asaidi-2 Reviews

The Casino (2004– )

FAKE! Not a reality series!

[1 July 2004]

I've been watching this show for the first few episodes and I've had very strong feelings that the show was fake and/or staged. Those feelings were confirmed with one of the story lines in the third episode.

One of the story lines of the episode involved this young blonde woman who is moving to Las Vegas from Oregon. The first time you see the woman she is driving to Las Vegas because she is planning on moving there from Oregon. If this were REAL then she must have called the producers of the show to let them know she was moving there or the whole scene must have been staged. How else would they have filmed her driving to Las Vegas. Plus, she is apparently moving to Las Vegas but she's not bringing anything with her. There doesn't even appear to be a suitcase in the car she's driving. Instead of finding a motel or apartment she checks into a fairly expensive hotel (the Golden Nugget - the main hotel in the TV series) to LIVE IN while she's in Las Vegas. Then she starts looking for a job at the hotel she's staying at. She doesn't look like a regular job hunter though, even for Las Vegas. Not matter what she's doing she's always got makeup on and she's always wearing outfits that look like she's headed out to a dance club, even when she's filling out a job application. Hopefully, she'll get a job at the hotel to make enough money so she can continue living at the hotel. During one interview the person says they'll mail her some information. They don't need to mail it to her they could just bring it up to her room.

The story goes on from there but by this time I've had enough. The whole storyline looked completely staged. Just like some other previous story lines of the show seemed. There is no way that this is real life Las Vegas. If you want to see what seems to be more like real life Las Vegas then watch "American Casino" on the Discovery Channel.

Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)

Very funny.....but it should have come out last year.

[6/10 · 30 March 2003]

This is a very funny movie. The only problem (for me) is that it came out about a year too late.

I've already heard almost all of the jokes in the movie. Ron White and Larry the cable guy basically do the same jokes they did on the "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" CD that came out at the end of 2000. Also, almost all of Bill Engvalls jokes were on that CD or his new comedy CD that came out late last year ("Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography"). Most of Jeff Foxworthys jokes are not on a CD, but if you've seen him live sometime during the last couple of years you've heard almost all of them. Actually, you can say that about all 4 guys.

However, if you've never heard of the 4 guys before or if you've heard of them but never seen them live or heard any of their CD's, then definitely go see this movie. The jokes are hysterical. Then you can go and pick up the comedy CD's and see them live. They have new jokes when you see them live.

Firefly (2002–2003)

So far, not great but promising.

[10 October 2002]

The concept of this show is very pretty weak, but (hopefully) the characters and unique storylines (one of Josh Wheldons specialties) will save this series if it doesn't get cancelled too soon.

The concept is of the show is kind of confusing. It takes place in the future and the setting (for the majority of the shows so far) is on a spaceship. It's kind of like Star Wars/Battlestar Gallactica/Star Trek in this mode. However, there are no phaser or laser guns to be found. All the people still use regular guns (some of them are even six shooters) and once they land on a planet (any planet) the setting turns into the old west. There are also a couple of other curious items thrown in for good measure. Some of the characters occasionally speak some type of oriental language (it could be Chinese or Japanese, or it could totally be made up for all I know).

The characters are a little more promising. The captain of the ship (a Han Solo type of guy) is the main character. Also, there's the ships crew: a male pilot, a female mechanic, a woman who is married to the pilot and another guy (I haven't figured out what the last two people actually do yet), plus 4 passengers on the ship: a female `companion' (a nice name for prostitute), a brother and sister (the brother is a doctor and the sister is his main patient with a mysterious past), and a older male priest. As for the storylines, they seem promising but I think I would have understood a lot more if they actually showed the first episode first. From what I understand from some preview commercials and from the internet, they had a two-hour premiere episode where, among other things, they introduced the sister with the mysterious past as a stowaway in a box of ice. However, probably due to the baseball playoffs, the network decided not to show the first episode. So, the viewers are left to piece together the storylines. After three episodes, they're slowly beginning to become clear.

So far, it seems promising enough to keep watching. Hopefully, it will have some more time to develop before it gets cancelled.

John Doe (2002–2003)

Good ideal - but bad gimmick

[23 September 2002]

I've always like the ideal that is the basic plotline for "John Doe". A guy with amnesia trying to figure out who he was. However, that plotline has already been done several times, most recently in the movie "The Bourne Identity". So, the makers of John Doe had to come up with some kind of gimmick. The gimmick of "John Doe" is what I have a problem with. He supposedly knows everything. This gimmick begins to fall apart with the very first episode. He knows the population of Morocco but he has to search for a missing girl, shouldn't he already know where she is and who took her? He knows what a token that he finds is used for but he has to call a bunch of hotels looking for a certain type of washing machine, shouldn't he know which hotel has the washing machine already? He has to examine a persons cap to discover that the person has Cancer, shouldn't he have known the already too? I like the second gimmick that the show has. He sees everything in black and white except for certain things which might have a connection to who he is (or might not). However, the main gimmick that the series uses is the weakest part of the whole show.

Repli-Kate (2002)

A great movie....for the right type of person

[7/10 · 11 August 2002]

If you're the type of guy who watches "The Man Show" and professional wrestling on TV and reads magazines like "FHM" or "Maxim", then by this movie immediately. You'll love this film. This movie is sort of an updated version of "Weird Science" for the guys who were the right age to love that movie when it came out in the 80s.

Just like "Weird Science", there's the nice guy and his somewhat funny and somewhat annoying friend. Instead of being kids in high school they now work in a lab at a University (I think they filmed it at UCLA), instead of parents they have a controlling boss, and instead of a mean older brother they have something far much worse. They don't create a woman from a Barbie doll this time, they clone a real woman. So, they have the original woman to deal with.

The girl is updated too. The guy and his friend mold the clone into the ultimate man in a woman's body. She loves drinking beer and watching sports. The type of guys I mentioned at the beginning of this review would do anything to be dating a girl like this.

However, for everyone else, the movie does have some nice moments. Some of the actors give funny performances including Desmon Askew and (the always great) Eugene Levy. Ali Landry does a very good job in both her roles (playing the real girl and the clone). Also, the special effects for the scenes where the real girl meets her clone are fairly well done.

Like I said, this movie is made for a certain type of man, but there are a few things in it that would appeal to other types of people.

40 Days and 40 Nights (2002)

A movie about abstinece has a whole lot of sex in it.

[3 March 2002]

After I saw this movie, I wondered how it got an R rating and not an NC-17. It must have just slipped by because it has more sex and sexual references in it that many soft porn movies I have seen. I was thinking this movie would be similar to American Pie but the amount of sex scenes, nudity (women only of course), sexual talk, sexual jokes, sexual innuendo, and sexual symbolism (take another look at that poster) put it more along the lines of a movie like Basic Instinct.

The whole movie is about this guy who wants to abstain from having sex for lent. This really wouldnt be too difficult for a lot of guys (especially for guys in the priesthood, guys in prison, or guys in the military) so they had to make it very difficult for the actor in this movie. First off, this is one of the most sexually active guys in the city. He has sex with three different women during the first 15 minutes of the movie. This guy is supposedly so attractive that a girl who he meets when she accidentally hits him with a door ends up having sex with him right after she meets him. After he decides to give up sex for lent (for reasons that are somewhat confusing....something about getting over an old girlfriend and about seeing black holes above him when he has sex....although all we see are ceilings cracking) the lead actor has to deal with his sexually active roommate, his parents who have a lengthy discussion about what sexual positions the father can do after he has hip surgery, his brother who is celibate (because hes becoming a priest) who tries to talk him out of abstinence (that seems like it would be funny, but its not), three or four attractive coworkers who will do anything for him not to acquire 'the power', a sexually frustrated boss, some sexually inactive coworkers who are betting on when he will crack, some porn websites (he works for a web site developer), his ex-girlfriend who comes back into his life (of course), beautiful women around him wherever he goes (some of whom he pictures nude), a ton of sex talk, sexual references, and sex jokes, and, finally, the girl of his dreams who he inadvertently meets on the first day of his abstinence.

Wow! Thats a whole lot of stuff to get through. It sure wears him down; at least thats what they want you to think. They slowly make him look worse as the days go on, he gets tense, he starts having weird dreams, etc, etc. None of the stuff that he goes through is very funny though.

Does he make it through? Well, by the end of the movie, after sitting through everything mentioned above and more, I didnt care. If you care maybe you should check out the movie.

Slackers (2002)

I didn't think it was funny.

[4 February 2002]

The makers of this film used comedic ideals from a variety of other movies to try to make this movie the ultimate teenage comedy. During the movie I noticed jokes that could have fit right in with movies like "Never Been Kissed", "She's All That", "Rushmore", "Bottle Rocket", "Scary Movie", "American Pie", "There's Something About Mary", etc.

The only problem with this movie is that none of the jokes are very funny. I don't remember laughing once. Plus, the quirky characters that fill up this movie are hard to like, which makes enjoying the movie even harder.

The movie might appeal to a small crowd like movies such as "Bottle Rocket" and "Rushmore" did, but that crowd must be very small because I liked those two movies (I didn't think they were great, but I liked them) and I can't say the same for this one.

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

It's all about the banter.

[6/10 · 9 December 2001]

The remake of Oceans 11 turned out to be more like the original one than I had thought. The best thing about this movie is the banter between the actors, just like in the original. There are a lot of really funny lines (some of them aren't delivered well though). That and some nice cinematography is basically the only thing I really liked about this movie. The plot is very slick, too slick if you ask me. After explaining how impossible it will be to get into a mega-vault in order to steal $160 million from three Las Vegas casinos, the 11 guys proceed to do it almost without breaking a sweat. There are only a few brief sequences where they fear that something may actually go wrong, and even in those scenes the tension doesn't seem as intense as it should be. Maybe that's because the lead guy, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) can do prison time with no trouble at all. When the movie starts, Ocean has just been released after 4 years in prison but there is only a slight mention of how hard prison life was for him. He even has some banter with the parole board as he's being released. As for the characters, all the actors do suitable jobs but there is no character development. They try to create some by giving some of the characters a quirky habit (one guy sweats a lot, Brad Pitt is constantly eating, etc). Plus, these guys must be the cleanest criminals the world has ever known. They're clean cut, well dressed, and they don't even swear a lot. Even the stripper in one scene is fully dressed. So it seems, despite their denials that's it's a totally different movie than the original, the more things change the more they stay the same.

Out Cold (2001)

It's been done better before.

[4/10 · 1 December 2001]

Ever since movies like "Meatballs", "Caddyshack", and "Animal House" came out and became huge hits about 20 years ago, studios have been trying to replicate the "teenage sex comedy" type movie about a bunch of beer drinking friends. The have succeeded in some cases (American Pie), but most of time they fall flat on their face. The ideal of putting them in a ski lodge, like this movie did, has been done several times before in movies like "Hot Dog:The Movie", "Ski School", and "Ski Patrol". The big difference between those movies and this one is that it's trying to be a "teenage sex comedy" movie without the key asset that those types of movies need: Sex and Nudity. There is a lot of implied sex and nudity, but not a lot shown. There isn't even much swearing in this movie. This is probably because the studio required them to get a PG-13 rating for the movie. Besides the "teen sex comedy" theme, there is no reason to come see this movie. There are a couple of good skiing/snowboarding shots but they are pretty brief and infrequent, the acting is suitable but not great, and the storylines are fragmented and sometimes confusing. For example, there is a scene (shown in the commercial for the movie) where a guy says "I need some paint, a bucket, and a pound of salt". Later you see him with the paint, bucket, and salt but you never really find out what he needs it for. There are a lot of scenes like that. If you want to see a movie with great skiing or snowboarding there are a bunch out there. If you want to see a "teenage sex comedy" rent one of the movies mentioned above.

Bubble Boy (2001)

It has potential, but doesn't pop.

[6/10 · 1 September 2001]

(a couple of SPOILERS in this review)

Bubble Boy, could have been a really funny movie. It had a lot of potential. However, it runs into two big problems.

The first is that the movie is trying to decide between two directions, and it never makes a decision. The directions would be to go the way of previous adult comedies (American Pie 1 and 2, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Austin Powers 1 and 2) or to NOT go that way. Bubble Boy tries several times to move into the adult comedy direction (including a joke about an erection), and also tries several times to NOT go in that direction (including a scene where one word is blooped several times). It never decided which way to go, which leaves the audience wondering which way it wanted to go.

The second problem is that many potentially very funny jokes are basically thrown away because the scenes moves too quickly. I THINK the Cunningham house from "Happy Days" is shown in one scene, but the shot goes by so quickly I can't really tell. Another joke has the Bubble Boy stealing a beer (there's actually two jokes in that scene but they go by so quickly you don't have time to laugh) and then taking his very first sip of beer. I think he was supposed to pass out after his first sip but it doesn't even look like he has time to get the sip in his mouth. If they had slowed it down and waited for the jokes to come through, it would have been much funnier.

Memento (2000)

The major thing good about the movie is the way it was shown.

[7/10 · 15 April 2001]

(some SPOILERS in this review). The major thing that makes this movie really interesting and exciting is the way it is presented, a reverse timeline. Basically, the first scene in the movie (besides the black and white scenes) is the last scene if the movie were in chronological order, and the last scene would have been the first (after the black and white stuff). It's a more extreme version of what Tarantino did for `Pulp Fiction', however that movie had a lot more going for it where this one doesn't If the movie had been shown with the correct timeline (and if they had moved the final twist scene to the end of the film, which would have been very easy to do) then I think the movie would have lost a lot of appeal.

First, it would have removed most of the questions in the movie. Most of the mystery is about `what happened to that ?', or `when did that happen?'. By showing the movie backward you see what happened to people and then you see how it happened. This is one of the most interesting things in the film, which would have not been there if it had been shown in chronological order. Secondly, if the movie were shown with the correct timeline the plot holes in the movie would be much more apparent. For example, Natalie supposedly first meets Leonard behind the bar. The next time she meets him in the bar (right after she meets him behind the bar, but in the movie this scene is right before the other one) she quickly plays some pranks on him because of his mental condition (he has sort term memory loss – which she apparently has heard about before although I don't think she had met him before). Then, a few minutes later (which is a few minutes earlier in the film) she invites a guy she basically just met to stay at her house for `a few days'. If the movie were shown in chronological order this would have been somewhat confusing, just like it is if you think about it after you see all the scenes in the movie. I'm not saying that the movie has only one or two things going for it. It has some very good acting in it, some very interesting scenes which take advantage of Leonards unusual mental condition, but the best thing about it and the thing which makes the movie so mysterious, creative, and entertaining, is that fact that it's shown backwards.

The American Success Company (1979)

A movie with several different titles.

[11 January 2001]

The "American Success Company" (AKA "Good as Gold" or "The Ringer"). It was later re-edited slightly and titled "American Success". Then it was re-edited again with many scenes switched around, a couple scenes added, and a narration by Jeff Bridges added and titled "Success".

I'm not sure why it was re-edited twice, but I think the reason might be related to the reason it was never released on video (except for a few copies when it was re-titled "Good As Gold") in the U.S.

It's a somewhat humorous story about a guy (Bridges) who's considered by his boss (Beatty) and his bosses daughter, who's also his wife (Bauer), to be a loser. So, with some makeup, some exercise, and some help from a local prostitute (Jagger) he becomes a new man. He also conceives a plan to steal a lot of money from the company that he works for (AM-SUC-CO, a movie version of American Express).

The last version ("Success") has a narration by Jeff Bridges, which clears up a lot of plot holes and confusion that are in the first two versions of the movie. Plus, I liked the extra scenes in the last version, which aren't in the previous two versions. "Success" is the version to see if you can find it.