The missus and I watched the new “Musical Version” of Hairpray – it was a lot of fun. The character selection was good, the music was fun (well, the missus was skeptical toward the beginning of the movie), in general it was a good time. John Travolta did a good job as the “mother” — you could imagine Divine in his character, just not quite as over the top as Divine. I thought Nikki Blonsky was fantastic as Tracy Turnblad, better than Ricki Lake. We followed that up by watching the original John Waters movie of the same name. I would say, with the exception of enjoying the performance by Divine, I think we both liked the new one much better… that said, the original was very “John Waters” which is no suprise.
I followed up this two-fer by visiting our local googol-plex to see Cloverfield and Untraceable. If you take The Blair Witch Project, place it in Manhattan, add Godzilla, then add a couple million dollars to the budget you get Cloverfield. If you can handle the constant shaky-cam and like monster flicks, this is a solid movie. If you hated Blair Witch and/or shaky cam makes you nauseous, you will absolutely hate Cloverfield. Untraceable is a somewhat derivative film, trying to be exactly what you imagine it is trying to be – a hunt the serial killer film with bits of lots of different movies thrown it, but it didn’t do a terrible job at it – pretty passable, but it won’t win any awards. If you have nothing better to watch you could do worse than Untraceable. To its credit, it didn’t completely screw up the technology aspect, which is more than I can for most tech-related movies.
On Sunday the missus and I watched Lost Voyage and Ghost Voyage (both on the Sci-Fi channel). To call these “B” movies is being generous. Both had terrible special effects (in fact, I could easily believe the same special effects team did both movies), laughable scripts, stories that were anything but new, and casts that, umm, probably were having trouble finding work elsewhere (well, there were a couple recognizable character actors in Lost Voyage). For “humor” value both movies served their purposes. The acting was a touch better in Lost Voyage and the story was a touch more interesting in Ghost Voyage, but both movies were exactly what we expected – Sci-Fi channel movies.
One last note, we were in the Phoenix area last weekend and had the joy of visiting an In-N-Out Burger where I got to enjoy a tasty Double-Double and some of their fantastic “well done” fries. I try to hit In-N-Out Burger anytime I am toward the west cost. Mmmm! If you have one near you, don’t forget the Secret Menu.