Life rears its ugly head once again and begins to bog down my own personal blogosphere as of late, but that’s not to say I haven’t been watching movies. When real life bulks up to become annoying, I find myself watching some movies not to review or write about in critical detail but to simply kick back and relax a bit. Many of the movies become re-watches, flicks I know that I’m going to life so that I can shut off the old noggin and space out for a few, some are ones I’ve been meaning to watch but don’t really feel I can add to much to what has already been said of it. Work continues though, so it’s not all for loss, if you want to check out some reviews be sure to check out my write ups for Val Kilmer’s The Chaos Experiment, Steve Zahn, Lee Lee Sobieski and Danny Glover in Night Train and Nick Simmons Incarnate #1 over at Bloody Good Horror.

As for the fun stuff this week, the Criswell family finally made it out to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit! The Mrs. being the hard core fan of the family found the movie to be pretty great though she wishes she could have seen a lot of the content cut from the book, such as Dumbledore’s procession. The daughter was pretty devastated by the events that take place in the film but otherwise liked it quite a bit. For myself, I felt the movie was fantastic all around and though it may be the newness and the heat of the moment, mark it as amongst my favorite of the franchise so far. The setup for the final book is pretty great here and I can’t wait to see it all! I’ve read the books but not too closely, so the cut factors don’t bother me too much, so that’s a plus. And for an off note, let it be know that I love love love Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange. Rawr!

For the past week or two, mainly since I picked up a blu-ray player, I’ve found myself with an unexplained urge to watch The Fast and the Furious and its sequels. This is odd for me for a number of reasons, primarily because I’m the type that could give a shit about cars in general and I’m not the world biggest Vin Diesel fan either. The movies felt like they would lend themselves to the flashy colors and loud sounds of blu-ray though, so I suppose that was a driving factor. (Get it?) I did finally manage to give the first two films a watch this past week and ultimately, I didn’t hate them. There is a bit more story to them than I expected, at least in the first film, so it wasn’t too horrible. 2 Fast 2 Furious was really rather boring over all and flat, especially in comparison to the first movie and just felt like an over long episode of ‘generic action cop show’. I’m still planning on giving the the 3rd and 4th movies a shot but the urgency has now been sated, so it may be awhile for those. At least Jordana Brewster comes back for the latest flick!

I don’t buy a lot of DVDs and Blu-ray disks these days. The majority of my library is made up of review copies in from PR companies and a lot of rentals. Browsing through the Video on Demand choices on our UVerse box the other night in search of something mindless to throw on, I was thrilled to find one of my favorite comedies of late in the free VOD choices, Pineapple Express. Having seen it roughly three times now, this one has quickly earned its title as my default background movie. The first time through, I was pretty amazed in that the film isn’t just a simple “Cheech and Chong” ripoff, but actually a cleverly disguised action comedy. Seth Rogan has reached the over saturation point lately but he’s firing on all cylinders here, for me anyway. The highlight of the movie though is James Franco’s Saul Silver. Luckily, the movie holds up to repeated viewings and is just and funny the second and third times through and always serves well for turning off and tuning out.

Some may even say there’s quite a bit of physical resemblance to myself and my friend Chris many years ago, but that’s another story for another day!

The movie watching is still going on, but it has been more in the personal indulgence mode as of late. The writing continues on as well, but again more in the personal venue than of the public nature. Coming up, I’m expecting some new review disks in the mail any day now, in particular some blu-ray disks to start the coverage on that spectrum too!