Random Movie Roundup (And Rollout!)

Sorry about not posting anything new lately.  Since I wanna keep this brief, I'll just say that I had a close family member being admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery.  Then in the days that followed, I kinda melted down from all the stress that's been building up in my head lately.  To make things worse, the only day I was in any sort of mood and had any time to write, my computer got a virus and I spent almost all day trying to get rid of it.  Yeah, this past week was horrible.  It's kinda weird how quickly things can change from good to bad.  Or from bad to worse.  But seriously, I did have a great time spending my birthday weekend with friends then suddenly, I was quickly reminded of the living embodiment of Murphy's Law that is my life. 

Anyways, enough of that.  In other news, thanks to all one of you reading this...OK, let me sidebar for a second.  I joke about how little my readership is quite often, but seriously, I know more than 1 freaking person reads this so you'd think I'd have more votes whenever I put up a poll.  Anyways, thanks to the 1 person that voted, I will be reviewing Ghost Rider next.  However, it won't be a standard movie review...I don't think.  I realize that I'm still trying to figure out which format I should go with reviewing movies but I'm going to try something new yet again with this.  As you can probably infer from the range of choices in the poll, I'm toying with making reviews of Nic Cage movies a recurring feature here on Sarcasmatron, seeing that he's pretty much the unofficial mascot of the blog at this point.  So it looks like Ghost Rider will be the first.  Eh, could be worse.  I was seriously hoping you guys wouldn't pick The Wicker Man.

So, in an effort to get some sort of new content up here, I'm just gonna talk about the random stack of movies I've been watching the past few weeks, complete with arbitrary grades.  How fun!

Predators Mini-Review And More

As part of my birthday festivities, I wanted to check out Predators as it was pretty much the only movie at the theater right now that I wanted to see other than Toy Story 3 (which I still haven't).  Even though it looked alright, I still had my reservations about it.  Would it end up sucking like the Aliens vs Predators movies did?  Will Adrien Brody be able to pull off being the lead in an action film?  Will Danny Trejo not be awesome?  Luckily, all of my worries were wiped away as Predators ended up being quite good...well, not ALL my worries.  ***Mini Spoiler - Danny Trejo is the first one to die.  :-( ***

HELP! I'm Being Blaxploited!

I make no secret about my love for so-called "guilty pleasure" movies to the point that I don't even consider them a guilty pleasure.  I'm proud to like movies of shady quality and ill repute and make it quite known.  Chop-socky flicks, Grindhouse sleaze, Italian giallo and zombie gore.  Sometimes I feel like I was born a couple decades too late and I should be wandering around the seedy side of Manhattan wearing a stained trenchcoat and mirrored shades.  But no other sub-genre exemplifies this underrated time in cinematic history in the same way that Blaxploitation does.  Sure, it's easy to write such movies off as "cheese" when the bulk of the characters in them are sporting bell bottoms, afros and jheri curls while spouting off jive and even easier to condemn them as exploitative when those very same characters are almost always junkies, pushers, pimps and prostitutes.  But to me, "Blaxplotation" symbolizes everything that's real and true with moviemaking, even if the end result is usually lacking.  There's no better way for me to explain it, so I'll let Blaxploitation legend and all-around badass Fred Williamson do it better than I ever could:

“I have no idea who was being exploited. Black people loved the movies, all the actors were being paid. I mean, if you compare it to Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood movies of the same time, they never called them ‘white exploitation’. It was a terminology they had to use to distinguish black film, because black films with heroes didn’t exist until [the 1970's].”

And Yet, More Nothing...

I hope all of my American readers out there had an enjoyable 4th of July holiday chock full of blowin' shit up and hot dogs and blowin' up hot dogs.  To all my American readers, ummmm....well...it's not like I can say something to the extent of "On this day, EVERYONE's an American" like they say with other holidays because a good chunk of people in America still don't even want to acknowledge anyone that's not white as an American, even if they've lived here all their lives.  Hooray for xenophobia!

Anyway, much like my last blog entry.  This one's not going to be very long because I'm still having trouble finding stuff to write about.  But hopefully that'll change for a couple of reasons.