Sex and Death 101 is mostly the latter

After I spent 15 minutes setting up my wireless adapter on my Xbox 360 I decided to take advantage of my Netflix account and watch a movie. The movie that jumped out at me (I really did not feel like thinking too much at the time) was "Sex and Death 101."

Other than coming through on not making me think very hard it did not offer a whole lot else. Simon Baker is incredibly smug and annoying in the movie and comedy is really not his shtick. His friends are for the most part terrible to listen to (although Scrub's Neil Flynn is not too bad) and the women he falls in love with are equally shallow.

To be honest, I did enjoy the small parts of the movie that Patton Oswalt and Winona Ryder were in the movie. However these parts are quite small even though Ryder is listed as the leading actress in the movie. There is an enourmous amount of sexual content which as you have probably figured out if you have read any of my other reviews that I love but past that this movie is a dud.

Wanted: Role Models

Every once in a while there comes a comedy that shows promise and thencompletely blows away even the moderately high expectations you had coming in. Role Models is this movie. The two stars are very well known and do as well as expected but what makes the movie is the supporting cast. Paul Rudd (Clueless) and Seann Williams Scott (American Pie) are for the most part in top form but do not go above and beyond what you would expect.

Rudd and Scott are sentenced to 150 hours of community service and are assigned to two children named Auggie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse AKA McLovin from Superbad) and Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson). These two characters could not be any more different but they end up going quite well with their respective "big."

Other relatively unknown actors/actresses who are amazing in supporting roles in this movie would be Jane Lynch as the former crack whore turned child mentor, Ken Jeong as the L.A.I.R.D. king, Matt Walsh as the king's main fake henchman, and A.D. Miles as the overenthusiastic Sturdy Wings mentor (who also wants to get in the pants of Jane Lynch's character).

If you are not turned off by excessive profanity, occasional nudity, and extremely obvious inuendoes (ALWAYS followed by a strange facial expression by Rudd) then this is a movie for you. Even movies that I love and get from Netflix are in the mail the next day usually. This one hung around a few days so that I could watch it a few times. It is THAT good. Check it out!

Watching Watchmen

As a recovering comic book geek I relapsed last summer and bought and read Watchmen. It was such a good book that I only took a break once to sleep. Normally I would have been someone to go see the movie within the first couple days of release but alas, I had just moved and started a new job so this weekend would have to do.

To start off I must commend whoever did the casting for this movie was absolutely brilliant. Almost every single character was spot on in looks and what I had imagined their voices to be. The movie is extremely gruesome at times and has recurring scenes of nudity and sex so this definitely lived up to the R rating it had been given (which is awesome if you ask me). As it was in the book Rorschach is the most haunting of characters that you will ever root for. He makes the Dark Knight seem not quite so dark.

Without giving away too much of the plot here is what goes down. At the start of the movie Edward Blake, AKA The Comedian is killed by a shadowed man who is extremely fast. This pushes Rorschach to start investigating, believing that someone is out killing masks. In the process we meet Nite Owl (former and present, or should I say former and not quite as former), Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, The Comedian (flashbacks, since he dies in the first couple minutes of the film), and Dr Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is a godlike character who gained his powers in a scientific accident and now can bend matter into basically whatever he wants. Along with Ozymandias he is working on a project that will make energy infinite and will end all wars. The storylines eventually all intertwine into an ending that really is not a prototypical Hollywood ending (really glad it stayed true to the book).

Although the movie is quite long I would recommend this to anyone who wants to watch a "smart" superhero movie. In addition I think that the book is a must read and is definitely something I will keep in my library for quite some time.