Happy 600th post!

Holy shit. 600? Really? That sounds kind of significant. I should do something. Something movie related. Hmm...what could I do that would be interesting and celebrate my 600th post properly? A review you say? Nah. Too cliche. You'd be expecting me to do a review. What's that? I never do reviews anymore? Who invited you? I'm done taking questions from the press.

I have some hobbies. Hobbies that are not movie related. I read. I'm learning to play the ukulele. And I play with my cameras. Well, one of my cameras, I like to use for making time lapse videos. I find it fun to do. And, as an added bonus, once it's taking pictures, I can take my short attention span and go do something else. Like read! Or play the ukulele! Woo!


For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to do a time lapse video of my apartment tonight. Ok, I'm lying. It was an idea for sure, I just don't know that it was a good one. Anyways, I took almost 800 pictures. And cleaned. And did normal stuff. Is it an interesting video? Eh. It is, however, set to music. And THAT I find hilarious!



Admittedly, the music is the work of Tyler Bates from the 300 score, which I feel is used in a parodic manner and allowed as fair use. Perhaps my interpretation is wrong, I suppose YouTube will let me know.

These things just sneak up on you sometimes

500!

Wow. Just...wow.

A special announcement from 7dp

Thanks for joining me here on a Saturday of all days. I almost never post anything on the weekends. It's my time off. I have to make an exception today though. You see, it's January 10th, and that means that for the first time, I actually remembered it was 7dp's birthday ON TIME (instead of days or weeks later)!

 

Hey, thanks Al. I really appreciate it. Can you believe it's really been 3 years? 

 

Yeah, well...work keeps me pretty busy sometimes. And it's hard to watch movies and write about them when I travel. You're right though, I should try harder.

 

That's enough guys. Thanks. Thanks for coming by and celebrating 7dp's 3rd birthday, but I think that it's time you all left. In fact, I think it's well past that time.

 

Yes.

 

Really, Al? That's awfully nice of you. And incredibly unexpected.

That's great Al. Thanks. That's awesome. I really think that it's best that you leave now.

To celebrate the 3rd birthday of 7dp, let's say that that is the reason I switched to 7dollarpopcorn.com. And since the new tv and dvd player will contribute to what I do here, lets say that those were gifts too. Now, if I only I made money here and could call it a business. Then instead of gifts, they'd be tax deductable business expenses.

Anyways, thanks for reading and sticking with me. And now, onto year number 4.

Happy Birthday 7 Dollar Popcorn!

January 10th marked the 2nd birthday of 7 Dollar Popcorn, do you know what that means? It means that, once again, I completely forgot about it. I had such lofty plans, too.

There'd be a cake.


And all of our friends would be there...


It would have been so much fun! We'd play pin the tail on the donkey. Watch some movies of course. It would have been great! But, of course, eventually the cake would run out...


Maybe not having a party was the right idea. Oh well, maybe next year!

Milla, what happened? You used to make such good movies...

I really wanted to do something special for my 300th post. Why? I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy was I wrong.

I decided I wanted to see a brand new movie. Something at the old cinema. Something I could overpay for and watch among strangers. And, since I was in Atlanta, and away from my dvd player at home, it seemed like a reasonable plan to go up to Atlantic Station to see Resident Evil: Extinction.

What a piece of shit.*

No, I'm serious. Total garbage.

Look, I really liked the first movie. I thought that it had some really good moments and worked well as a zombie movie. And then came the sequel. Which, I enjoyed. It was a good action movie, I wished they'd done more with the zombies, but Nemesis was cool. The third one though, I just can't explain.

It's at this point that I would normally give a rundown of what happened. The problem here is that...well, NOTHING happened. For 95 minutes, no one did anything, and nothing was accomplished. This was supposed to be Milla's last turn as Alice, the genetically mutated zombie killer, and they left the whoel thing wide open for a fourth movie starring Milla.

"What's going on here? I have no idea..."

I'm going to give you a bit of a spoiler here. Alice's blood is the key to curing the T virus outbreak, and at one point she is in a facility with everything she needs to make the cure, so what does she do? Does she make a cure? Who the fuck knows! They never tell us. She raises an army of Alice clones to go after the CEO of Umbrella. End of movie. That's it.

The movie exists almost entirely to kill everyone off. Carlos and LJ return and are a part of Claire's convoy, cruising around the desert aimlessly. They're looking for supplies, but have no base, and no destination. Until Alice comes along with a journal from a dead guy who claims that their might be safety in Alaska. They go to Vegas looking for gas, at which point everyone dies. Well, most everyone. Well, most everyone except for the people who had just been killed by the zombie crows.

Oh, and Alice has mind powers.

Things just happen for no reason. Nothing is explained. And in what should be the closing act of your saga, nothing is wrapped up. The movie itself is an exercise in futility. There is nothing to become emotionally invested in. It's a group of entirely one dimensional characters. There is no real conflict in the movie. And there is nothing for them to do. I'd say it was the epitome of banality if I knew what banal** meant.

Rather than showing any real action, director Russell Mulcahy uses quick edits to give the appearance of action. This is a lazy technique used by incompetent directors everywhere. It's a way for implying action when you are incapable of actually showing anything. It's a cheap trick.

And good old Paul WS Anderson goes on, once again, to show what a fucking hack he is. The only thing he's worse at than writing seems to be directing. So, I guess it could have been worse. Can someone please tell me why Hollywood keeps letting this guy work?

The upside of the entire experience was seeing the trailers for Iron Man and 30 Days of Night. Both of which look pretty fucking sweet.

Resident Evil: Extinction gets 3 zombies swarming around the compound until the fence is blown wide open and the mysteriously decide to stay out of the compound of their own volition out of 10. And, I'd like to add a simple plea...please stop. Let this be the last movie. I don't think I can take much more.

*In all fairness, I reacted the same way after seeing Episode 3 for the first time. I now love it.
**I know what it means.

7 Dollar Popcorn Prestents the 7 Dollar Popcorn FILMuary Extravaganza 28 Days of Movie Mayhem Day 13 Post 200: Children of Men

It's the 200th post here at $7 Popcorn! 200! That's...wow...more than I ever really thought I'd make it to. Especially last year when I almost gave up on this whole thing, but here we are! Coming together for the 200th episode, praying the network doesn't cancel us before 300! It's been pretty fantastic so far, I'd show you some highlights or something, but I'm not sure that there are any! Oh well! Fuck it, on with the show!

Lucky number 13, right? 13 is always lucky, especially when it's 13 days into 7 Dollar Popcorn Prestents the 7 Dollar Popcorn FILMuary Extravaganza 28 Days of Movie Mayhem. Today its the movie that everyone is talking about, Children of Men.

Children of Men takes place in England, about 20 years from now. It's a violent future and a future where no one can have kids. Clive Owen is...well, some guy. But he apparenly has a prior relationship with a woman who heads up a group of...freedom fighters. Well, she dials up Clive and wants his help in getting transport papers for a girl. You see, she's not English, and foreigners are illegal. Then plan is to get her to a boat. That's the plan. The plan goes to shit when the woman gets killed (I really need to start paying attention to people's names). So, she gets killed by some other group of "freedom fighters", the more violent kind.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

They retreat to a safe house where the girl shows Clive that she is pregnant. The first one in 18 years! They also find out that the woman was killed by one of her associates! Clive grabs the pregnant girl and they run...right to Clive's parents. His dad's name is Jasper (see, I remember something), and I think Clive's name is Theo. And the pregnant girl is Key. It's all coming back to me.

So, Theo, Key and the miwife take shelter at Jasper's. Jasper figures out a way for them to get to the boat via a refugee camp. Basically, they have to get themselves arested by a guy named Sid who likes to refer to himself in the third person.

Sid gets them in, but the midwife ends up having to sacrifice herself for Key, who has gone into labor.

It's a pretty remarkable movie really. It borders on being science fiction, but it's not robots and spaceships. It paints a rather bleak future for us, but one that is remotely possible.

I dug it. I really liked it, so I give it 8 and a half military dudes stopping their battle to stare at a baby only to resume the battle without thinking twice out of ten.