Travis' Movie Extravaganza

Since our blog has been dormant for a few days and Laurette is off in babyland with her sister and mary payton, I figure it is up to me to carry the flag of our beloved blog. I was heading to Memphis in May, but after a last minute cancellation on my part (sorry Mitch) I have decided to lay low this weekend and do nothing. Sometimes that is the greatest thing...Nothing. Anyway, I have prepared for a weekend of bad food, movies, and sleep. I will give a quick report on each one as I go.
side note: since Laurette isn’t here I apologize in advance for bad grammar.

Smokin' Aces


Laurette's flight was at 6am this morning and when I returned from dropping her off at the airport I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I started this movie at 5:30am. A cool link for everyone...Free TV & Movies. This site has tons of tv shows and movies, from The Office to Captain Planet.

Smokin' Aces has a sort of Oceans 11 feel to it. Jeremy Piven of HBO's Entourage fame is the main character in this movie, but I say that loosely. In fact that was the main problem with the movie. I love Jeremy Piven as an actor, I have loved him ever since his movies with his former buddy John Cusack and that little known gem PCU, but in this movie you never really get to seem him do his thing. Anyway I have come to find out he is a real Richard Cranium (my dad always uses this term, prize to the first one who figures out what that means) in real life. For example, for Christmas one year he gave his friends DVD's of his own show Entourage. Ok, so back to the movie. Piven plays a Vegas magician who is in bed with the mob and gets in way over his head. When he goes to the Feds to snitch on all these crime bosses a bounty goes out on his head. Every hit man around comes to his hideout in Lake Tahoe in hopes of getting the reward. The movie is decent at best, and that is a sad thing. The movie has great actors all throughout, and even Alicia Keys and Common play great parts. The only issue is the movie moves so quickly you never really get to know the characters. I am hoping my next movie is a little better. This one was definitly an Ocean's Ripoff.

The Departed

This years Best Movie according to our good friend Oscar, the movie that finally got a win for Martin Scorsese....it lived up to all my expectations. This is a guy movie of all guy movies. It has mob ties, crooked cops, and believe it or not, a funny Alec Baldwin. Hard to believe this funny guy could go off on his kid like he did. He added a little lightness to such a heavy movie. It was awesome to see Jack Nicolson and Leo acting together. I have been hearing for a while now that Leo is the new Jack, and up until this movie I didn’t really believe it. I gave him props for his work in Gilbert Grape and The Aviator, but didn’t really think he was the new actor of our era. That change after seeing him hold his own in this movie opposite of Jack Nicholson. Even Mark Walberg did a heck of a job…No he didn’t do any Calvin Klein underwear commercials with the funky bunch in this movie, nor did he say “Donnie D’s on the backup, drug free so put the crack up.” (Marky Mark's Good Vibrations was always in the playlist at a Waxmaster Wolfe party back in the day.)

This movie is another hardcore Scorsese gangster movie, but that is what he is known for. Another thing Scorsese is known for is his impeccable taste in music. His soundtracks in movies are brilliant and he can match the perfect song for any occasion. Take for instance in this movie. Leo is in a Quickie Mart and some mobsters are giving the owner a hard time, well Leo decides to beat them down, and what is playing in the background “Nobody can do the twist like I can, Nobody can do the shake like I can…” you would never think it would fit in a beat down session, but it does.

Blood Diamond

Wow, that is all I can say right now about this one. It is so raw and real. I mean in your face real. I will have to get all my thoughts together on this one, and it will get its very own post after this. I dont want to look like a jerk and post about this movie and then move on to the next, so I will just leave it open and we will have one on the topic of Africa soon.

Also, you can help children in Africa...more on that to come, but enjoy these photos first.


For Your Consideration

I need to put in a comedy after being emotionally beat down by the last movie. Christopher Guest is one of my favorite directors, he is brilliant. He is known for his Mockumentaries like Spinaltap, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman. This is his latest....Time to wrap this up. I was spending just as much time blogging about a movie as it took to watch them, so I had to just put this down to finish my movies. Now I can do a quick wrap up. For Your Consideration is ok, but not the best of the Christopher Guest's movies. I am sure it would be funnier the second time I watched it, that is how all his movies are. Funny topic about what happens to actors when there is Oscar buzz on a movie set, and some of the characters are hilarious. Mississippi native Parker Posey does a great job as always. A good movie, but if you don't enjoy dry humor, probably wouldn’t like this one.

The Black Dahlia

This movie was terrible. I had high hopes for it. I am a big fan of murder mystery movies so I really thought this one would be great. I did a little research on the always reliable and trustworthy wikipedia about the actual Black Dahlia case before the movie and I was really thinking this would be great. The actual case, if you look at the who's who of suspects reads like a list at a upscale Hollywood party in the 50's...A publisher of the LA Times, Folk singer Woody Guthrie (who was Bob Dylan's mentor), Mega-Director Orson Welles, and on and on. So I was geared up for a really cool movie. What I got was a slow, boring, yawn fest that is more interested in the lives of the other characters then the actual case itself. The movie is actually based on a semi-fictional book about the case and it sticks line for line from the book so I am told. I was really bummed by this one. You know those cheesy skits that are in black and white and are about some dame walking into a detective’s smoky office talking about a murder she knew about. Well this movie was just like one of those skits only extended for two hours. Stay away from this movie. Trish you are right on this one, but totally wrong on the Richard Cranium guess.

Children of Men

This was my last movie and it made up for the horrible Black Dahlia movie. I am still upset that they took such an interesting murder case and made Pure D. Crap. Anyway, Children of Men is about the future in about 20 years. In the movie, women for some reason stop being fertile and no child has been born since 2008. Long story short all the other nations have collapsed except for Britain and it is in sort of a police state where Refuges are treated like dogs. It is all about the socio-political implications of our current society and what if something this devastating was to happen. As you can tell from that, yes it is a deep movie. I was a little worn out from my marathon of movies when I got to this one, I did enjoy it, but I did kind of mail it in. I am sure if this was the first movie I watched I would have liked it even more. The eeriest thing about the movie was there were no children in it. No background noise of kids playing in a park or anything like that. The filmmakers did a good job at not really drawing attention to that kinda of thing, but as a viewer you knew that stuff was missing.

So there it is thanks for indulging me for a while. It was quite a weekend, I didn’t leave the house on Saturday except to mow the yard, and now officially have a man-crush on Leo.