Kids These Days: Some Nights, Reviewed

by Chris Marshall:

Greetings, dear readers. I know it’s been ages since I posted anything. I’ve got an excuse, sort of, in that I stopped posting regularly right around the time I took on a new position at my job that required me to write 17 articles every week, and after all that, I never really felt like writing anything else.

But the itch has struck me again. Those work articles are often interesting, but they are formulaic, and I never get to write freely. So here I am again with the first (and hopefully not last) entry in a new blog series idea I came up with, which I’m calling Kids These Days.

It all started about a week ago, when I was reading Entertainment Weekly’s preview of the Grammys, which will have aired earlier tonight, by the time this post goes up. I was looking through the nominees, and I realized that, not only had I never listened to any of them, I’d never even heard of quite a few of them.

So I Broke My Kneecap, Pt. II

by Mike Hanus:

I should note that I’ve been hesitant to write part II-it’s a lot less funny, and a lot more drugs and sleep and vomiting.

Anyway, after a good bit of time waiting in the ER I was finally transferred to my room. At this point it was about 9:30pm and I hadn’t eaten since 10am. I had only until midnight to eat, because of whatever complications that come from eating too close to anesthesia. Amanda, my nurse, was a rockstar. We went over the basic stuff, and she answered all my questions, including whether I could wear contacts during surgery (no) and how to use the restroom-which involved a convenient little bottle that you clipped to the side of the bed. “Just sort of tilt over and use it, or however guys go.” It attached to the trademarked “Uri-Clip” that hung on the side of the bed. This was all very exciting. I am also buying one for my home.

The bed itself I was laying in was pretty crazy. It could do all the leg and back raises I ever needed, and came with a nice remote that turned on the TV and called the nurse. Moving a piece of the bed up or down activated the jet engine under the bed, which would rattle the windows, raise me half an inch, and then stay on for 10 extra minutes and sometimes randomly lift and lower my lower back.

So, I Broke My Kneecap Pt. I

by Mike Hanus:

"A patella looks like a cookie. Yours is cracked in two." - Dr. Quackenbush.

On Monday, February 4th, around 6pm, I broke my kneecap. I decided to write this to record this major life event, organize my thoughts, and be able to say "you mean you haven't read my blog?!" when people see me walking around on crutches. It contains some gross details, lots of drug references, and a lot of exaggeration concerning my toughness. Let's begin.

On Monday I went to the gym with my grad school buddy Carlos to play basketball. In the locker room, as we were changing, I ran into a current student I had. It's always terrible to run into students at the gym, because any chance of authority I may have built up is instantly ruined as they see me flailing around on the court, my entire shirt covered in sweat about 20 minutes in, and in this case, my pale and soft stomach (which, of course, I sucked in).

Ruptured Reasoning: ATM (2012)

by Chris Marshall:

Director: David Brooks

Cast: Alice Eve, Josh Peck, Brian Geraghty

Netflix Synopsis: When three coworkers make a midnight stop at a glass-enclosed ATM after their Christmas party, they find themselves trapped by a menacing man outside. Soon they're fighting for their survival as the temperature plunges and the man toys with them.

Chris: I’ve watched a lot of movies this year. Like, a whole lot. Most were quite good, thanks to The Oscar Project, where even the “bad” entries tended to be of a pretty high caliber. I’ve seen some really bad ones as well (I’m looking at you, Project X). But purely in terms of realism, Project X looked like a documentary in comparison to ATM, which hinged entirely on the stupidity of its main characters.

This isn’t exactly a revolutionary phenomenon. Roger Ebert, in his Little Movie Glossary, refers to it as the Idiot Plot: “A plot that requires all the characters to be idiots. If they weren't, they'd immediately figure out everything and the movie would be over.”

Ruptured Reasoning: The Burrowers (2008)

by Chris Marshall:

Director: J.T. Petty

Cast: Clancy Brown, David Busse

Netflix Synopsis: When the men on a pioneer homestead are brutally murdered and the women and children go missing, a posse sets out to find them, assuming they've been abducted by Indians. But they soon discover that the truth is much more horrific.

Chris: I was mostly interested in The Burrowers because it fell into a genre I had never seen before: horror western. I guess I just hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I realized I couldn’t really think of any other examples of the genre. I’m sure it exists—Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series could sort of be considered horror western, I suppose—but I had never seen such a movie.

As it turned out, the film had plenty to offer outside the peculiarity of its subject matter. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it turned out. Sure, there were some flaws, but for a movie that never saw a theatrical release, it was quite well made.

Ruptured Reasoning: The Final (2010)

by Chris Marshall:

Director: Joey Stewart

Cast: Mark Donato, Jascha Washington, Whitney Hoy

Netflix Synopsis: Unpopular high school student Dane leads a group of outcasts seeking revenge on the "cool" kids who harassed and humiliated them for years, and their plan includes gruesome forms of torture learned in history class and horror films.

Chris: Whew. There is one good thing about this movie. It allowed me to do some expert-level trolling of Justin after it was over. Other than that, it was an abomination.

I almost don’t even have the energy to write about it. This is everything that’s wrong with America. This is everything with wrong with humanity. There is no redeeming value, only a glorification of evil. I really wonder who gave this project the go-ahead. What kind of person thought this would be even slightly okay?

Ruptured Reasoning: The Innkeepers (2011)

by Chris Marshall:

Director: Ti West

Cast: Sara Paxton, Pat Healty, Alison Bartlett

Netflix Synopsis: In this eerie ghost story, a venerable inn closes after a century in business and the two remaining employees are determined to uncover the truth about longtime rumors that the majestic mansion is haunted -- but will they survive their explorations?

CHRIS: I was mentioning to Justin a night or two ago that, even with no conscious planning on our part, our first few movies in this series had all been completely different styles of horror. Pontypool was zombies, The Snowtown Murders had serial killers, Crawlspace kind of fell into 80’s slasher territory, Vile was a torture movie, and Eyes Without a Face was a classic old-school movie. We were pretty much just missing ghosts, monsters, and vampires.

Ruptured Reasoning: Vile (2012)

by Chris Marshall: 

Director: Taylor Sheridan

Cast: April Matson, Akeem Smith

Netflix Synopsis: Ten[1] captives have 24[2] hours to mount an escape from a locked room[3], but they must endure excruciating pain to win their freedom.

Chris: I went into last night’s film, Vile, with the absolute lowest expectations. I’d never heard of it in my life, and the synopsis made it sound like a complete Saw rip-off. Which I suppose it kind of was, but it was so much better than I ever would have anticipated.

It was not a great film, by any means, and I’d even say that “good” is a stretch. But it was very entertaining, and I have no regrets at all about my choice. When it comes to movies where people torture each other for an hour and a half, you can do way worse.

The plot is simple enough. Nine people wake up and find themselves trapped in a house. It’s dirty and dingy, but in every other way it’s just like any other home. There aren’t any of the typical horror movie trappings, except for a large video screen, where a pre-recorded message tells them what they have to do to get out, and steel doors preventing them from escaping.

Ruptured Reasoning: The Snowtown Murders (2011)

by Chris Marshall:

In case you missed the first post in this series over at Movie Coda, my roommate Justin and I are going to watch a horror movie each day until Halloween and write our thoughts about it. Any kind of horror is fair game, but the films must be available either on Netflix Instant or Hulu Plus. Each day we will alternate blogs, but I’ll link to the previous day’s post on here as well.

Sometimes we’ll have conflicting opinions, and sometimes we’ll agree. We’re not playing the game where we each take a different side of the argument. In other words, I’ll always have the correct opinion about each film, and every once in a while, when he agrees with me, Justin will be right too.

My first pick was The Snowtown Murders, a rare horror biopic. I had wanted to see it when it was in the theater in Ohio, but it had such a short run that I never made it. We’ll see if it was worth our while.

Ranking the Best Picture Winners: The Top Five

by Chris Marshall:

Although I now wish I would have done them all at one time, I held off on revealing my five favorite Best Picture winners in the last post. At the time, I didn’t expect it to be another 10 days before I posted them, but, you know, the Olympics happened, and I stopped having any time to do anything else. But now it’s time, at long last, to finish the list.