A Scanner Darkly (2006)

This is one of those movies where after the credits roll, I say "WHAT!" and immediately go to check wikipedia in search of an explanation to what I just saw. Oh yes, now I understand that this is a movie about drug abuse written by a psychoactive drug abuser.

It's difficult to say exactly what I saw. The high contrast filter that they used to film the movie certainly gave it a weird feeling. Many of the scenes were purposefully disturbing, probably to simulate the feeling of losing your mind. I'm guessing that this is what it's like to have brain damage, most likely an experience more or less like having a high fever or sleep deprivation, but with people all around you that are supposed to help you but don't. The final scene is a memoriam to some people maimed by drug use. A tribute to a bunch of people that fucked themselves up and curse the system for failing them. I like that.

Philip K Dick uses blue flowers as a symbol of all his drug problems. According to wikipedia, the blue flower is a symbol of "desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable". I'll bet that's what people think about when they go from a life of total freedom to group therapy and a padded cell. Violins weep and we go to credits.

Keanu Reeves plays an insane guy that whispers a lot of psychosomatic stuff.
Rating: 50%

Star Trek (2009)

This was so epic. I only watched this to see how bad it was but it became awesome at the very beginning and the rest of the movie thereafter became fucking epic.

The last few years have been pretty bleak for sci-fi with StarGate getting canceled and the BattleStar series getting perma ended, so people have been itching to get back into space. Enter Star Trek, the disgraced franchise that ended in 2002 with Captain Picard fighting an angry clone of himself in Star Trek Nemesis. Pretty shitty. Also, they killed Data, which is fucking bullshit. Now enter director JJ Abrams, who lifts Star Trek out of the dumpster and cleans it up, taking out all the nerdy bullshit and drawing up the most realistic version of the future I've seen to date.

But that isn't enough. If you end with that, Star Trek will die the way that the Firefly movie did. So Abrams added a new storyline with 2 of the most poignant topics of our time: your parents and your career. These unlikely topics are, strangely, things that all people seem to care about. They represent the sum of your past and future, and you stand in the rift between them. No matter how amoral or apathetic you seem in person, you can erase neither your parents nor your career from your identity. So, you watch Kirk and Spock grow up with parents that love them and make sacrifices for them. Then you see them make the hard choices that lead them to an occupation with endless possibility. That is what people want to see. That is a gripping story.

FIRE EVERYTHING! is now a meme
Rating: 100%

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

This film is fucking terrible. I don't know how coked out Matthew Mcconaughey was when he signed the contract, but it couldn't be nearly as coked out as he was during actual filming. Or maybe instead he was doing truckloads of crystal meth with a little dose of mountain moonshine thrown in for flavor, considering he's a fucking hick who comes from hillbilly country and his brother's name is fucking "Rooster."

On second thought, since his character is supposed to be drunk during most of the movie, he couldn't possibly have been imbibing any form of alcohol at all, since he's such a brutally terrible actor he couldn't even pull this off. He just keeps drinking shot glasses of what is most likely iced tea, without even bothering to act like it's hard liquor until you're sitting there going, "Ok, drink up that iced tea, boy. That's a good sport, pretend like you know what the fuck you're doing."

No part of his character is even slightly believable. Supposedly he is a professional photographer who is also a skilled womanizer, able to bone every chick he meets. The little actresses they hired to play the women he molests do their best to almost literally throw themselves at him, which is kind of hilarious seeing how badly he reads his lines. When he drops his pickup lines it sounds like he's failing middle school drama. He looks and talks like someone grabbed a vagrant off the street and gave him a makeover.

Eventually he gets haunted in the bathroom by a molester ghost who's his dead uncle who I guess was his inspiration to be a walking STD dispenser. He sort of acts like he's freaked out, then kind of fake-stumbles back to the party he was at, and immediatly grabs some old GILF's tits and starts trying to convince her to fuck him. This scene is totally insane by any standard. Not only does he forget that he just saw a dead person, now he's trying to get himself some ancient poon that he just met in a party full of young, nubile bodies. He really goes at it too, telling her that she's probably a great fuck and that he really wants to squirt his load into that barren tomb of a uterus. It's completely revolting and makes no god damn sense at all, in terms of absolutely everything else in the movie. Maybe seeing a corpse made him want to rape a corpse, I don't know.

The movie, I dare say, get's kind of better MAYBE as it progresses, but the first half-hour, oh fuck. The theatre was totally empty except for me and my girlfriend, so I just buried my face in her tits and tried to cry myself to sleep.

To put it in terms of how categorically awful this movie is, I was thinking to myself, "you know, it really hurts me to say this...but...but I think that, at this moment, I actually would rather be watching Twilight than this movie, right now."

Yes, Twilight. This movie was so bad, I would rather have been watching Twilight. Yes, it is that eye-and-ear-bleedingly bad.

Ok, maybe not Twilight. But this movie is pretty bad.

(2007)

I'm on a Steve Carell movie blitz. I find everything about him to be funny so I will watch any movie that he is in. I guess it's his face and the way he talks that I find so funny. I remember watching The 40 Year Old Virgin many years ago and finding it just weird. "Absurdly unrealistic", I'd thought. But years passed and I think about how awkward things actually are in real life and suddenly awkward humor finds it's hilarious place in my mind.

This is the first Steve Carell movie that I've seen where he attempts a serious romantic drama. So, this movie isn't actually as awkward as I would've liked, but it still turned out really well. A single father of 3 daughters, Dan is an underachiever and a parenting advice columnist struggling with cumbersome family matters of his own. Of course, this isn't his only source of trouble. The many years of being a single father are gnawing at his sanity. Most of the time, I would find a movie like this to be mild and boring, but with Carell, it's acting gold omg hillllarious.

Rating: 80%