PCP on DVD - Law Abiding Citizen

It’s time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I will be talking about the film Law Abiding Citizen, which I finally got around to clearing from my Netflix queue.

Review:  Law Abiding Citizen.  Rating:  2.5 out of 5 stars. 

I wanted to love this movie.  It stars Jamie Foxx, who is awesome in most everything he does, and Gerard Butler who used to be awesome.  He was King Leonidas in 300 for crying out loud, but lately he's been choosing some pretty bad movies (this, Gamer, the Ugly Truth, and the Bounty Hunter).  Filling out the rest of the cast are some familiar faces including Colm Meaney (O’Brien on Star Trek: TNG & DS9) as a detective involved in the case, Bruce McGill (Collateral, Runaway Jury, My Cousin Vinny) as the district attorney that Jamie Foxx works under, and Leslie Bibb (Iron Man 1 and 2) as the required eye candy for a movie like this to have, but their characters are rather two-dimensional and not really any focus of the plot at all.  The plot is pretty conventional - guy's family gets killed, guy goes for revenge, and the system is so messed up he has to take justice into his own hands.  Only been done 100 times before.  They try something new, to make it a mystery as to how he's still killing people on the outside, while locked up in jail.  I don't want to blow the ending yet, but basically it is somewhat lame and filled with the mother of all plot holes.  Although there were a few good creative kills in this movie, ultimately this movie could have been so much better than it was, and because it was disappointing, it only gets an average score.  Watch it if you've got nothing better to do, but pass it up if there's anything else on.

SPOILER ALERT:  only keep reading past here if you've already seen the movie, as I will now discuss the ending.  Again, SPOILER ALERT- as reading past this point will tell you the ending of the movie so you've been warned.

PCP - Top 10 Worst Movies Ever Made

NOTE - originally posted by me on my friend's blog back on 9/27/10

Time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I’m gonna give you a taste of the worst movies ever made.

In my time watching movies, I have watched a number of awful movies.  Some I watched because there was absolutely nothing else on TV, some I watched because all new movies in a theater need to be screened before tickets can be sold for them, in order to make sure they were assembled properly.  One of these I even watched on a dare, but thankfully other than my time wasted and brain cells killed, I never paid to see any of these.  These 10 movies are so bad, they make Gigli look like an Oscar winner.  In order from bad to worst, these are the 10 most awful pieces of garbage I have ever wasted time watching.

10.  Bloodrayne. Never have so many good actors made such an awful piece of garbage.  Clearly they were all here for the paychecks and nothing else.  Directed by the extraordinarily awful Uwe Boll (he’s got 3 movies on this list), the videogame adaptation starred Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) as the title character.  The supporting cast was deep, including appearances by Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Meat Loaf (Fight Club), Billy Zane (Titanic), Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar), and Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) hamming it up as the villian.  Not even Kristanna Loken topless could save this movie.

9.  Teenage Caveman.  This straight to video disaster is completely and utterly awful.  It’s so bad it’s good, in a train wreck sort of way.  My then girlfriend (now wife) and I caught this on cable in college and we laughed our asses off at how awful this movie was.  You know you’re watching a bad movie when there is a scene that has one character stating that she knows she’ll die if she has sex with another character, due to his superhuman strength, but then she goes for it anyways because she wants him so bad.

Read more after the jump!

PCP on DVD - Year One

Note - this post was originally posted by me on my friend's blog on 10/24/10

Review:  Year One.  Rating 1.5 out of 5 stars.

For a movie with this deep of a talented comedic cast, this movie was not funny at all.  It was so bad that not even the outtakes at the end of the movie were funny.  This movie had a huge cast, including Jack Black (Tropic Thunder, Kung Fu Panda) and Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno) as the stars, and appearances by Oliver Platt, David Cross, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Vinnie Jones, Hank Azaria, Olivia Wilde, Xander Berkeley, Horatio Sanz, Bill Hader, and Paul Rudd.  It was written and directed by Harold Ramis, the writer ofCaddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters.  You’d think with a cast like that, this movie would be a riot.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t even come close.  It barely generates any chuckles and absolutely no laugh out loud moments.  Michael Cera plays the same wimpy nerd he plays in every movie he is in, and Jack Black is playing a raging idiot, like many of his movies.  It is the same characters they always play, just in a biblical setting that doesn’t even come close to being in the right time period – having the story of Abraham and Isaac taking place at the same time as the story of Cain and Abel, while they were many generations apart in the bible.  The only bright spot in the film is the fact that it has Olivia Wilde in it in a small role.  She’s smoking hot in anything she’s in, and she’s the reason this movie wasn’t scored even lower.  However, this movie is just flat out bad.  There’s a reason it bombed at the box office.  Don’t bother wasting your time because this one is totally not worth it.

Reminder:  if you want to see my rating history (1-10 scale) of every movie I’ve ever seen, you can see it here:  http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=1099042