heck anyone was talking about, or who any of these people were that always were discussed. Of course Snookie is the biggest star of the show, and I now know why since she’s by far the most loveable/perplexing and entertaining one to watch.

I was most surprised by how much I enjoyed watching Snookie, and how she is actually the character I like best and could most picture myself hanging out with. Sure she’s wild and crazy, but she’s actually a really sweet and likeable girls, and she seems like she’d be hilarious to hang with.

But I digress.  This post is all about the infamous explosive relationship between two hotheads on the show, Sammy and Ronnie. They frustrated their room mates in the first season with their budding romance, and entertained viewers with their sometimes upsettingly explosive relationship.

Sammy and Ronnie seemed from the get go to really click, but relationships that start that quickly and are that passionate and all consuming are often destined for long term failure.  And apparently Ronnie and Sammy are no exception. The two reportedly split up and are totally over.

No reports on what caused the split, but apparently season two had these two getting into even more explosive fights, so it’s not shocking to say the least. Both of them, from what I saw in season one, had a lot of growing up to do. They talked about stuff without really “talking” like adults, and it seemed to me like puppy dog love. 

The gang is heading to Italy for the next season, so it should be interesting to see how these two interact, since they are reportedly both still signed on for the show.  I know that I’ll be watching!  The second season is currently on Netflix on demand, and my hubby and I are planning on watching it soon, before they take it away like they are so wont to do (shame on you Netflix!)

So, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but my hubby and I have gotten somewhat hooked on a few reality shows on the fantabulously trashy channel of all reality shows, Tru TV.  Although how “true” most reality shows are, I’m not quite sure.

Big Brian the Fortune Seller is one of those shows where you feel like you’re interested in the subject matter, but you’re not quite sure if half of it isn’t staged to make it more exciting than it really is.

The show is about Brian, a guy from Jersey, and his Jersey crew, which is a bit motley but otherwise pretty likable, who are in the profession of selling off people’s estates.  Now, I will say that what makes another similar show to this work really well, Hard Core Pawn, is that the family that runs the pawn shop on that show is very charsmatic and they have an interesting dynamic.

That is what this show lacks. It also seems very contrived a lot of the time.  There are definitely some staged scenes in it, and they are so obvious that they’re almost insulting.  The fast talkers that come in to buy things and the guy Brian himself who does all the bargaining for the estate items he’s selling is probably one of the more interesting parts.

Another interesting things is, if you are in to antiques and what things are worth, and finding “lost treasures” and interesting pieces of history is fascinating to you, then you will like a show like this.  It’s almost like HGTV’s “If Walls Could Talk” with a spin on it.

Overall, the show is ok. I wouldn’t say I’d watch  it again for sure, except it is only a half hour, so it’s not a massive waste of time if it sucks.

I’m in love with the AMC hit show Mad Men. I love the whole sensory experience of watching this show. There is something so effective about how the show is filmed, the colors they use, the furniture, the wardrobe, the whole ambiance, that is very authentic to the times it is trying to capture, which are the sixties.

I’m really loving season 4 so far. This season has Don Draper, the anti hero, stumbling through a problem with drinking and depression, womanizing, and coping with being newly single while his wife is already married to someone else.  I think that all of the actors have really found their niche with their characters as well.

The ex Mrs. Draper, played by January Jones, is still cool and calm, almost sociopathic in her demeanor, and we know that a depressed and unhappy woman lurks beneath the surface. We see her turbulent relationship with her daughter Sally take a turn for the worse as we just want to give the little girl the hugs and love she isn’t getting from her cold mother.

Betty has remarried, and very quickly, another man named Henry, who is a really nice guy that is starting to see his new wife may be a tad bit on the frigid side when it comes to certain emotions. 

Don is bedding every woman he can, taking his womanizing ways to a new low when he has a last minute quickie with his new secretary in a drunken stupor, making it a very uncomfortable situation for the impressionable young woman at work.

We also see him go back to visit Anna, the only woman alive who really knows who Don really is, his humble beginnings, and still loves him for it.  We also find out (SPOILER ALERT) that she has cancer and we get to see how much she really means to the usually cool on the emotions Draper.

This season has really started to show the changing times too. The hippy movement is just beginning. Free love, demonstrations and the newer, more forward thinking is starting to edge out the old school, more rigid school of thought, and Draper’s fledgeling new ad agency is struggling to cope with the quickly changing times and attitudes.

This season is just awesome so far. I thought the show might have had a bad season by now, but it has kept up with solid writing, acting and producing. Let’s hope it makes it a few more seasons!

Catherine Zeta Jones is a gorgeous actress whom many would have never expected to have a care in the world. A high profile, handsome husband, two beautiful children, and all the beauty, and money one could want.

However, her husband, the talented and handsome Michael Douglas, had just gone through cancer and suddenly her whole life was put into question. Her family, her future, and her beloved hubby’s life.  But that may have only been part of the equation. The actress recently came forward to the media and admitted that she has seeked treatment for bipolarism.

Many people suffer from this disease, which has people going through somewhat manic phases of up and down moods. There are different types of bipolarism, and Catherine does not have the most severe form, but it was bad enough to make her seek treatment.

And her coming forward with all her wealth, beauty and stardom, is very brave since it has sort of demystified it for other people and made it not such a taboo subject to talk about or admit to.

I really think this woman is brave and very giving by coming forward with this.  Now I not only think she’s a  beautiful and talented actress, but also genuine and down to earth, which I must admit I never thought of her as before.

My husband and I sat down to watch a little bit of the mini series that has been critically panned as well as tossed around by networks after being rejected by the History Channel, yesterday. It was really our replacement for other shows we’d rather be watching with dinner time, so we weren’t expecting much.

And we didn’t get much. While the series in interestingly filmed in a sort of dimmed way, the score of the series is so overly dramatic and soap-y that I can’t take this seriously at all.  The acting itself is ok, and quite frankly I don’t understand why Katie Holmes is being critically skewered for her performance as Jackie Kennedy.

I actually think she channels the first lady quite well. Then again, I’ve only seen about one hour of the show thus far, so I can’t really comment past that. She speaks like she did, and is soft and quiet, much like the first lady was during her husband’s presidency and candidacy, so I don’t see much derivation from the real person there – I think she did fine.

Greg Kinnear is hardly in it for the first hour of the show, with most of it being a flashback to his teen and early twenties. The stage is mostly given to his father, which is played a bit overbearingly by Tom Wilkinson. I think he soaps it up a bit too – but honestly I’m not sure if it’s the melodramatic lines he’s being given by the writers, or his delivery that make them sound so ridiculous.

The show is interesting only because it told me a few things I didn’t know since I’m no history buff like my husband is (he was appalled that I didn’t know some of these things by the way). I never knew that the Kennedys had another son who died in the war, Joe, whom the father desperately wanted to be the president.

I also never knew that Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the family, gained his fortune through bootlegging liquor.  It’s also interesting because you start to see the “Kennedy curse” unfold, beginning with the death of the golden son Joe, the “prodigal son” Jack (John) taking his place in the family’s presidential endeavors.

The mini series so far is not that impressive. I guess that it was dumped by the History Channel and taken by Reelz ultimately because they deemed it not historically accurate enough.  I think it also may have had something to do with the soap opera like presentation. They should have taken it a bit more seriously.  I’ll watch the rest, but so far it is mediocre.

My husband and I were flipping through our Netflix Instant options last night, and we came across a documentary that instantly piqued both of our interest. Especially mine, since I’d been interested in the Mothman legend since I read the crazy-suspenseful real life documentation story by John Keel, who has since passed away.

It’s a shame the author passed, since an interview with him could have been extremely revealing for this documentary, and he would have surely been a more credible interviewee than some of the questionable characters they had intereviewed. 

Overall, the Eyes of the Mothman documentary is well done. It accurately portrays a lot of the stories that were share din the Keel book Mothman Prophecies, and it also shares some interesting and plausible theories, seeming to be open to various theories other than the strictly super natural.

For anyone who has never heard of the legend of the Mothman, “it” is a creature that was spotted hundreds of times in the town of Point Pleasant, in West Virginia, and some surrounding communities for a year’s period of time by the townsfolk, reputable law enforcement, airplanes, and in short, way too many people to be just a mass hysteria or strange coincidence.

The stories will chill you to the bone, even if you don’t believe in that kind of stuff.  When I read the book over a year ago, I actually had the creeps for a while, so it’s a story that really gets to the root of human fear of the unknown. I think this story is probably one of the most compelling of the unexplained, simply because there are so many corroborated reports.

Not only were ther sightings of the mysterious, terrifying creature called the Mothman, but there were also massive reports of UFOs, flashing red lights, “men in black” who tried to tell the townsfolk not to share their sighting stories and seemed to be not of this world themselves, with similar features, and the story of Indrid Cold.

Also interesting is the fact that the Mothman’s “home” seemed to be a toxic dump that had once been a weapons manufacturing facility called the TNT area.  Theories ranges that perhaps the toxins seeped out and caused mass hysteria and delusion, to the very same toxins perhaps produced the strange creature called the Mothman by a mutation of some common large bird.

However, the theories that don’t include something otherworldly somehow don’t explain the other effects the sightings had on some people. Many people had inflamed eyes and radiation burns after coming into contact with the UFO’s, the strange beings, and the Mothman himself.

After a year, and the fall of the Silver Bridge, which was the small town’s largest tragedy ever, the sightings inexplicably ceased.  If you’re interest, you should be. The story is fascinating as it literally has hundreds of stories, many of which unfortunately cannot be told directly in a documentary any more because the witnesses have died.

I would recommend this documentary if you are interested in the unexplained – very interesting!

We had borrowed the Blu Ray movie Book of Eli, from a friend several weeks ago. It sat and collected dust for all that time, because honestly we didn’t think we would like it all that much.  Neither my husband nor I are huge fans of Denzel Washington, so we figured we’d keep it until we were done watching our other movies that were coming in as rentals first.

Well, the joke was on us, because we finally watched this interesting conceptual movie last night, and we were both very pleasantly surprised by the novel concept and the message that it sent, as well as the great production value, good acting, and excellent action sequences.

Denzel did a great job. He played a totally different character than he usually does in most of his other movies, which is why I really liked this one.  In the movie Book of Eli, you’re not quite sure what is going on, or the significance of Denzel’s character’s mission, until you are at least half way through the movie.

I like that though – it built suspense and got you to really like his character first.  What we know when the movie starts is that apparently some apocolyptic event has occurred, turning the world into a monchromatic dustbowl with little hope, rampant crime and dirty images.

In this way, it reminded me much of another post apocolyptic movie which was based on one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years “The Road”. 

Denzel can definitelly fight, and he’s one tough guy who seems to have an angel on his shoulder at times, but most of the time he fights his own battles and is more than capable in taking care of himself – almost as if he is superhuman, but not quite.

He comes on a little town that seems somewhat civilized, which is ruled by Gary Oldman, who we come to find out is looking for “the book”. This is where we find that the book he seeks is the bible.  All bibles have actually been burned “after the war” and he seeks it’s powerful words so he can bring all of the disenfranchised, the hopeless and those in need under his rule. 

He simply wants it for power.  He has sent his thugs out to find this book, and finally by chance finds that Denzel’s character (whom we figure out his name after the town scenes is Eli) is in possession of the King James version of the Bible.

This movie is very good, and it also has a great message.  We never do find out exactly how the world ended, we only get occasional allusions to great fireballs coming from the sky and people being burned alive, with very little hope, food, and clean water left afterwards.

I would highly recommend this movie to anyone. It’s got action and a message, and some great acting, as well as an interesting story line.  Mila Kunis, Jennifer Beals and Ray Stevenson also turn in great performances.

My husband and I are from the Jackass generation. We were at just the right age when the show reached its peak popularity on MTV, and for us, it brings back fond memories of being irresponsible, and well, a total jackass at that age. 

Now that we’re both in our thirties, we wondered if the stunts and crude tricks would still be amusing to us, and they are, much to our surprise.

We did however find it funny that some of the guys really seemed hesitant to do that same stuff they’d be chomping at the bit to do when they were younger, so it’s funny to see that the cast has grown old with us.

Definitely nostalgic, and I highly doubt that anyone else in any age group other than their thirties or early forties really “gets” this any more.  The team of carefree hipsters still consists of the main core, Steve O, who is off drugs and looks a lot better, but seems wary of the whole thing now.

Chris Pontius, aka Party Boy, who I was disappointed not to see in Jackass 3D, is still pretty much the same, although his physique isn’t as appealing as it used to be (yeah I’m a girl, and I used to think Pontius was hot). 

Bam Margera still looks the same and acts the same pretty much, and he took his parents April and Phil along for the ride. They appeared in one prank where a giant gorilla, which was Pontius dressed up, scared the shit out of Phil – literally.  It seemed a little forced and set up, but it was still pretty funny.

Some of the crude jokes were pretty disgusting, and no matter how much a fan of the show you are, they seemed to go a little over the top. One example is the volcano of feces – one of the guys stuck his painted green butt up through a landscape scene and must have just had an enema judging from the volanic eruption that occurred.  Use your imagination. You may want to skip that part, that one really grossed me out.

One of the funnier scenese was one where Steve O and Tyler went into a pen with a ram, a horn, and a tuba.  You get the gist.  There was also one where two guys dropped into a huge inflatable tube, with one on the other end, serving as a launch pad into a huge lake. Hilarious.

One of the best practical joke scenes featured Johnny Knoxvilled as the old man. He goes into a moped store and ends up going through a window.

All in all, if you’re a fan of the Jackass show, then go ahead and see Jackass 3D. I thought it was better than Jackass 2.