Well, I finally saw my 1000th movie yesterday. I'm now a member of the elusive "One-Grand Club," as it's called. It's akin to the 5-Timers Club of Saturday Night Live. You may be saying to yourself, "that's great and all, but don't you get anything?!" I'm glad you asked. Upon admission to the club, you receive a red velvet robe lined with the skin of baby seals. Very posh, indeed. To mark this milestone, I'm revising my rating system to be four times as granular! I found recently that I'd like to give half-ratings to some movies, so I'm now rating movies from 1 to 10 with the ability to give half a point! I'm also going to start reviewing the movies I see — starting now. Exciting I know…now on with the reviews.
Movie 999: 30 Days of Night - 6.5 / 10
In order to see my 1000th movie I had to first see my 999th movie, as one might natually deduce. For my said movie, I went to see 30 Days of Night, a vampire movie starring Josh Hartnett and Melissa George based on the graphic novel of the same name. This vampire movie takes place in modern day Alaska in the northern most town in the US. Every winter, the town doesn't see the sun for 30 days, hence the title.
A group of vampires (brood?, coven?, clan?, murder?, coalition?) comes to town to feast on the living. Chaos ensues.
Not being well-versed in vampire lore, I have a rather inexperienced palette as far as quality and accuracy are concerned. Keeping that in mind, here are my impressions of 30 Days of Night.
The music was great. The composer did an excellent job of conveying the mood and keeping it creepy and intense.
As far as fictional stories with fictional creatures go, this one was pretty plausible. Ignoring the part about vampires not being real, I could totally see this happening. The vampires weren't cheesy or over-the-top, so it worked really well.
Crazy vampire language. I don't know what language vampires traditionally speak, but these spoke Vampire'ese I assume…or maybe it was Romanian, who knows. Whatever it was that they spoke was 1) subtitled, and 2) unintelligble by me. This added to the "plausiblity" factor for me. It would be naive to assume all vampires spoke English.
I read somewhere that this movie was "more relentless than The Descent." While I don't necessarily think that's true, it is pretty gory. Don't take your 9 year old to see it like the guy in front of me.
In the end, I enjoyed it, but it could have been paced a little faster to keep it more intense.
I give 30 Days of Night 6.5 blood-curdling vampire screams out of 10.
Movie 1000: The Brothers Solomon – 4 / 10
This movie was not awesome by a long show, but good for a few laughs nonetheless. It stars Will Forte, Will Arnett, and Kristen Wiig, of SNL fame, so it plays like an SNL movie (i.e. A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar, etc.). The Brothers Solomon is about two brothers who have zero experience with women and want to have a baby to save the life of their ailing father.
The premise is pretty dumb (Think 40 Year Old Virgin meets Dumb and Dumber meets Knocked Up, only 33% as novel), but that's to be expected when Will Forte is put in charge of writing the screenplay. It feels like one of his typical SNL sketches that lasts for about an hour and a half. So it moves a little slowly at times and uses a few gimicks one too many times.
Worth a few laughs for sure, but I wouldn't pay too much to see it. Maybe give it a whirl if it's on HBO or something.
For my 1000th movie, it wasn't stellar. But try as I did to find a Schindler's List or an Apollo 13, I just couldn't come up with anything. So I just picked the first goofy comedy I saw that I hadn't seen yet. Oh well, here's to 1000 more!
I give The Brothers Solomon 4 out of 10 on three. One, two, three! 4 out of 10!
