My Blog’s July 2016 Recap

Happy August, everyone! August? When did that happen?! Well, it’s a new month so here’s my blog recap for July. 🙂

POSTS

My Most Popular Post: My Ten Most Hated Movies Since Starting This Blog. I think this proves that people love a good bitchfest! I was starting to wonder if anyone looked at this blog anymore when I decided to put this post together on a day when I was in a really bad mood. I got loads of comments! I loved hearing from people who agreed with some of the movies I absolutely hated but also from many who disagreed as well (my hatred of Mary And Max & of Slumdog Millionaire was especially unpopular).

My Favorite Post: My Top Ten DJs/Disc Jockeys In Movies. This was a fun list to put together & one I’d been meaning to do for ages. I still love that, while researching this list, I discovered that a cartoon Skrillex was in Wreck-It Ralph.

MOVIES REVIEWED

My Most Popular Movie Review: Circle. This movie was a very pleasant surprise. This is the type of movie I love to blog about – good films that not many people have seen or maybe not even heard of & which deserve more attention. I think I talked a few people into watching it. Oh, and one of the lead actors also stopped by & left a comment so that was cool. I love when that happens! Glad that didn’t happen on my “Most Hated Movies” post…

All Movies Reviewed (ranked best to worst):
Battle Royale
Circle
People Like Us
The Secret Life Of Pets
We’re The Millers
Red Dawn (2012)

MOVIES WATCHED

In Cinema (ranked best to worst):
Finding Dory
The Secret Life Of Pets

At Home (ranked best to worst):
Battle Royale
Circle
Little Witch Academia
The Book Thief
Deathgasm
The Visit
Paper Towns
Finders Keepers (2014)

TOP TEN LISTS

– Top Ten Tom Hanks Movies
– Top Ten Harry Dean Stanton Movies
– Ten Most Hated Movies Since Starting This Blog
– Top Ten DJs/Disc Jockeys In Movies
– Top Ten Kevin Spacey Movies

SEARCH TERMS

My Top Search Term: “gnome project x“. But spelled as “gnom” – how annoying. Well, variations of this search term pop up all the time. The “gnome giving the finger” in the movie Project X seems to be very popular!!

My Favorite Search Term: “jennifer balgobin weird science“. I like search terms for people I’ve never heard of. I had to look up Jennifer Balgobin. Turns out she was “Biker Chick” in Weird Science (which I reviewed HERE). Cool.

Here are my top search terms for the month:

BOOKS

Book Reviewed: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Book I’ve Just Finished: The End Of The World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker

Book I’m Currently Reading: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

BLOG PLANS FOR THE COMING MONTH

I’ve been taking it easier & not posting as many reviews plus I’m doing simple Top Ten & Music Video posts as these don’t take up much of my time. I’m going to stick with doing things this way for now as I can keep up with the slower pace. It’s no longer a fun hobby if it becomes stressful! I was happy that I finally managed to watch Battle Royale for my July Blind Spot film as I really enjoyed that. I’ll watch my August Blind Spot film soon – what do you guys think of these choices? It was going to be El Topo but I keep putting that one off so may go with one of my alternates instead:

El Topo
Akira
Zodiac
The Raid
Running On Empty
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
House (Hausu) (1977)
Tetsuo
Solaris (1972)

Upcoming Movies:

There are quite a few movies coming out in August that I’m hoping to see. I wasn’t all that excited about Suicide Squad but I’m changing my mind now (mainly because that below poster for it is so awesome). I’m sure none of these will be great but I’m looking forward to The Shallows, Lights Out & The Purge: Election Year (I seem to be in the minority but I’m a fan of the first two Purge movies – you can see why in my reviews of the first movie & the sequel). It looks like the adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell is finally coming out this month?! I expect that to be horrible because of all the problems & delays that movie has had. What a shame as I really liked that book. I’ll still watch the movie, though, since I watch every King adaptation. Finally, I’m curious to see how the Pete’s Dragon remake turns out so I plan to take the kid to that. Remakes piss me off but this is one rare occasion where I have to admit that the original film is badly dated (even though I love it).

I always end these with a music clip related to something I watched/reviewed. Well, there weren’t any great soundtracks in the movies I watched this month so here’s a tribute to the Project X gnome! I didn’t like the movie but did like some of the songs in that film. My favorite was probably Pursuit Of Happiness by Kid Cudi (Steve Aoki remix).

My Ten Most-Hated Movies Since Starting This Blog

Since starting this blog at the end of November 2012, I’ve watched a lot of fantastic movies. This is partly because 1) I think I make more of an effort to watch good or, at least, “interesting” movies since I’m now writing about them and 2) projects such as my IMDB Top 250 Challenge have forced me to finally get around to watching some highly regarded classics. I’ve also been enjoying my 2016 Blind Spot choices so far so I’ll probably keep that going each year for however long this blog continues.

But it’s not all been good! I’ve also watched far more crap than ever before. My husband is partly to blame for this as he’s always like “Don’t watch so and so good movie without me!” but then he never actually watches any movies with me at home & I’m stuck watching something shitty by myself so he doesn’t moan at me watching something good without him. Marriage. Gotta love it. October is also to blame as I feel the need to review horror movies all month long so I end up watching whatever horrors happen to be on the services available to me & they end up being shit 90% of the time.

Anyway, as I’m in a bad mood & have nothing else ready to post for today, I thought I’d do a list of the ten movies I’ve hated the most of all the ones I’ve watched for the very first time in these last four years of “blog life”. Speaking of blogdom, I’m down on that lately too. Is it just me? I think the blog thing is dying off. Sad. Oh well – I’m still gonna shoot the shit about movies here for a little while longer, even if I’m only talking to myself. 😉

Oh, I should add that I’m excluding the movies I watched for Eric’s (in)famous Shitfest at The IPC as the whole point of Shitfest is to watch the worst movies possible. Clearly, these movies were worse than most on my following list. So here’s a quick list of links to my Shitfest reviews. I don’t hold you responsible for making me watch these atrocities, Eric! Well, maybe a little. 😉

– The Hottie & The Nottie
– Children Of The Living Dead
– Moshi Monsters: The Movie
– Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
– Alone In The Dark (as part of a Shitfest Social where a bunch of us bloggers watched this movie at the same time while trashing it in the comments at that link. Good times! I miss those days.) 🙂

So, now, here are the Ten Movies I’ve HATED THE MOST!!!! (counting down to the very worst):

10. Blue Ruin

9. The To Do List

8. Trance

7. Oz The Great And Powerful

6. Slumdog Millionaire

5. Mary And Max

4. Into The Woods

3. The Victim

2. Repo! The Genetic Opera

1. Love

Wow – have I really reviewed every single one of these movies other than Love?? Clearly I take the time for reviewing movies when they piss me off. HA! I do love to have a good bitchfest sometimes. Wait until I go to town on Love! I hated the FUCK out of that one (and there was lots of fucking to be hated).

(Dis)Honorable Mentions:
ATM
Red Dawn (2012)
Used Cars
The Boxtrolls
Mr. Peabody & Sherman
Lockout
Factotum

IMDB Top 250 Challenge – Movie #18 – Mary And Max (2009) Review

Mary And Max – IMDB Rank #183

Watched 7/6/13

Directed by Adam Elliot

Starring Voice Actors:
Bethany Whitmore
Toni Collette
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Eric Bana
Barry Humphries

Running time: 90 minutes

Country: Australia

Plot Synopsis:

This story follows the friendship between a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl named Mary and a 44-year-old New Yorker with many mental problems named Max. Their friendship starts in 1976, when a very lonely and neglected Mary decides to write a letter to someone in New York and chooses Max at random from a telephone directory.

My Opinion:

I hated this. Absolutely hated it. That is all. Review over. :-p

Okay… I’ll try to say a bit more. To be honest, I don’t know why I hated this so much but the whole thing just rubbed me up the wrong way. I can see it has some merit and a lot of this is probably just me being awkward as it’s obviously liked by enough people to have been voted into the IMDB Top 250. It does NOT deserve to be in a list alongside the “all-time greatest movies”, though.

I wouldn’t say that I don’t like a bit of black humor so I had no problem with that. But the whole thing was SO depressing. Every single character in this, other than Mary as a young girl, is completely unlikeable and some are downright hateful & horrible. As a young girl, Mary is so sweet. But she’s very lonely thanks to very neglectful parents (especially her alcoholic mother). The kids at school are horribly mean to her because she has a big birthmark on her head. She’s such a nice girl and I just couldn’t stand seeing this poor little girl being neglected and so in desperate need of a friend.

Then Max comes along and they have a great but oftentimes troubled pen-pal relationship due to Max’s many different issues (anxiety attacks, overeating, depression, and Asperger syndrome). He will sometimes get mad at Mary and she won’t hear from him for ages, which really hurts her. Her life is full of ups and downs (mostly downs!) and, as to pretty much be expected, she starts to descend into her own depression… Yada Yada. I won’t say whether or not this movie at least has a happy ending but who cares anyway – you’ll be lucky to not be severely depressed yourself by the time you make it to the end of this.

Um. Okay – I’ll say a couple good things. I liked that Mary’s world is sepia & Max’s is black & white. And there are, believe it or not, some quite funny things in this (I was just too depressed to give a shit). These were mostly things said by Mary or Max – I do admit that a lot of their correspondence was cleverly written and sometimes very funny. But this is one of those movies that’s too “aware” of its own cleverness. That sort of thing always gets on my tits. This film is pretentious. Oops – I was trying to say good things, wasn’t I… Mary. Mary as a girl. The only good thing, really.

Oh! And here’s another thing I hated probably more than anything else – this movie has now ruined for me a song that I loved: Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Perpetuum Mobile. And it not only used the song once, it kept using it over and over and over again. The movie clubs the viewer over the head with this song. Annoying. Dammit – I can’t hear that song now without thinking of this movie!

Anyway – I suppose this film is making some sort of point about mental illness that maybe I missed. Maybe the point is how it can ruin people’s lives through no fault of their own. Because the lives in this film are certainly not happy ones. Here’s a list from Wikipedia of some of the themes covered in this film:

Childhood neglect, friendship, the obscurity of life, teasing, loneliness, autism (Asperger syndrome in particular), obesity, depression and anxiety.

They forgot several things as well – such as agoraphobia, kleptomania, and alcoholism.

Yeah. Fun stuff indeed. 😉

Summary:

I hated this movie.

My Rating: 4/10

Now listen to this awesome song then never watch Mary And Max because it will destroy the song for you: