Jaws!

One of the all time great movie speeches...

Here is a link to the story historical account of the story he tells.

10 "Bad" 80's Movies You Probably Haven't Seen....but should.

I don't actually know the average age of my readers, but I assume that many of you were not part of the movie watching public in the 1980's.  For those of you that were, you will enjoy this as a bit of nostalgia.

All of these movies were relatively dissapointing at the box office, but are very entertaining.  Most of them were on HBO round the clock in the 80's and early 90's.  Some are considered to be not very good, but don't trust "them", these are movies you'll enjoy watching.

1. Big Trouble in Little China

This movie is incredibly awesome.  John Carpenter directed and Kurt Russell owns this movie as the ridiculously over self-confident Jack Burton. There are so many quotable lines in this movie it's ridiculous. In the commentary on my DVD Kurt Russell says that whenever he gets on an elevator with random dudes, they always make a reference to this movie. It is one of my life goals to ride an elevator with Kurt Russell to do just that.

2. Tremors

Another intentionally "bad" movie. This is probably Kevin Bacon's defining role and what catapulted him into the stratosphere of megastardom and having his own trivia game named after him.  This movie is about giant worms, but don't let that scare you off.  The worms are just an excuse to bring amazing characters together and let them do what they do best, be amazing characters. Michael Gross (of Family Ties fame) and Reba McIntire (of bad country music fame) are hilarious in smaller supporting roles.  Also, you'll be saying "Hey there Old Fred" alot after watching this movie. One last thing, Tremors and Big Trouble in Little China share one cast member. Below is the one of the best scenes in the movie....

3. Spies Like Us

Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd, as 2 decoy spies in this theatrical bomb.  This is probably one of the last times that Chevy Chase was funny, but man, when he was on, he could deliver a great line better than anyone. Akroyd is perfect using faux technical jargon, and his wife, Donna Dixon, plays Chevy's love interest. This scene is from early in the film. It isn't my favorite scene, but it is pretty indicative of the humor.

4. Three O'Clock High

There is almost no way you have seen this movie, no matter how old you are.  It's about a high school fight that is meant to take place at 3 o'clock, and the tension that builds as that hour approaches. Casey Siemaszko plays the lead, you may remember him from Young Guns. Also, be sure to catch the voice of Lisa Simpson. The first 10 minutes are in this link. The clocking ticking off and on throughout the movie really helps build the tension. 

5. Midnight Madness

1980. Virtually still the 70's.  Michael J. Fox's first role.  A wacky story about several teams of kids who are on a giant city wide scavenger hunt. This is the definitive scavenger hunt movie. Also an 80's cable classic.  Fun movie, with a cameo by Paul Ruebens (aka Pee Wee Herman). Michael J. Fox shows up about 3:00 in this clip.

6. Can't Buy Me Love

This is the quintessential 80's movie.  It encapsulates all the rest of the classic 80's movies (Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) into one film.  The trailer below explains the plot. Which is the classic nerd becomes cool 80's story. The nerd is played by none other than McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) from Grey's Anatomy. Also, Seth Green plays Dempsey's overly mature younger brother.

7. Inner Space

Dennis Quaid is a test pilot who gets shrunk down to microscopic size and accidentally injected into the body of Martin Short. Hilarity and adventure ensue. Also, young Meg Ryan is in this movie too.

8. The Best of Times

Robin Williams plays a guy who dropped the winning touchdown pass in the big game in high school. He has spent his entire life being the "guy who dropped the ball", so he arranges to have the game played again 20 years later.  Kurt Russell plays his best friend and the famous quarterback who threw the pass. Great freaking movie!

9. All The Right Moves

Another high school football movie. This one starring Tom Cruise. It was on every afternoon in February in 1985.

10. Mr. Mom

This one wasn't a theatrical bomb, but it has fallen off the radar. Michael Keaton doesn't even have a career anymore, but that dude was a beast in the 80's and this is him in the perfect role (long before he played Batman). He gets laid off from a Detroit auto-company and in order to pay the bills his wife (Teri Garr) goes back to the corporate world, leaving him at home with the three kids. We get to watch him spiral down into the hysterical abyss of a stay at home dad, and then rise again, in a great training montage parody. 

There you have it. 10 movies you should watch if you have insomnia, get your wisdom teeth out, are trapped in a room with Netflix or you have no purpose in life.

Which kind of person are you? (not a personality test)

 What’s it all about?  What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of my existence? Why am I here?  Does it even matter if I’m here?  These are some of the questions that haunt us as we consider what we should do with our lives.  We want to make our lives count. We want to be important, we want to be significant. Ultimately we want to live a life that matters. We want to know what life is really all about so that our lives will not be an insignificant waste of time. In order to answer the question, “What is life all about?”, we have to figure out what kind of person we are.  What we believe about the universe we live in. So what kind of person are you?

    In the summer of 2002 I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s film Signs.  It was advertised as “the scariest movie you will ever see”. I am not someone who sees many scary movies, but I went to see this movie anyway because I enjoyed Mr. Shyamalan’s previous films immensely. After seeing the film I realized it wasn’t about all the things that were advertised.  Yes, there were frightening and tense moments in the movie, but those were just a backdrop for the question that Mr. Shyamalan was asking the audience - “What kind of person are you?”   

     The story that allows this question to  be raised involves aliens coming to earth.  Sounds weird, I know, but its effective. In the film Mel Gibson plays Graham, a minister who has lost his faith as a result of  a tragic accident where his wife was killed in a car crash.  The critical point in the story is a conversation between Mel Gibson’s character and his ex-baseball player younger brother, Merrill, played by Juaquin Phoenix.

    As they sit in the dark and stare at the TV and see alien ships hovering over different cities on TV they are gripped by curiosity and fear. 

  I encourage you to watch the rest of the movie, because it addresses this question further.  We have to ask ourselves the same question.  Which kind of person am I?  Is everything we experience just a product of random chance.  A product of a series of chemical reactions that cause certain people to do and say certain things that affect other people and ultimately us as well.  Or is there more to life than just randomness. Is there a purpose? Is there a reason that we are here? What kind of universe do you believe in, a universe that exists by accident, or something that was designed?

    This is a topic that is hotly debated in our culture today. The debate has taken on lots of names; “culture war” , “Creation v. Evolution” , “Science v. God”. The purpose of this blog is not to debate the scientific details in each of these arguments. You probably did not open this webpage in order to read about scientific theories.  However, I do feel the need to take a few moments to cover the topic in a broad way.

    Obviously this topic can and will be debated until the end of time.  It is very difficult for one side to convince the other side that they are right, and impossible to prove.  Usually the debate degenerates into a debate over the age of the earth, or how the universe was formed. While those are interesting topics, I don’t intend to spend much time on them here.  There are many great resources available that cover this topic. 

But before we move on, here are a few things to consider.  Firstly, our universe is ordered.  There is not much debate to the fact that our planets move in an orderly way, or that the entire universe is very predictable.  We know when comets will pass by thousands of years before they do. We have laws of the physical world that we trust implicitly. Thousands of us board giant metal tubes and fly at fantastic speeds 20,000 feet above the ground with not much thought because we trust the laws of the universe to keep an airplane safely in the air. Human beings themselves are immensely complicated.  The human brain is an amazing organ.  We understand exponentially more about it now than we did just 20 years ago, but scientists still claim that we don’t understand much about the brain as a whole. 

    If we don’t understand our own bodies completely, perhaps we also have much to learn about the universe and how it functions and where it came from.  We do know a few things about the universe whether we are scientifically minded or not.  As I mentioned earlier we know that the universe is ordered, that it works, planets are not hurtling randomly through space smashing into other planets.  The universe is not chaotic.  If the universe is not chaotic, then it might even be designed.

     Let me illustrate it this way:  Say you had a watch, and you took this watch apart, all of the pieces, gears, springs and other things that make a watch tick were disassembled and put into a small box.  Now shake that box up for 5 minutes.  When you open the box, what would you find?  A watch? Of course not, you would find a bunch of watch pieces all jumbled together in a box! What if you shook that box for an hour?  When you opened it you would still find a box of parts, not a whole working watch. If you shook it for a year, or 10 years, or a million years, or for all eternity you would never open it up to find a functioning watch.  Why not? Because a watch is complicated and it takes an intelligent mind to make those parts work together.  It takes someone who understands the mechanics of how a watch works.  It took someone who could craft the different parts of a watch to put them together and assign them tasks to tell time. Now if we agree that something like a watch could not put itself together, how much more true would that be about the human eye?  Or the human brain? Or the universe itself? 

    We don’t expect computers, or cars, or nice meals, or any of our modern toys to make themselves. Everything in our experience leads us to believe that complicated functioning systems have intelligent designers behind them. Why not the universe?  Well, the reason we doubt that there is a creator of the universe is because we can’t see him or her or it.  At the same time we don’t see gravity, but we do see its effects, and therefore we believe in gravity. We can see that there is an ordered universe, that we can trust the laws of physics, motion and gravity. We trust that they exist even though we can only see evidence of their existence. Perhaps we need to trust that something greater than us (for the sake of language, I’ll refer to this something as God) exists and is responsible for our existence even though we can only see evidence of this entity’s (God’s) existence. 

As we learn more and more about the beginning of our universe and how it came into being it helps us to understand our own existence even better, but it still can’t possibly answer the question as to where the original matter that formed the universe came from or why it exists at all. Was there ever just nothing? Was there a time when nothing existed?  If so, did time exist? If time didn’t exist, then what did? My head just exploded. So maybe there is something (God) that caused the universe to come into being several billion years ago. So what?

10 Most Overrated Movies

Here are 10 movies I find to be unbelievably overrated, in no particular order....

1. Avatar - it really isn't that good at all. Amazing effects, but totally lame and predictable story mixed with bland acting.

2. The English Patient - nominated for a billion (literally) Oscars, and it won Best Picture. However, this movie is so boring it's insane.  The Seinfeld episode about this movie is total vindication of my beliefs on it. This is when I first realized that the Academy Awards are a joke.

3. Office Space - its just not that funny for me, although my friends who have worked in an office "cube farm" say that it's because I have never worked in such an environment.

4. The Godfather 2 - this is a good movie, but I've seen several "professional" lists that have it ranked as "the best movie ever!".  It's not even the best movie in its own trilogy. I prefer The Godfather. In fact, my favorite scene in The Godfather 2 is the flashback to the first one that happens at the end.

5. Chinatown - I watched it, and afterwards I thought. "That was weird, and freaky, what's the hoopla all about?"

6. Forrest Gump - I really like this movie, but some people used to (and still do) worship it. It's fun, it's funny, it's sad, it's smart (for its time) but I can't watch it anymore. I've seen it twice, and it's not good enough to earn another rewatch, ever.

7. Chocolat - This movie was nominated for Best Picture! It's terrible, boring, predictable, and its theme would have been edgy in 1955, not in 2005 (or whenever it came out). I hate this movie!

8.  Independence Day - I know that no one thinks this thing is award winning, but there are lots of people who like this movie. It's unwatchable.  The only reason it made a bajillion dollars is because when it opened it had the trailer for the rerelease of Star Wars (the new and impoved versions of the originals). Those trailers were awesome as you can see if you click this. Those special editions are in many ways an abomination, but the trailers were awesome geekery.

9. Kramer v. Kramer - another best picture winner.  The 70's were brutal at times.

10. Bugsy -  Another movie that was nominated for a ridiculous amount of awards, but was just boring and terrible. I saw this when I was in college, and walked out of the theatre after it was over and almost asked for my money back. It was that bad. When it got nominated for best picture I was shocked into incoherence for 3 days.

That's my list, off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed some, so feel free to add anything I missed in the comments. Or feel free to eviscerate me for my poor taste and lack of culture.  Either way, I want to see how the comments work on this new website, so make a comment.