Movies 2007

I barely saw any movies in 2006 so I decided to keep track of all the movies I saw in theaters in 2007 (and in the first few weeks of late 2007 releases in 2008). Here are all the movies I saw in order of when I saw them.

Factory Girl
Reno 911!: Miami
The Queen
Black Snake Moan
Reign Over Me
I Think I Love My Wife
TMNT
Blades of Glory
The Namesake
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
The Hoax
Meet the Robinsons (in 3-D)
Hot Fuzz
Avenue Montaigne
Knocked Up
Away from Her
Spider-Man 3
Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End
Paris, je t'aime
Evan Almighty
The Valet
Waitress
Ratatouille
Once
Eagle vs. Shark
Live Free or Die Hard
Joshua
The Simpsons Movie
Sicko
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hot Rod
Hairspray
Superbad
Talk to Me
Nancy Drew
Rocket Science
The TV Set
The Ten
Shrek the Third
The Brothers Solomon
Surf's Up
The Nanny Diaries
The Heartbreak Kid
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Death at a Funeral
Balls of Fury
The Darjeeling Limited
Gone Baby Gone
Across the Universe
Michael Clayton
The Nightmare Before Christmas (in 3-D)
My Kid Could Paint That
Dan in Real Life
Into the Wild
Margot at the Wedding
Bee Movie
No Country for Old Men
Juno
I'm Not There
Control
Lars and the Real Girl
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
I am Legend
Enchanted
Charlie Wilson's War
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
There Will Be Blood
The Savages
Persepolis

Woah that's a lot of movies! Here are the top 10 best ones of those:

10. The Simpsons Movie -You did it Homer. This barely made my top ten, I kind of didn't want to put it here, but I decided to give it the tenth spot for a couple reasons. First off, it made with the LPMs (laughs per minute). Above everything it is a very funny movie, and it stays funny all the way through, so props for that. Second off, it's very nice to look at. Hand-drawn 2-D animation is my favorite thing in the world and it was nice to see it on the big screen looking so fun, better animated than the TV show ever was. Third off this movie makes my ten for showing me how much I can still enjoy Homer and crew. I have not been a fan of The Simpsons for a long while, and for good reason, because it sucks (shut up), but this movie was a great reminder of how much the show used to mean to me. Great job, Homer.

9. Control - This movie is a pretty basic biopic of Ian Curtis, the singer for Joy Division, and a dude who committed suicide (spoilerz). I'm a little bit of a Joy Division fan and a little bit of a fan of Director's Label DVD-haver Anton Corbijn so I thought I'd check this out. I'm glad I did, because it's actually really rockin and super-pretty to look at. Even though almost the entire second half of the movie is about the week leading up to his suicide, the first half is about being a small-time band like Joy Division and what it's like when passionate dudes are getting famous for playing rock and roll. Movies about rock and roll are movies I like.

8. Once - Here's another movie about rock and roll. It's kind of a realistic musical about an Irish dude who meets a girl and they make music together. I loved this movie for a lot of reasons, but the most main one is because it reminded me of the Wonder Years episodes when Kevin Arnold would go on summer vacation and meet a girl and have fun for a summer. Man that's all I want, a fun summer.

7. Knocked Up - Man this movie. I kind of wish I didn't like it as much as I do, because there are a lot of reasons not to. Yeah the script isn't great, it goes on long, all the over-reliance on improv, the sexism (I agree with you Heigl), and plus I hate kids, what do I need to see a movie for about how great it would be to have them. But I can't help fall in love with it. It's high with the LPMs, it charms the heck out of me, and makes me genuinely feel sad in a good way. Also I'm ranking it this high in case Judd Apatow sees it so he can maybe put me in a movie (or three).

6. I'm Not There - Another musical biopic, this one about Bob Dylan. This is an "experimental biopic" as you may have heard, with six actors playing different stages of Bob Dylan's life. I'm probably less of a Dylan fan than I am of Joy Division, nothing against Dylan but I just never sought out his work, and people have said you have to be a Dylan fan to really "get" this movie but I loved it all the same. Even without knowing anything about Bob Dylan this movie was entertaining as hell to me, it has Bob Dylan hanging out with the Beatles and David Cross and playing a whole bunch of rock songs while being rude. Ok I pretty much described only the Cate Blanchett parts but the rest of the movie was pretty awesome too. Referenced three times on the O'Reilly Factor in case you were wondering.

5. There Will Be Blood - Sorry, Kevin Smith. Yeah, this movie is great, great acting, great directing, great story, but you've already heard all of that I'm sure. But also one of the best parts about this movie that you never hear about is how it has a lot of good quotes that you can do impressions of, such as "MY SON!"

4. Ratatouille - I loved this movie a lot because it really brought me back to my old days of when I used to watch Disney animated movies on VHS all the time. Back before I had cable all I ever watched were super-old Disney movies (like Snow White, Lady and the Tramp, etc.) over and over again and Sesame Street. And with Ratatouille, Brad Bird and Pixar made a movie that feels more like a modern version of a Disney classic than anything I've seen from Disney proper. I can imagine kids today watching this over and over again on DVD or Blu-Ray (ugh) and for once I can feel happy about what kids today are watching.

3. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters - Our favorite crudely animated food trio finally makes a leap onto the big screen. I loved this movie because as far as I'm concerned it was perfect in what an Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie should be. Granted I'm already a fan of the show, but I admired how unapologetic this movie was about staying true to the spirit of the show, while keeping the LPMs high. I really didn't think I'd see a better movie than ATHFCMFFT this decade, BUT I SAW TWO BETTER ONES THIS YEAR. What can they be? Read on...

2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters - This is a documentary about a nice guy trying to get the world record in Donkey Kong from a rude dude who has the top spot. Even though it might seem like it's just a movie about video games, it really has it all: an awesome story with all kinds of plot twists, some great characters you can get behind as well as one of the meanest villains around, a bunch of conflict, and it even has people becoming champions by doing what they love. Also I loved this movie on a personal level because it made me realize that video games that you can't get a high score in aren't worth a dang.

1. (of all time) Hot Rod - This is the best movie I have ever seen. Rod Kimble (my hero) goes around town doing stunts on his motorbike, hangin' out with his buddies, and being a general screw-up in his life until his stepdad gets sick and Rod has to save the day with the biggest stunt he's ever done. Along the way you get to meet a whole bunch of great characters and see some hilarious gags. With this movie The Lonely Island officially become the world's funniest movie makers as they bring the LPMs up to infinity. Cool guys like Bill Hader, Danny R. McBride and Chris Parnell join TLI's Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone for great gags and great fun, examples of which I don't feel like explaining. Just see it, yo. And F the haters, Lazy Sunday was always awesome.



11-20 honorable mentions:

11. Persepolis - I really wanted to put this in the 10th spot or as I call it the "2-D animation spot" (ha ha) but Homer won out in the end. Persepolis is an animated biopic from France (:rolleyes) about a girl growing up in Iran; it's got sadness, laughs, and hand-drawn animation. I guess all it needed was the Homer-man.

12. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - I love movies about rock and roll and I love movies with hilarious jokes in them, how come this didn't make my top ten? I dunno man, it was just a really good year for movies I guess! John C. Reilly plays a rude rocker who goes for the LPMs but it seems like he lost out to the dudes who went for the heart like in Once or Control.

13. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - This movie is based on a true story, and it's about when the editor of Elle Magazine in France gets paralyzed except for one eye, and he writes his memoirs by blinking. Even though it didn't make my top ten, this movie really hit me on a personal level because my secret dream is to be a French fashion magazine editor.

14. Juno - Shut up. Yeah, here's another movie about having kids and how great it is and blah blah blah, and again I wish I didn't like it so much but I can't help falling in love with it. Man I guess I am just a dad on the inside. There are a bunch of things this movie has against it, but I don't care.

15. The Darjeeling Limited - I actually liked this movie a lot better than most people seemed to judging by the reviews it got but not enough to make my ten. I still love your movies Wes.

16. Superbad - This movie almost made me die laughing when I saw it in theaters, it's not as good on DVD though. Still though, it's good.

17. Into the Wild - A movie by Sean Penn about Emile Hirsch playing a kid who graduates college and runs off and has his own adventures. Some people are mad that this movie glorifies the life of a kid having adventures, I say that life sounds pretty glorious already! (I don't actually say that :( )

18. No Country for Old Men - I LIKED THIS TOO, SO WHAT.

19. Gone Baby Gone - Ok Kevin Smith, are we friends again? This is a movie directed by Ben Affleck about a rude detective from Boston trying to solve a crime in a gross city. It's got crimes, good twists, some gun shooting, and Casey Affleck doing an accent that's fun to do impressions of, and on top of that it really makes me miss the east coast. All of that adds up to a good movie to me.

20. Paris, je t'aime - This is a whole bunch of short films about Paris, all by different directors (man if I love France so much why don't I marry it :rolleyes). I wanted to put it on here because it was one of the best theater experiences I've had in a while. I saw it in a pretty packed theater, and I was the youngest one there by at least 30 years. One of the segments was directed by Gerard Depairdieu and it was just about old people talking about old people things. The entire theater of old people was losing their shit laughing, it was pretty stellar.

Bonus honorable mentions to Blades of Glory, The Ten and The Brothers Solomon, three great comedies that didn't have the LPMs to get into the top 20 but still were great times.


Top 5 worst movies of 2007 (well I didn't see anything too terrible this year, so these are more the 5 "lamest" or "least good" movies that I saw this year [well except for number 1, that one I really pretty much hated]):

5. Evan Almighty - My two John Goodman jokes are better than this movie's actual jokes: 1) Goodman says "TWO OF EACH ANIMAL? DELICIOUS!" 2) When Carrell says he's going to build a boat Goodman says "HEY THAT'S MY LINE!"

4. Margot at the Wedding - Well done and all but just unpleasant as hell to sit through.

3. Shrek the Third - It is important to me that you know that I have valid reasons for not liking Shrek 3 that I don't really want to bother explaining.

2. TMNT - It's pretty unfair putting this movie under "worst" because most of why I didn't like it is because it didn't meet up with my expectations, but it still wasn't any fun for me. I just wanted a nostalgia kick for my old days as a young Turtle fan, this movie came up short on nostalgic-ness and short on being a good movie, but long on boring video game graphics.

1. Balls of Fury - Can we all admit by now that Tom Lennon and Ben Garant stink at movies? Sure Reno 911: Miami was fun enough, and Taxi and The Pacifier, etc. were all cashgrabs, but Let's Go to Prison was bad and this movie is garbage. It doesn't even feel like the makers of it find it funny, like it's their idea of what us "regular" people find funny, and it ends up being not funny to anyone. At least if this movie had pot jokes, I could at least go "well, stoners might like it," and that's how bad this movie is, it would be better if it had pot jokes.


For bonus fun, Top 7 TV shows of 2007:

1. Xavier: Renegade Angel
2. Flight of the Conchords
3. 30 Rock
4. Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
5. Yo Gabba Gabba!
6. The Sarah Silverman Program
7. The Soup (yeah I said it)

Drawing Celebrities from Memory

Lately I've been trying to draw celebrities from memory, here are some of my results.



This was actually supposed to be Joe Jackson, but it looks almost exactly like David Wain and even more like a teacher I had once. It looks nothing like Joe Jackson, what on earth was I thinking.



Famous Oscar-winner Daniel Plainview. Not very good, but he is saying the best line from the movie; not the milkshake one but "MY SON!"

I think this was supposed to be Keith Moon? I might have been trying to create my own Doug character though.

Celebreality star (I'm guessing but probably, right?) Kid. You can tell I rushed it just to get to the rectangle on his head.

The late great Heath Ledger in the role made famous by Cesar Romero. Not TOO bad, I guess! Man actually it kinda stinks.

Coulter/Clapton. Man what the hell, I can't even tell what era Clapton that's supposed to be. My best celebrity drawing was David Wain and it was my first one and I wasn't even trying to draw him. I give up, no more drawing celebrities from memory, it's too hard.

Contra The Movie

I dreamed I was watching a live-action Contra movie that was extremely true to the video game. It was about the two guys following a path through the jungle and jumping and getting attacked by enemies and shooting them. There was a part where they drive a jeep through the jungle (I don't think there was a real jeep level in Contra) and they drove over a rickety bridge and fell into a bottomless pit, and that's when I woke up. I wish this movie was real.

How I Was Wrong About Herman's Hermits

A couple days ago I watched Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, the Herman's Hermits movie, on TCM. I had heard of Herman's Hermits before but had never seen them or heard their music. I always assumed they were a jam band and looked like the guys in Herman's Head except with long hair and beards (and there would be four guys and no girl). Boy was I wrong. They are totally clean cut dudes, plus there are five of them.

The movie wasn't very good btw, I gave up on it after half an hour. I might not have liked it because I watched Head (The Monkees', not Herman's) right before though :(

Bill Fagerbakke's NES Protips

Joanna Gruesome

I wrote this Rude Review of Joanna Newsom's terrible album Ys. Check it out man:

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I pretty much knew this album sucked before I ever heard it. I had no idea who Joanna Newsom was and hadn’t heard a note of Ys (more like Ns) when it got rave reviews and made every music critic’s top 10 list of 2006, but I still figured it was bullshit. I mean, yeah, they keep saying it’s good, but there’s no way it actually is good. Then I heard the album. Turns out I was right.

Normally a ton of critical hype amounting to an awful album wouldn’t faze me in the least, but this album was so hyped and so awful that I couldn’t help ask myself a few questions: Is the indie community so creatively stagnant and aimless that they’ll tout whatever sounds different enough from what mom and dad listened to as “the next big thing?” Is the world of rock journalism so cynical that they think we’ll lap up just anything they make sound important? Is this chick deaf? I mean, I still wouldn’t be impressed, but it would explain why we’re all being nice to her, not to mention her voice.

Now I like 15 minute folk songs about faerie goblins and icicles as much as the next guy, but when it comes in the form of tuneless harp-prog I just can’t accept it as good. Newsom’s sound (I won’t call it music) is dreary, pedantic, aesthetically repulsive and horrifically pretentious, but all too misguided and dead-fucking-serious to be acceptably laughable (though I would love to laugh in Joanna’s face, it would probably melt her like water on the Wicked Witch). Newsom’s voice sounds like a buzzsaw to the ear’s genitals. If the lovechild of Billy Corgan and Fran Drescher chain-smoked through Roseanne’s vocal chords and then voiced a talking chicken in a Japanese cartoon on Nickelodeon, that chicken’s Bobcat Goldthwait impression would sound like Newsom’s singing voice. (Speaking of Japanimation, I bet it’s popular among Joanna’s fanbase, her lyrics have as much depth as a 14-year-old anime ninja philosophizing on “Do robots have feelings?” following a scene of a horny grandpa trying to look at a schoolgirl’s panties.) You might say Ys (more like Whys) is an acquired taste, to which I’d reply: only if I acquire it. Otherwise it’s just bad.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she’s technically proficient as sweet get out on the harp, and has likely had more years of classical training than I’ve had days of not living in my parents’ house. She may even have a degree in harp from a place worth a damn and a half if I’d bother to wikipedia her. And hey, I’d like to see me play the harp better! I also wouldn’t doubt for a second that her live shows are simply the bee’s knees. I can just picture it: Joanna dressed up like Juliet playing the harp with all the grace of someone fake from a black-and-white movie, while maybe some other guy stands to the side and plays an instrument from Asia, or something, I don’t know. It must make for quite a splendid evening out; the problem is watching Joanna play the harp is just as sad, irritating, and unintentionally hilarious to me as the trombone players in ska bands or the dude with the violin from Yellowcard. I can totally understand wanting to have something to show for doing such a good job at learning such a hard instrument but that’s no reason to force it on everyone else under the guise of something “interesting,” leave that shit in the elementary school band room and pick up a real rock instrument, asshole!

I get raving about this album on your blogs/zines/blogzines, believe me I really do. Because if I thought I “discovered” this shit, oh Christ, I would not shut the fuck up about it ever. I would hoist it upon my shoulders and parade it through town like the cure for cancer, taking it upon myself to make sure I get everyone into it, or at least let them all know I liked it first. I’d probably even convince myself that Joanna is hot. But I didn’t discover it, so I have no reason to pretend it’s anything but unlistenable garbage. If you really want to hear something arty and intelligent-seeming, go listen to Bach or Mozart or one of those guys who had the decency to die like 200 years before we decided to give a shit… hell even jazz would be a step up. If you want to listen to something quirky and obscure, go to the dollar bin of the used CD store, pick whatever has the funniest cover or band name, and hype that to the high heavens, it can only be more worthwhile than Joanna’s record and it’ll save the rest of us 9 bucks. And if you, like so many Newsom fans claim, just want to hear something that doesn’t sound like Britney Spears or Ashlee Simpson or the typical top 40 pap, well neither do car horns and screeching tires, so go play in traffic, motherfucker. Ys (more like Zzzzzs) is, without hyperbole, the worst audio I have ever heard.

Freaks and Geeks

I dreamed I was watching an episode of Freaks and Geeks (which I am also doing in real life, see below) and it was about Seth Rogen as Ken Miller sleeping with (or at least dating) a teacher. She was a new substitute teacher and she had a huge rack. I was in this episode for some reason, I was hanging out with Seth Rogen at the beach and the teacher came by and started hitting on Seth and they ignored me. This episode was shot on old film stock and actually looked like something shot in 1980.

Joe Flaherty as Harold Weir heard about this student/teacher relationship and was steamed. He went down to the school to yell about it but he couldn't get past the secretary, who was played by Whoopi Goldberg who was the age she was in 1980 (Joe Flaherty was the age he is now though).