Micheal Bay is the kind of director that makes you want to hate movies forever. On his own, he is the man responsible for such cinematic abortions as "Bad Boys" 1 & 2, "Armageddon", "The Rock", "The Island" and his holy grail of crap, "Pearl Harbor." Coming from the world of commercials and music videos, Bay doesn't make movies so much as he makes two and a half hour TV spots. His trademark explosions an indecipherable editing style have helped lower entertainment standards across the board. More recently as a producer, he has seen fit to remake classic fright flicks, turning once revered horror movies into lifeless cash cows. "Friday The 13th" is the latest to be groped by his slimey hand.
Released in 1980, the original film takes place at the infamous Crystal Lake, a summer camp with an urban legend past. Year prior, a young camper named Jason Voorhees drowned in the nearby lake as horny teen counselors did what comes naturally(i.e., sex.) The entire camp was found murdered, leading the local yokels to nickname the site "Camp Blood." Several years later, the camp is reopened, much to the chagrin of the aforementioned locals. As the campers arrive, the new teen counselors begin to get killed by an unseen madman, often in conjunction with their indulgence in sex and the partaking of drugs. The deaths escalate and the tension tightens until the final moments when the killer, and their motive, is revealed.
Along with John Carpenter's "Halloween", "Friday The 13th" wrote the rulebook for the slasher movie, a sub-genre of exploitative thrillers thinly disguised as morality tales. The characters were usually made up of the broadest of archetypes; The jock, the slutty girl(s), the stoner, the outsider(punk, metal kid, goth, etc.), and of course, the "Final Girl"--the sole innocent of the group who inevitably escaped death. The slasher formula resulted in quite a few classics, but sadly was turned to parody by it's own sodomizing, it's unwillingness to experiment with the mold.
The new "Friday" starts by spoiling the originals climatic twist ending almost immediately before jumping to the present day. We meet our doomed teens hiking by the nefarious Crystal Lake. After the ham-handed campfire exposition, the gang quickly breaks off to: A)Have gratuitous sex and B) wander onto a rundown cabin and snoop around inside. A few obvious cat scares and one "Night Ranger" sing-a -long later, things end badly. Then the opening title card finally appears. Twenty three minutes on the clock and the movie has officially begun.
This chunk of the movie, which plays more as underwritten filler than story, also introduces another main character: Jason's pot garden. At some point, the serial slasher formed quite the taste for marijuana, harvesting a stash that would give Tommy Chong the munchies on sight alone.
Several weeks later(or as I call it, "Even more present day") we meet a new batch of kids, including the obligatory Asian stoner/comic relief and the racially sensitive black guy, along with the token sluts and jock A-holes. We also get a weak link to the opening act in the form of Clay (played by Jared Padalecki from TV's "Supernatural".) He shows up in town looking for his sister Whitney, the non-slut from the extended opening, who is now being held hostage in Jason's underground lair(Huh?).
Re-teaming from their previous collaboration on the god-awful remake to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", Bay, along with director Marcus Nispel and cinematographer Daniel Pearl have constructed a by-the-numbers and completely un-engaging motion picture. Characters are given zero backstory and no inkling of sympathy. Nispel's direction is dull and fails at the relatively simple task of staging decent deaths and nude scenes, the staples of the genre. Daniel Pearl, who never met a stage light he couldn't dim out of existence, photographs every scene as if he were creating mood lighting for a blind person.
The slasher movie genre may have never been genius, but it certainly deserves better than this.

At the height of her popularity, teen pop-tart Britney Spears decided it would be nice to try her hand at acting. The result was the 2001 opus Crossroads, not to be confused with the album by Eric Clapton or the movie starring Ralph "karate kid" Macchio, both which are arguably better than Mrs. Spears' vanity project.
Musicians becoming actors is not unusual. From Frank Sinatra to Mick Jagger to Fergie, the roads of film history are paved with many such accounts. Varied results aside, the urge to break out into another medium is a very human characteristic. The frumpy wish to look fabulous, the poor want to be rich, the rich yearn to be slightly richer. Not wanting to look foolish, most stick to what they do best. Mrs. Spears, however, has yet to discover what that is.
In Crossroads, Britney plays Lucy, a vacuous and valedictorian-y high school student; a girl next door. She holds resentment towards her father, Pete(Dan Aykroyd, turning in another dull role)who pushed her to study at the expense of her living a full and productive(readointless sex)high school career. Like all stereotypically oppressive movie parents, he just wants what's best for his little girl, i.e., pushing his own unfulfilled hopes and dreams on her.
Adding to this blistering high drama of teen soap proportions is the fact that she has fallen out of touch with her childhood friends Mimi and Kit(Taryn Manning and Zoe Soldana playing white-trash, pregnant outcast and token black bitch, respectively). After some Dawson's Creek-flavored graduation shenanigans, the girls decide to unearth an old shoe box of dreams they buried back when they were kids.
The lot of them reluctantly agree to a road trip to California together to serve all of their selfish aspirations--Kit to visit her long-distance boyfriend, Lucy to visit her estranged mother and Mimi--the optimist--to land a record deal in LA and in the process, reconnect with her disenchanted friends. From that point on, the movie becomes a breakneck hodge-podge of car breakdowns, karaoke throw-downs, uber-femme overacting and of course, trips to the waffle house.
Directed with generic aplomb by Tamra Davis--best known for her television work and dopey comedies like Billy Madison and Half-baked--Crossroads is at least as bad as either of those pictures. Mrs. Davis is, however, smart enough to get Mrs. Spears in her underpants twice within the first ten minutes of the show. Gotta pull in the kids somehow, and a teenage boy spank-fest will always pull in rentals.
The film fails spectacularly at every turn, not even showcasing the stars already limited talents to their extent. Her voice is too plain to sell any of the songs she is forced to belt out(including a highly butchered version of the 1980's anthem "I love rock and roll") and her acting talent is best described by not mentioning it at all. By the time the end credits mercifully roll, you almost wish that Ralph Macchio had been in the movie.

Rules:

1. Be sure to label your Journal "ILU" firstly.

2. Pick 2-5 of your friends you hold high as best buds or close people you love.

3. Display their icons or names and say something nice about each one of them. No limits on how much you say.

4. Say something they've done or do for you also. Include as many hearts as you want!

5. At the end of your "ILU" shout, tag 1-5 people to do this in their journal as well! Spread the love!

6. Be honest too. >:C

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My sister. And not in some friendly "you is like my sista" sort of way, I mean my actual one. She's an awesome artist(check her out, kids!)on top of being a great person. I'd like to think I'm saying that because she is a unique and interesting individual, not just because we're related. But you never know. Love ya, sis.


My best friend in the whole world. This guy introduced me to so many cool things and shaped my personality. I've said in the past that if we both didn't love chicks so much, I'd totally go gay for the man. I don't think he visits this site anymore(working towards a PHd will do that for you).


An artistic soul aged far beyond her years, this chick is awesome. She is a great writer and has a wonderfully irreverent style about her. Plus she's Canadian, which puts her a step up in my book. I love the girl's spirit and am glad to call her one of my pals.


A great little photographer and a spitfire of an Aussie gal. She's a metal chick and is cute as a button, too. I see great things for her in the future.

I tag--

For much of my movie going life, I have stayed to watch the end credits. At first it was just a habit my dad passed down to me as a way of avoiding the exiting crowd of people, but eventually stemmed from my love of MST3K, who would often continue to riff over the credits. It also gave me a chance to listen to other people's thoughts on the film, as my quality gauge is often opposed to the mainstream. Most times the reaction is varied, ranging from "Not bad" to "It was so good, I almost crapped my pants" , hardly ever being nearly unanimous either way, until lately when every person that passed me it the aisle was on the edge of rage.

One of the unwritten laws of the universe states that Godzilla© must be played by a man in a rubber suit. I’m not making this up, it’s scripture. Should this commandment be broken, the world would collapse upon itself and any semblance of a normal society would break down. The universe would fall into a deep abyss that not even Chuck Norris could rescue us from. In other words, utter chaos. Anyone who remembers the terrible 1998 American remake of the Big G can attest to that.

Besides classic Universal horror films such as Frankenstein and The Wolfman, the Big G is what people most identify with when you talk about monster movies. Of course, what people forget is that for it’s time, the 1954 film of Godzilla© a fairly serious cautionary tale against nuclear testing and it’s effects on the environment. What he’s most remembered for is silly wrasslin’ matches with other rubber suited beasties, laying waste to scale models of Tokyo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

At some point, the focus slowly shifted away from the grim casualties of the original to good old fashioned smashing stuff--scale models and functioning toy tanks were shown no mercy. The change in ethics wasn't that hard to understand, most people go to the movies to be entertained, not preached to. And watching a guy in a big lizard suit beating the stuffing out of buildings is pretty damn entertaining. No one cares much for the human characters in a Big G flick because, let’s face it, Godzilla© and his rouge’s gallery of creature friends are more interesting than us. Which is exactly the problem with a movie like Cloverfield.

Produced by J.J. Abrams, known for his TV shows like Lost, the movie takes place in New York, following a group of disposable 20-somethings as they throw one of their friends a going away party. The entire film unfolds through the point of view of one of the party goers videotaping the events as they occur, bringing to mind The Blair Witch Project from a few years back. Unfortunately for them--and us, since we're stuck with them--a gigantic monster shows up and lays waste to the greater Manhattan area.

Cloverfield is basically an exercise in flipping the middle finger to anyone who enjoys giant monster movies, and movies in general, for that matter. Imagine a Godzilla© movie where you never see Godzilla© and you start to get the idea of how irritating it is to watch the film. What we get instead of good old fashioned destruction is a non-existant plot that hinges on rescuing a guy’s girlfriend who may or may not hate his guts(assuming they haven't been stomped out of her).

Explosions happen all around but the camera perspective is to shaky to witness any of it. Entire action scenes are obscured by objects in the foreground and the videotaping character "being too scared" to look at it. The creature is scarcely seen, save for a few panic-stricken passing glances, at which point the thing looks more like a giant Kermit the frog than anything else.

It even manages to muck up the "found footage" conceit--originated by Cannibal Holocaust, not Blair Witch as many think--by splicing in earlier taped "backstory" with the explaination of, oh, well, crappy cameras do that. I have an old camcorder, and never once during playback has it ever jumped back and forth between present day and 2 months ago. Cheap plot device or not, that’s dirty pool the filmmakers are playing at.

The movie is like living having bad plumbing that causes you to glance back in the bowl to see if the waste has flushed, at once uncomfortable and insulting. What they should have done was screen The Host instead, an excellent south korean monster movie directed by Bong Joon-ho, instead of bothering with this half digested effort. Hell, even the worst of the Godzilla movies(often featuring the infant moppit Godzuke) would have made a fine substitution. At least that would have been entertaining.

They say that imitation is the best kind of flattery. Of course if that was the case, The Simpsons would be thrilled that Family Guy has been ripping them off since day one. But then again, The Simpsons is basically The Flintstones, which was itself an "homage" to The Honeymooners.
Being derivative for the sake of creativity is nothing new--most horror movies for the past 30 years have been cloning Halloween and Alien; there are more remakes than original movies being made by Hollywood; Quentin Tarantino wouldn't have a career had he not made his own foul-mouthed riff of City On Fire.
Success breeds imitation; if it worked once, why not try it twenty more times? The Ring/The Grudge/Dark Water, Flashdance/Footloose/Honey--you get the idea. And now, as chance has it, one of the best cult TV shows ever made is being riffed on by a new generation of chuckle-heads.
It's name is Incognito Cinema Warriors XP.
In 1988, Joel Hodgson, a stand up comedian from Minnesota, created what would become Mystery Science Theater 3000. The concept of the show was simple and brilliant; A working class guy is launched into space by a pair of mad scientists and forced to watch bad movies in the hopes to drive him, and eventually us, insane. Luckily for Joel, he is able to construct a number of robot friends to help him make fun of said crappy movies.
Finding a home at the newly formed station Comedy Central, the show became the channels' benchmark program overnight(Okay, maybe not completely overnight, but work with me here; I'm trying to condense for time). But as love affairs often do, the relationship ultimately soured. New management demanded the show be shortened to make room for extra commercials. With neither party willing to back down, the ensuing feud wrecked havoc on the programming schedule. After only seven episodes into it's seventh season, the show was canceled. A theatrical version was also made for Universal Studios, but did very poorly at the time due to lackluster advertising by the film company.
The show was picked up for three more seasons by the Sci-Fi network before it was once again let go. The series' final show was broadcast in the summer of 1999, with reruns finally ceasing nearly four years later.
A good idea never dies, which is evidenced by the recent resurgence of every one of the main MST3K cast members in one form or another. Head writer Mike Nelson, along with writer/performers Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett headline Rifftrax, a downloadable movie riffing service. Creator Joel Hodgson is joined by writers Trace Beaulieu, Frank Coniff, Mary Jo Pehl and Josh Weinstein at Cinematic Titanic, a much more interesting(and funny)concept, echoing the original spirit of the show.
And then there's these guys on myspace who call themselves the Incognito Cinema Warriors XP...