Dental humor.

Ghost Town

I love this movie. The end.

I really do have reasons why I like it though. It’s very witty, heart warming and stars Ricky Gervais. that sentence alone should be enough to let you know of its greatness and glory.

So there’s this dentist right. He’s a ornery A-hole. He goes in for a colonoscopy (what a bummer), gets an anesthetic so he won’t feel his bum feelings and then has a crappy experience. He goes home and starts “hallucinating” and seeing all these people everywhere. It turns out that the crappy experience wasn’t the colonoscopy itself but he died for approximately 7 minutes and then gained the power to see dead people.

Enter Greg Kinnear. He died in the beginning of the movie and is a ghost now. He finds Dr. Ricky and follows him around and tries to get him to get his widow to dump her affianced. Enter Tea Leoni. She’s pretty. Dr. Ricky thinks so too and tries to get her to fall for him. She does, then doesn’t and then other stuff happens.

He eventually stops being an A-hole and helps the ghosts get to the other side and she falls for him. More stuff happens but it needs to be seen to be appreciated. mostly because Dr. Ricky and the Kinnear are comedic geniuses.

Watch it or don’t but if you choose the latter get ready to fight me because I’ll make you watch it. Peace out interweb!

Side Note: My wife and my first kiss was while watching this movie. Another reason why I love it so much.

pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich

I don’t know how to tell you I feel about this movie. I hate watching Forrest Gump because it seems so long. I was dreading watching it, to be honest, but once I watch it, I almost always cry through the whole thing. If you were to ask me if I like this movie, I would say no. But if you were to make me sit down and watch it, as we did last night, I would laugh and cry and shake my fist and shake my head and my dog just fell off the couch and that was awesome to watch!

Synopsis: Forrest Gump is a couple saucers short of a full serving set. He meets Jenny on a school bus and they’s like peas and carrots. Forrest overcomes his disability and achieves fantastic things. He meets the president, he uncovers the Watergate scandal, and he runs across the country something like 31 times. Jenny, on the other hand, gets hit a lot and has sex. A lot. She gets AIDS, Forrest and Jenny get married, and then she dies. Sorry if I gave something away, but who hasn’t seen this movie at least once in the past ten years, when it has shown on the TV every Sunday night? That’s what I thought. I’ll go on.

So I love this movie and I hate it, and this blog shall serve as the medium through which I will sort it out.

Things to not love about Forrest Gump:

• I am not all too concerned about the circumstances under which Jenny grew up. It’s true that she was super, super good to Forrest, but whatever. She was a tramp, and I find it vile that she had sex with all those yucky people, then had a baby with Forrest, and didn’t even bother to get tested for all of the STD’s that she indubitably had at this point. Movies about tramps that defy the odds are not cool.
• I cannot get over Tom Hanks in this role. He pulls it off masterfully well, but I think that might be part of the problem. I don’t know. There’s just something about it that bothers me. I see him as Forrest Gump, and it is just incredibly off-putting to me.

Things to love about Forrest Gump:

• The film score is amazing. Probably my favorite film score of all time, second to The Last of the Mohicans. It seems almost cliche, I know, but The Last of the Mohicans score is just good. But as far as film scores go, it’s too trendy. So good music at the top of the pros list.
• The soundtrack is awesome. This is different from the Forrest Gump theme, so I am counting it separately. This soundtrack is one that you could watch the movie just for the music if you wanted to. I guess probably because it covers several decades (the best decades in music–which is to say nothing in the past 20 years or so) and the best music from each. Several times the Bear and I burst into song. They should have a singalong version of Forrest Gump. That’s all I’m saying.
• So many life lessons. Don’t do drugs. Don’t join the Black Panthers. Hippies do lots of drugs. Stupid is as stupid does, and as it turns out, life really is like a box of chocolates. Forrest could not have known, especially in his limited capacity, that he was going to coin the phrase “Shit Happens,” that being wounded in the buttocks was going to bring him worldwide acclaim as a ping pong champion, or that there were so many different ways to cook shrimp.

So I guess I love this movie. And I guess the reason why I might love this movie is because I really do love movies about people who overcome their circumstances and do incredible things (I’m talking about Forrest, not Jenny. Ho.). And I love movies that make me cry.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

Hey, I’m not an animal! I… I am.

I think we need to start putting reviews of new movies we have seen on this blog. I am going to start with the movie I saw last night. While Steve was gone, I went and saw Marmaduke. No one I knew really had any interest in seeing it (I can’t imagine why–those trailers were hilarious!) and it had been a while since I went to a movie alone (read: a week and a half!), so I went by myself. Probably not the best movie ever. But I loved it.

The leading man in the movie (other than Marmaduke) was one of the worst actors I have ever seen, but the leading lady was none other than Judy Greer, who as far as I’m aware, has strictly been a character actress thus far in her career. Like Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones, I was glad to see one of my favorite actors in a leading role. Even if she was just playing the mother to a Great Dane.

I think Marmaduke is a must-see for all little children and dog lovers everywhere. It made me miss my little Pommers back home, and inspired me to train him really well because he is just too cute to not be a circus dog or something. (His repertoire currently consists of sit, come, and we are working on “Get up!” and “Look at me!” with dismal results.)

The CGI in this movie was very minimal. According to IMDB, the only CGI in the movie was lip syncing the dogs. (I am skeptical though, as I’m not positive that you could ever train a Great Dane to stand up and do the robot, but whatev.) The dogs were really smart and at times you forget that they are animals, but once I started forcing myself to remind myself that these dogs were being trained to do all this stuff they were doing in the movie. Super impressive.

One thing I really would have liked to see in this movie is more rescue/shelter dogs. All of the dogs were obviously purebreds, even the “mutts” that Marmaduke chills with are purebred (Australian Shepherd, Dachshund, and Chinese Crested). I stayed after the credits to see where they got the dogs for the movie, and it regretfully was not a shelter. I thought that would have been pretty great, but alas.

The movie was a combination of 10% Marley & Me, 10% The Ugly Dachshund, and 80% Some Kind of Wonderful. That’s right, in Marmaduke, Mary Stuart Masterson’s equal is an Australian Shepherd whose crush, a Great Dane (Eric Stoltz), thinks he’s in love with a Sheltie (Lea Thompson). It’s amusing a little bit. I love Some Kind of Wonderful.

But anyway, if you love dogs, please see this movie. Dogs are the smartest animals in the whole world and I’m pretty sure I need to have 20 other ones so they can have awesome parties while I’m gone.

I want to kill everyone. Satan is good. Satan is our pal.

There are really only two reasons I love The Burbs.

As Exhibit A, I present Pre-1991 Tom Hanks. (I say pre-1991, because Joe Versus the Volcano is the best movie of all time and it was 1990.) When I think of my favorite movies starring Tom Hanks, I do not think of any movies post-Apollo 13 when he started pumping out dramas and less-slapstick style goofy movies. It is just a fact that Tom Hanks was a much better actor in his early comedies than he is now. If you dare to disagree with me, please educate yourself with the following movies and get back to me with your arguments:

1. Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
2. Turner & Hooch (1989)
3. Big (1988)
4. The Money Pit (1986)
5. The Man with One Red Shoe (1985)

In case you couldn’t tell, I would rather just not take Tom Hanks seriously at all, please. And never after 1990. And never in The Terminal. What was that mess about anyway?

As Exhibit B, I call to mind the fact that the three ‘burbanites in the movie are exactly like Steve (Ray Peterson) and two of his friends, Fred (Art Weingartner) and Bryan (Lt. Mark Rumsfield). I also like this because in this fictional world, that makes me Carrie Fisher/Princess Leia. Steve and Ray are the wife-pleasing types who are slightly reluctant to get involved in the schemes that Fred/Art is always trying to get into. Top it off with a paranoid Bryan/Rumsfield who is always packing. We all know Bryan’s going to end up with a trophy wife who is constantly wearing a bikini. Intermittently throughout the movie, Stephen or I could be heard declaring, “Oh man, that is SO Fred!” It’s like the theme movie for their trio. So cute.

This movie is so ridiculous and so good. I guarantee that you will see it and really wish that you had some weird neighbor drama going on. I feel that same way about Disturbia. It just makes me wish more than anything that my neighbors were serial killers. I guess I’ll settle for the scary burbs-esque furnace in my basement and the run-of-the-mill drug dealer neighbors I have now.

Sigh. Life is hard.

Before: Steve is half excited for the movie. The other half is afraid of my furnace.

Before: Half excited. Half worried about the furnace.

AFTER: If you look closely enough, you might see the remains of two of your movie watching heroes in there. RIP.