My Week In Movies - Creeps, Cops, and Polar Bears

I'd like to start a new feature called "My Week In Movies" where I recap the films I had a chance to see over the past seven days. This new feature will not only give me subject matter for at least one day of the week, but I'd also like to get better at writing about movies and this feels like a good jumping off point.

Before you pass judgement on me that I spend too much time watching movies let me just say that I hardly watch any broadcast television. I don't follow CSI, or House, or ER...or any of those shows. There's a couple of comedies I like, but everything I watch is on TiVo where I can watch an hour's worth of TV in under 45 minutes! Also, I don't channel surf...if I sit down in front of the TV I'm actually watching something. But enough about me...let's see what I saw this past week:

Religulous (2008) This is Bill Maher's documentary style movie about organized religion. Here, he basically asks people questions about their belief system and then proceeds to back them into a corner until they don't have answers to why they believe in what they believe. I like Bill Maher. I think he's smart and very funny but he's also a little smug and too sure of himself. We all know that different religions have different beliefs and that some contradict each other which in the end makes this film kind of pointless. There's another documentary I saw recently called "The God Who Wasn't There" which was terrible but was also more fact based and went into greater depth on some of the issues that are only touched upon in Religulous. Bill Maher would have been better off to pen a fictional comedy movie about his gripes with organized religion than to simply make fun of other people for what they believe in.

Dirty Harry (1971) At this point in time Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callihan character is such a major film icon that he's almost a cliche'. Dirty Harry set the tone for many cop films to follow and has been ripped off and parodied so many times that watching it for the first time today, it doesn't seem that special. One of my all time favorite TV shows is "Sledge Hammer!" which was a goofy take off on movies like Dirty Harry. I've seen every episode of Sledge Hammer at least a half-dozen times. It wasn't until I watched Dirty Harry that I realized how much of Sledge Hammer was borrowed from Dirty Harry. Especially the first episode which has many homages to this first Dirty Harry picture. I also love how 70's cop movies play just like a 70's cop TV show. The music is so distinctively 1970's, it's great! The story here is pretty simple, but the action is also pretty tight and it all still holds up almost 40 years after it was made.

Arctic Tale (2007) I've wanted to see this one for some time now and caught it on Showtime and watched it with the kids. It's a sequel or sorts to March of the Penguins. Instead of taking the serious tone of the Penguin movie, the filmmakers decided to go a little more commercial and have Queen Latifah provide a more kid-friendly narration. What made March of the Penguins such a great movie was the unbelievable storyline that Mother Nature wrote out for those penguins. Here, we follow a Polar Bear family and a walrus family. While both families are cute and have some interesting adventures, their tale is not near as compelling as that of the penguins. However, it's a unique film with it's heart in the right place and my kids found themselves oddly fascinated by the whole thing...well, at least the first hour or so.

The Addams Family (1991) The other day I had the M.C. Hammer song "Addams Grove" stuck in my head. So much so that I bought the song of off iTunes, downloaded it to my iPod and then proceeded to run it straight into the ground listening to it over and over. So then I got to thinking about the movie the song was written for. I had only seen it once when it first came out on video, but I've seen the sequel "Addams Family Values" a dozen or so times. So, when ABC Family ran both movies the other day I TiVo'ed the first one and gave it another screening. As with so many other TV-to-Movie translations, this first Addams outing is horribly misguided. Instead of sticking close to the TV series, this film tries to recreate the original comic strip that no one is familiar with. Instead of a story that shows off the Addams creepy, kooky ways you get a confusing story about embezzlement and fraud and other things that don't really have to do with The Addams Family. The cast, however, is great and you can tell they are all having a good time. Which is why when they made Addams Family Values a few years later they got themselves a better script and therefor made a better movie!

What did you watch this week?