A random list of movies

Movies this week:
1. Maybe Baby: A British comedy about a BBC script-writer who decides to overcome his writer's block by writing about his marriage and trying to have a baby. (secretly, since his wife expressly forbade the whole idea.) It was a really good movie I thought. It had, what seemed to me, a nice reference to the movie Train Spotting, although, perhaps Train Spotting is just one among a large genre of teen angst heroin movies.

2. Twister. I had seen this one before, but I enjoyed it again. Every movie needs a villian, and in this movie, the villian was a corporate sponsored tornado chaser, who had no "instinct" and took credit for other people's ideas. The rivalry was so ridiculous that about half of the laugh lines in the movie were laughing at the writing about this rivalry. The special effects were amazing, if you enjoy watching flying combines, splintering barns and houses. If it were made today, it would be a good contender for 3D.

3. Miss March. Sort of in the spirit of Dumb and Dumber, except there was just one character who was really dumb. The other character had devoted himself to a life of chastity before marriage. Except that when his girlfriend insisted, he finally gave in, only to fall down a staircase and go into a coma for four years. When he awoke, his girlfriend was a Playboy Centerfold, and the two of them went across the country to confront her at the Playboy Mansion. There was some immature humor here and there, but it was a fairly competent story-line, with likeable characters.

4. Two Tickets to Paradise. Hey, there are these three guys that are my age. They are kind of like me in that they are all sort of thinking they'd be somebody by the time they got to be this age, but really aren't. They aren't like me in that they are going to drive across the country just so they can get in to see a football game. (or maybe it's baseball, I don't remember.) This is a movie that aspires, I think, to be a comedy of sorts, but not the laugh-out-loud kind of funny. If you're a lonely 38 year old guy, this one isn't going to cheer you up much, because I think all three guys go home at the end to hot twenty-something looking women, despite their "I'm so depressed I want to kill myself" attitudes.

5. Two Much. I watched about ten minutes of this, and realized I didn't have any idea what was going on, and didn't really care. It was either a funeral or a wedding. I know the plot has something to do with a guy dating two women by pretending he has a twin brother, but then it was a bunch of Italian cultural stuff, which is all pretty alien to me.

Other movies
TrainSpotting: Since I mentioned this above, I thought I'd bring it up again. I tried to watch this when it first came out on video, but I couldn't understand a word they said. I thought what they were saying must be important since it got all this highbrow critical attention. I rented it a few weeks ago on DVD, and turned on the english subtitles and found out that the actual script of the movie was pretty much what you should expect from a bunch of complete losers. Not a relevant line in the whole movie, unless you happen to be a heroin addict, or you were thinking about trying heroin, in which case, hopefully this movie would convince you that it wasn't worth it.

Bickford Schmeckley's Cool Ideas: A fun movie for nerds like me. Wouldn't it be cool if you could write about physics and women would read it and throw themselves at you? Okay, this guy, Bickford, has his memoir "The Book" stolen from him during a toga party, and he spends the rest of the movie trying to track it down. Meanwhile a group of D&D players recover the book from a homeless guy, who found The Book in a trash can, and make free copies to distribute over the campus. Certain passages and ideas in the book invoke a "braingasm" in the readers. In the end, Bickford concludes that he can't always be so serious, but he needs to enjoy life. The story was written and directed by a guy with ALS, or Lou Gherig's or something like that.

Gamers 2: You should also see Gamers, but Gamers 2 is really written from the perspective of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. How does it work; there are two parallel storylines. The players of the game have their own lives, and I think there is a romance between one of the players and the Dungeon Master, and maybe a side plot about some game shop... I don't remember. A lot of the jokes of the game are probably funny to non-players, but are definitely funny to players.

Dungeons and Dragons: The Movie. Most people don't like this movie, but I went into it, I guess, with low expectations, and those expectations were met. Namely, I asked the question; does this resemble what it looks like when I get together with my friends and play Dungeons and Dragons. And my conclusion is, yes; to the extent that the players in my games actually take the hooks and try to "role-play," the acting and storyline of this movie resembled precisely that. It looked like a random group of strangers (withoug backgrounds) mysteriously dropped into a ridiculous situation, and railroaded into a story-line. Exactly like D&D.