Movies

You can tell when neither of us have looked at our Netflix queue in a while when we end up with two movies at home, and neither of us want to watch either of them. We both tend to add things to the queue on a whim, sometimes because the system recommends them to us based on past rentals, and sometimes because I feel like we "should" watch some of the classics. And sometimes the desire to watch the movie fades before the sucker even makes it to our door.

That's how we ended up with Deliverance and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest a couple weeks ago. Oops ... need to break those up with a comedy in between, I think.


And for the past week we've been sitting on Hello, Dolly! and Live Free or Die Hard, or whatever the last Bruce Willis epic was called. When movies sit around for more than a couple days, both of us start getting antsy, because Netflix only makes sense if you turnover movies pretty regularly. We finally gave in and started watching these paragons of cinema earlier this week when the kiddo went to bed before 8pm.


Boy, was Hello, Dolly! much worse than I expected. I mean, Barbra can sing her ass off and all, but like Jason said, musicals kinda suck when there's too much singing just for singing's sake. And this sucker had a lot of five-minute-long pointless dance numbers in it. I mean, you can say that somebody sitting down and singing a soliloquy is believable, but when the entire population of Yonkers decides to come out for a dance routine before boarding the train to NYC, that's pushing things a bit. Oh, and in case you're ever planning to write a musical, never include more than two far-fetched romantic hookups, okay? Four was waaaaay too many.

Speaking of far-fetched, the Bruce Willis movie takes the cake. Any time you manage to shoot down a helicopter by launching the car you're driving up a concrete bridge support (while you roll out at the last minute and don't fatally wound yourself), you're skating on thin ice. And when chunky henchmen with inexplicable French (?) accents suddenly go all Cirque du Soleil during a fight scene, you've crossed a line you really should have respected. At least the computer geek was cute.

The only thing that's saving our Netflix membership is the fact that we rented Eddie Murphy: Delirious a while ago, and it was every bit as good today as it was when we watched it in high school. Well, okay, the stuff about gays at the beginning is a bit offensive now, but the rest was hilarious. It's appalling how much of my high school lexicon was linked to that movie, now that I think about it, and how many of the little catchphrases still pop up in our conversations regularly. If you've never watched it - and you have a relatively high threshold for crude language - you really need to see it.


As a matter of fact, thanks to the ice cream truck that just cruised past our house (ICE CREAM! ICE CREAM!!), you don't have to go far, just click on the link below to see the "Ice Cream Man" bit from the video.

THIS VIDEO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK!