The Bucket List
Directed by Rob Reiner
Starring Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Sean Hayes
Rated: PG-13
Released date: Jan 11, 2008

I like pizza. I’d say it’s one of my favorite foods. It’s easy, it’s always good, and you can create variety just by changing a few toppings around (I’d say I’m a supreme guy, for anyone interested). I also like chili and spaghetti. But if you tried to put chili and spaghetti on a pizza I don’t know that the end would justify the means. (Actually, that doesn’t sound half bad”¦). My point is just because you like the ingredients doesn’t mean you will like the finished product as a dish. You could say The Bucket List is kinda like a chili-spaghetti pizza.

I mean honestly, who doesn’t like Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson? The two of them have been in some incredible movies. Doesn’t it make sense that the two of them in a movie together would be good, if for no other reason than to see them in the same movie? Yes, that makes plenty of sense. What doesn’t make sense is why they picked such a lackluster project to finally work together. And don’t get me started on Rob Reiner — or as the name tag he would wear to a high school reunion would read, “Hi, My name is: I haven’t made a good movie in over a decade.”

27 Dresses
Directed by Anne Fletcher
Starring Katherine Heigl, Edward Burns, James Marsden, Malin Akerman
Rated PG-13
Release date: Jan. 18, 2008

Romantic comedies tend to exist in their own little world, don’t they? A world where they make up their own rules without any grasp, or even real connection to the rest of the planet. A world where everything gets a tidy treatment and at the end of the day everyone’s problems are solved in just under 100 minutes. They are the sitcoms of the movie world and they rarely make apologies to that point.

Having just sat through P.S. I Love You not 24 hours prior to watching 27 Dresses, I thought about the genre as a whole and did a little exercise. During the previews, I sat down and made a quick list of any plot devices I could think of that are overused in romantic comedies, just to see how many they would try in 27 Dresses. Again, this list was based strictly on my best grasp of the subject matter and the fact that I had seen a similar one not one day beforehand. This is not meant to be a complete list by any means, just what I wrote down before the movie started:

Rob & Big
The Complete Seasons 1 & 2 (Uncensored)
Starring Chris Boykin, Rob Dyrdek
Paramount Home Video
Available Jan. 8, 2008

Come on, you know the words. Sing along with me:

“My Buddy, (my buddy)
My Buddy, (my buddy)
Wherever I go, he goes”¦”

From the equally annoying yet perfect opening theme song, the MTV comedy reality series Rob & Big crams the idea of friendship down our throats with such force you almost turn away in disgust. The show follows the lives of professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek and his best friend and head of security Christopher “Big Black” Boykin. The premise of the show is simply to follow them around and document their antics, of which there are many.

YO! MTV Raps, The Headbangers Ball with Riki Rachtman, Remote Control, Liquid Television — these are the shows I think of when I think MTV. Or at least MTV as it was when I watched it regularly. I guess you could say I am one of those people who stopped watching “when they stopped playing music videos.” It just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I probably swung back during the initial Jackass craze, but for the most part I have, dare I say, outgrown MTV. But for all the new MTV programming that has been lost on me in the last 5-10 years, this show is different.

For starters, Rob & Big is watchable. That seems like a simple idea but think about it, MTV is, at the very least, partially responsible for the demise of the American attention span. The oft-tired, quick-cut, Ridley Scott-style of editing was damn near invented by MTV. So to say this is watchable says something different from the jump. Along with its watchability, the show is funny. Not the typical flash in the pan, “watch this guy take a bat to the nuts” funny; it is “sit by yourself after a hard couple of days and laugh out loud” funny. That these two are best friends is apparent from the beginning, but once you start watching the show, you see how genuine their friendship is, and that comes through in how funny the show is.

Halloween (2007)
2-Disc Unrated Special Edition
Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell, Sheri Moon Zombie
Genius Products/The Weinstein Company
Available Dec. 18, 2007

“Go for it. Make it your movie.”

According to director Rob Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects) during a special feature titled “Re-Imagining Halloween,” that is what John Carpenter said when he respectfully contacted him to tell him he was directing a remake of his 1978 classic. Zombie goes on to say that when he decided to remake — sorry re-imagine — Halloween he wanted avoid making a shot-by-shot remake since that movie already exists (agreed). So without any creative input from Carpenter, that is precisely what he did.

This movie is something of an anomaly. It is a remake of an arguable classic, the granddaddy of all slasher movies, the movie to which every A, B, C, and Z-grade horror movie owes its existence. It is also a Rob Zombie movie. What a testament to his directorial abilities that after only two films, the expectation for that label is already this high. There were enough built-in reasons that this movie’s theatrical release had no business being as successful as it was. More surprising, the success wasn’t a result of Zombie fans flooding theaters and inflating the box office, it was actually a really good movie.

In his attempt to make this movie his own, Zombie did more than just update actors and wardrobe, he rocked the original right to its core and restructured the whole story from the ground up. The first half of this movie is the new material and most glaring change to the story. We start in a world previously unearthed in the Halloween universe. Much goes into explaining young Myers’ backstory before the original batch of Halloween night killings.

Lost
The Complete Third Season
Starring Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway, Dominic Monaghan
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Available Dec. 11, 2007

WARNING: *Possible spoilers*

Rarely does a show come along that lends itself so openly to viewer participation. Listening to story complaints and even going so far as to allow viewer complaints to be a driving force behind structuring the schedule of the episodes, the creators of Lost, while keeping the show on its projected path, are very dialed in on what the viewers want. When the season originally aired, it was shown in two blocks of episodes. As a way of silencing complaints of all the reruns that littered previous seasons, Season Three opened with a six-episode run. Then after a 3-month hiatus, it returned with 16 new episodes in a row. This was a valid complaint as no other show relies so heavily on continuity as does the Lost universe.

The beauty of a show like this is that when executed properly, the ambiguity actually adds to the richness of the overall mythology. But balancing between the introduction of new story elements and answers to previous ones has been the Achilles’ heel of the show since the pilot aired.

When we left the island in the excellent season two finale, Jack (Matthew Fox), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), and Kate (Evangeline Lilly) had been captured by the Others. Hurley (Jorge Garcia) had been released and sent back to camp with the message that they were never to return. And Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) were given a boat by the Others with the coordinates to finally get off the island and return home. It was an explosive episode (pun, intended) that left viewers clamoring for more.

But season three didn’t start with the same intensity. We see that Jack is being held captive in the Hydra (another Dharma Initiative station) while being interrogated by a new Other, Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell). Kate and Sawyer were kept in nearby cages and it is revealed that “Henry Gale,” whose real name is Ben (Michael Emerson), is in fact the leader of the Others. As the season gets under way, there are few answers from previous episodes and new questions mount quickly. The initial batch of episodes felt like a tease. While they weren’t great, they were hardly terrible either. My biggest complaint echoed that of every other person that watched and loved the show, simply not enough answers. At the very least, the ratio between answering existing questions and introducing new ones didn’t balance out.