It took a long time, but I’m finally getting back to watching movies for watching movies sake. To some extent though, this return to movie watching tends to be dependent on whatever is on Cinemax or HBO while I’m playing Diablo 3! I’ll be damned if I can stop long enough to change the channel!

But seriously though, it feels good to get back to watching movies simply for the sake of it being fun to watch movies. This weekend found me with some extra time, so I indulged quite a bit.

First up….

For a more indepth review on this one, you’ll have to be sure to check in to the upcomng Bloody Good Horror Podcast. For our purposed here, I’ll just go ahead and say: I enjoyed the hell out of it! In fact, my comment to Colleen afterward was; “that was dumb as hell, but by god I loved it!”

Let’s be fair here: The premise is down right zany. The book was pretty zany too, although quite enjoyable. To expect anything less that zany in the movie version is just setting yourself up for disappointment. The crazy wire fu antics an over the top action scenes are this flick’s bread and butter. The story is secondary, yet still fun. For those of you coming from the book, this story is fairly different. Overall it is very condensed chopping out a good portion of the middle such as the Speed family and Abe’s rise through politics. It still hits the major points though! The ending however, is fairly different. Still, good fun all the same.

Safe House

BEEFCAKE! Er…Denzel and Ryan Reynolds. The commercials for “Safe House” pretty much spell everything out for you; there’s reall no big mystery going on here. For an action/spy flick, this one’s pretty by the numbers. However, Denzel is star caliber and Reynolds is getting there, so the acting makes this pretty watchable. The action sequences are pretty rote as are the twists but…it’s engaging. That’s really all I can say. Denzel’s Tobin Frost character is a good one and Reynold’s green behind the ears CIA agent is pretty solid as well.

That said, I can honestly say that I’m glad that I waited for video on this one (read: Screeners!) as opposed to shelling out ticket $$ for it when it was at the theaters. It was pretty good; not really $12 good though.

Project X

This flick promised a lot with it’s trailers. The crazy party, hints of some truly out of this world events taking place at said party, yadda yadda. Being a fan of the handheld trope when done right, I figured this would be worth a shot since that was the main gimmick they were going for. In a lot of ways, this worked in “Project X”; it had some really solid moments and some cool stuff going on from time to time. None of it really turned out to be mind blowing though. In the end, I sat through this expecting something outrageous to happen but instead I was given….”Animal House” as shot by handhelds. This still makes for some good laughs and a decent flick but it was just somewhat anticlamtic by the time it was all said and done.

The characters were are main driving force in this one and really, “Thomas” and “JB” did a pretty decent job. I’d have to say “Costa” did a decent job too, but if I was Thomas, Costa would have been murdered pretty early on. Then again, that just means that the kid play Costa was doing his job right!

All in all? I’d watch it again.

American Psycho

I watched about half of a lot of movies while playing Diablo 3, but most of them I’d glance over at pay attention to for 10-15 mintues at a time. It shows the power of this classic that I actually pushed the keyboard and mouse away and sat and watched “American Psycho” through to the end. Especially considering I’ve seen it three or four times already!

There’s much to say that hasn’t been said before about “American Psycho”. Christian Bale was simply fantastic at the role and there’s not much arguing it. I can say that having read the book in the time since my last viewing, it was pretty cool to see how well they did adapting it to a film. There’s a lot of idiosyncracies that were spelled out in internal monologues in the novel that actually translated well to the big screen. My first viewing, I’m not so sure I caught all of the subtleties, but they definitely stood out post read.

And finally….

True Blood 5×3: Whatever I Am, You Made Me

This season still can’t make up it’s mind if it’s going to be any good or not. All I can say is that so far, it’s better than Season 4. Man, they’re getting a bit long winded in parts though. Then again, I’m biased. I can ‘t freaking stand Tara and I’m still pissy that they didn’t keep her dead after Season 4. I honestly don’t know home much more I can take.

On the plus side? The Pam history lessons are fantastic! (As is the Pam.)