Obligatory Movie Reviews

My roommate rented a couple of movies from Blockbuster the other day, and I watched them. They were, without a doubt, three of the worst movies I've even seen. I'll skim through each one-

1) The Devil's Rejects- I'm still not even sure why I watched this in the first place. I can't really compare it to anything, other than say it is the visual representation of the aural holocaust that is Rob Zombie's music. The plot, if you can call it that, is this: Sadistic, evil family runs from sadistic, evil cop causing much death, pain, and human misery. Cop catches family, inflicts pain and misery, is then killed. Family is then killed in roadblock shootout. The entire movie leaves you feeling vaguely nauseous. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a one out of ten- only because of the Diamond Dallas Page cameo.

2) Mr. and Mrs. Smith- Am I the only person who really doesn't think that Angelina Jolie is really all that hot? I just don't see it. She wasn't hot in Gone in 60 Seconds, wasn't nearly as hot as Lara Croft should have been in Tomb Raider, wasn't hot when she adopted kids, and really was just average movie hot in this. If I ever met her, I don't think I could resist saying, "Hey Angelina! Gorbachev just called, he wants his forehead back." Also, this girl who was at the house while I was watching it drank a bottle of wine, and then tried to argue that Angelina was the most pretty/sophisticated/competent woman alive while I looked frantically for a thick book on a woman who was pretty, sophisticated, and competent to beat her to death with. I couldn't find/think of one, so I taped Denise Richards pictures from Playboy onto a Margaret Thatcher biography and used that. Also, why is every person employed at Angelina's "assassin agency" a woman of above average attractiveness? Is this some cheap ploy at female empowerment motivated by Charlie's Angels? Anyway, any movie that ends with a John Wu style shootout between the protagonist and an indiscriminate number of henchman armed with rocket launchers and submachine guns just doesn't do it for me. However, Brad Pitt is totally sweet.

3) War of the Worlds- This movie was excruciatingly horrible for the same reason Pearl Harbor was. A surefire way to make a crappy movie is to take a plot where the hero is basically helpless and pathetic, graft a cheap emotional plotline on top, and then market the hell out of it. Also, if the entire plot consists of said helpless protagonist trying to stay alive, don't make him a pathetic loser. Why do I care if the aliens kill Tom Cruise's industrial, divorced, poor father figure character? What am I supposed to be rooting for? a defeat of social darwinism? Awesome! It is also exceedingly hard for me to take Tom Cruise serious at any level, knowing that he believes this-

"one episode that is revealed to those who reach OT level III has been widely remarked upon in the press: the story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who first kidnapped certain individuals who were deemed "excess population" and loaded these individuals into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). These space planes were supposedly exact copies of Douglas DC-8s except with rocket engines. He then stacked hundreds of billions of these frozen victims around Earth's volcanoes 75 million years ago before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and brainwashing them with a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days, telling them lies of what they are and what the universe should be like and telling them that they are 3 different things: 'Jesus, God, and The Devil. The traumatized thetans subsequently clustered around human bodies because they watched the motion picture together, making them think they are all the same thing, in effect acting as invisible spiritual parasites known as "body thetans" that can only be removed using advanced Scientology techniques. Xenu is allegedly imprisoned in a mountain by a force field powered by an eternal battery. He is said to be still alive today."

Pathetic. The special effects were cool though!