So having in recent weeks subjected my wife to “Snowpiercer” (“What kind of train has an aquarium and a nightclub in it?”) and “Ender’s Game” (“All I’ve figured out so far is it’s a bunch of kids playing video games.”), I decided we needed something she might actually pay attention to. Enter “Just Like Heaven“, AKA the romantic comedy where the ghost of Tracy Flick meets the Incredible Hulk, with an assist from Napoleon Dynamite. Or something like that.
So we’re in the home stretch of the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot now, nearly halfway through season 4. And by “we” I mean “me”, as my wife has more or less tuned “BSG” out at this point, except for some of the scenes where Al from “Quantum Leap”* (AKA Dean Stockwell) shows up, and the occasional conversation like this that ensues if she happens to be awake when I start an episode:
Continue reading “Still Not A Review Of “Battlestar Galactica””
So I recently watched “28 Weeks Later“, the sequel to Danny Boyle’s classic “28 Days Later“, the film that helped to usher in the “fast zombie”* boomlet of the early 2000s. Like its predecessor, “28 Weeks Later” boasts a very strong cast (including Rose Byrne, Robert Carlyle, Harold Perrineau, and Jeremy Renner) and it delivers the apocalyptic mayhem, but unfortunately it suffers from the fact that the characters behave in incredibly stupid ways. If you imagine that they took Season 3 Andrea from “The Walking Dead” and put her in charge of a military operation to repopulate Britain after it was devastated by the rage virus from the first film, you’re not far off.
Because my wife studiously ignored the presence of this movie in the house, I can’t use the usual rating system of how long it took her to fall asleep. Therefore, I’m going to dust off the “badmovies.org” style of bullet-pointed summary, which I think was last used in my infamous pan of “August Rush“, to illustrate some of the important things “28 Weeks Later” taught us. Needless to say, there will be …
So, it’s been a while since I posted a “movie review”. The reason for the dearth of recent writeups is not that we haven’t been watching movies, but that she hasn’t really been paying attention to them lately, for various reasons, including that none of them is “Breaking Bad“. Anyway, here’s a sample of some of the selections that have arrived and departed unremarked. (Longtime readers will recall that the ratings system I use is, “How many minutes did it take for this movie to put my wife to sleep?” By that standard, none of these did very well.)
Continue reading “Freezing Bad; Or, Not A Review Of “Frozen River””
So recently I mentioned that, after any number of other series were rejected, I decided we would start watching the 2003 reboot of “Battlestar Galactica”. Obviously this show could not possibly be as good as “Breaking Bad”, because what is? But it’s still pretty good. It tends to put my wife to sleep in 15-20 minutes or so, which is longer than most movies can keep Mr. Sandman at bay. But does she actually pay any attention to it when she’s awake? For a while I didn’t think so. She didn’t really seem to know or particularly care who anyone was, leading to conversations like this:
So I previously mentioned that, having finished “Breaking Bad“, I have now been charged with finding a new show that can catch and hold my wife’s attention. Although there’s been no shortage of suggestions on shows that might fit the bill, those who are familiar with my movie rating system (“This movie put my wife to sleep in X minutes”) will not be surprised to hear that the search is not going well. WARNING: Minor spoilers below!
So as everyone knows, for the past several months we’ve been binge-watching “Breaking Bad” (which, for us, means watching one to one-and-a-half episodes a night). Sadly, we have recently come to the end of the series. Season Five started out a bit slow, and introduced some new characters, which caused a very slight and temporary slump in interest.
Continue reading “Neither A Review Of “Breaking Bad” Nor Of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen””
So here we are, partway through the fourth season of “Breaking Bad”, which we started watching on Netflix back in January — obviously we are amateurs when it comes to binge-watching TV shows. At this point “Breaking Bad” has pretty much been enshrined as the Best Show Ever. Not only does it not put my wife to sleep (with the single exception of the episode “Fly“, which she characterized as “too ‘Breakfast Club’-ish”; despite being a card-carrying member of Generation X, she is not a fan of “The Breakfast Club”), but she actually tries to get me to stay awake for it. Shades of “Beasts of the Southern Wild“!
Continue reading “Still, Still Not A Review Of “Breaking Bad””
A few weeks ago I mentioned that we had started watching “Breaking Bad” on Netflix, and that my wife had immediately become addicted to it. At this point we’re partway through Season 3, and is she any less addicted? Oh no.
Viscosity 