Reviews - College

Well, today's review will cover the Deb Hagan film College. I've been putting this one off for awhile. The film tells the all too familiar story of high school kids away for a weekend visiting, you guessed it, college.

While the formula may remain the same, the details make or break a movie like this.

First a synopsis:
Kevin (Drake Bell), Carter (Andrew Caldwell, and Morris (Kevin Covais) take a weekend trip after a friend from school raves about the craziness experienced over the weekend while visiting college. Following suit the trio swings by Fieldmont University looking for some excitement. They end up as pledges at the most notorious fraternity on campus, and are subsequently administered some serious hazing. However, humiliation aside, they are given access to the fraternity's wild parties, and end up each meeting a sorority cutie. Fraternity president Teague, played by Nick Zano, is somewhat jealous of the boys success with the women. So he concocts even more severe and increasingly humiliating punishments for the boys to sustain, in exchange for keeping their educational status a secret from their love interests. Frustrated to no end, the trio devise a plan to exercise their revenge and get the girls.

In a nutshell, don't waste your time. The movie is an insult to self-respecting college movies everywhere. I can't even begin to list the number or things wrong with this movie.
Or can I.

-Trying too hard to be Superbad.

-A normal kid + a fat kid + a nerdy kid does not Superbad make.

-Nobody has ever been to a party like the parties depicted in this movie. And if you have, you're in the 0.01 percentile that have. For the rest of us this all just feels horribly fake.

-It's horribly fake.

-The nudity is a joke. Pointless nudity is best saved for straight to cable soft-core B porn. In movies such as this it never fails that what nudity there is has absolutely nothing to do with advancing what meager plot there is. Nudity in movies like this only makes sense when it involves the female/male main or supporting characters. Intentional insertion of random tits is insulting in situations such as this.

-This is a rated R movie, yet it's clearly aimed at those with the mental capacity of a sixteen year old, and that just doesn't make any sense. They should have axed content to hit the PG-13 crowd, it would have been much more successful.

-Nick Zano wishes he was Ryan Reynolds, and it doesn't work. Only Ryan Reynolds and Jason Lee are allowed to look like Ryan Reynolds.

-Everything is exaggerated. It just feels like the writer/director sat down and watched 10 decent movies, took all the funny parts, and asked themselves "How can we make this ExTrEmE!!." And by extreme I mean murderous to any suspension of disbelief the audience came with.

-Fieldmont University... FU. Are you fucking kidding me? That's the oldest and stupidest trick in the "college movie" playbook. Port Chester was fucking genius compared to this nonsense.

I could go on, but it's only a 45 minute lunch. Maybe if I ever watch it again I'll pay attention long enough to elaborate. But it's long returned to DVD rental oblivion.
What was good? Hmmm...

-Bearcat, relatively entertaining, but if you're going to make him hairy, keep him hairy the whole movie. Don't be normal and then a werewolf in the only scene that involves excess hair.

That's pretty much it.

Half a keg of Schlitz out of five.

Get it, it's a pony keg.

Didn't laugh?? Good now you know how I felt watching this piece of shit.

Apologies to the good people at Schlitz.

I'm out.
Jimmy

Yeah but where you gonna keep it?

So here's a trillion dollars, just for reference.

Pallats of $100 million double stacked. The tiny red thing on the left is a man.

That's a whole lot of Cheez-it's™.

More on that here.

A Week in the Life - All Work and No Play Makes Jimmy a Dull Boy

Well, this week is a free week for the most part. No musical happenings to say the least. Still, it's a busy week as I try to catch up on neglected schoolwork (as per my M.O., one class is a breeze, the other is a mountain of work. Why? I'm not sure).

In addition, taxes were filed last week and now refunds must be appropriated in the manner most suited to eliminating debt and/or catching up on ever looming mortgage payments.

Likewise, the house needs maintenance, another ever looming issue. Had the ol' septic tank empited the other day. You see, while our house does lie within the city limits, at the time it was built (1961 methinks) a septic tank was pretty much your only option. We may still need a visit from Roto-Rooter, as the pipes are still running a bit slow. I'll give it the ol' college try later on today (insert mad plunging here).

Hopefully today we'll be able to catch Coraline in 3D while it's still at the theaters. Here in the LC a new set of 10 screens just opened up at the local shopping mall. Previously the Mesilla Valley Mall contained 8 screens, 4 outside and 4 inside. When the company opened up 12 screens on the north side of town they shut down the outside four screens. Now they've closed the other four and built an addon to the mall complete with comfy stadium seating, an in-house restaurant, and some rocking digital projectors. It opened on March 6th, just in time for use to catch Watchment on Sunday afternoon. But more on that later.

All in all that brings us 26 screens, 4 cheapo second run and 22 digital. Nice work keeping the tickets down to a reasonable 8 bucks as well.

This weekend there's a plethora of activity. Some distant relative has a baby shower on Saturday, and on Sunday we'll be at my company picnic. Weather permitting of course. In the evening you'll find me with family, watching the latest DVD releases a second time (Milk and Role Models), tinkering with my now Level 80 Death Knight in World of Warcraft, and hopefully blowing the dust off my guitars, both real and plastic. I've been itching for some more progression through Rock Band 2.

Lastly, I need to seriously get on it when it comes to communication. I haven't updated anything lately. Facebook, nothin'... MySpace... pshh... Twitter... zzzzz..... I'm failing miserably at this interpersonal communication. Haven't called my parents/brother in at least two weeks. Hell, my friend Geoff lives 5 minutes away and I haven't seen him in two months! Needless to say I need to spend an hour or so over the week and call everyone just to say hi. Alot of good it does utilizing all this fabulous technology to reconnect with long lost friends only to "add" them and shuffle them off into the long lost pile again. And a blog post or two couldn't hurt either...

So, there ya go, one more week in the harnessed madness that is my life. Here's to the hope that your's goes easier, and to the appreciation that it's not nearly as bad as it is for some.

As always,
Jimmy