Movies My Mother and I Both Rated Five Stars on Netflix

Billy Elliot
Body Heat
Casablanca
Chinatown
ET: Theatrical Rerelease Version
Back to the Futures I and II
Clue
The English Patient
First Knight
Waiting for Guffman
Citizen Kane
Arrested Development (seasons 1–3)
Far from Heaven
Being John Malkovich
Beetlejuice
David Bowie: The Best of Bowie

Movie We Both Rated 4 Stars
Willow

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WATCH "SWEET HOME ALABAMA"

Dear Readers,

Perhaps you've seen the advertisements on the Lifetime network for 3 nights of the movie Sweet Home Alabama. "Reese Witherspoon is marrying McDreamy!" it proclaims. This sounds promising. Could be good, you think. That Patrick Dempsey is awful handsome, and Reese is so cute.

That's what I thought, and I watched this movie in its entirety, waiting and waiting for even one scene I could enjoy. But it's bad. It's so bad I rated it only one star ("I Hated It") on netflix, a rating shared only with What Women Want, Batman & Robin, Rocky V, Coyote Ugly, American Pie 2, and Little Man (another movie I was forced to watch on the bus to Boston). Patrick Dempsey doesn't even get the girl at the end. And Reese as at her most annoying. The only good reason to watch this movie is if you've seen that Johnny Cash movie, so you can marvel at what a better actress Reese is now than when she first started out. Because she (and Dempsey, for that matter) are both horrible is this boring, unheartfelt film filled with every stereotype in the book.

I know it's raining out, but stay away from Lifetime people, for your own good.

My Newest Addiction: The Shield

Well, The Shield is on again, and when The Shield is on, I am watching The Shield. This is the second time I've seen this part of this episode. I watched the entire episode last Tuesday, but they replay it over and over again, and I keep finding myself watching it. I can't turn away until after the part at the end where Vic turns into a little rhino. For those of you who have never seen Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey, he's a pudgy, wild-eyed, crude asshole who also happens to be the fucking hottest thing alive. Michael Chiklis is also the only actor on TV to have the balls to end a scene with drool running down his face.

It would be bad enough that I'll watch the same episode of The Shield over and over.
But I also watch the censored-for-latenight network reruns on channel 11 at 1am every Saturday night (currently in season 3). This Saturday-night episode repeats the next Sunday, so if I miss it I'll catch it then, or sometimes, if it was particularly good, I'll watch it again.

To supplement my Shield addiction during the Wednesday–Friday period, I've recently started getting Season 1 of The Shield from Netflix. For the past week or so, I've been able to watch The Shield pretty much every night.

Incidentally, why aren't YOU watching The Shield? Too busy with American Idol or House or some shit? Not that I'm saying you should be as dedicated to Vic's unique brand of renegade justice as I am. In fact, the only other person I know who is as dedicated to The Shield as I am insists I'm making a mistake. He believes The Shield is a good enough TV show to take the effort to experience in the order in which it was meant to be experienced.

I can see what's he's saying, but there's something about experiencing it all at once—from the death of Terry; to Lem; to Shane's cock, Frank, when he went undercover at the Cockfight.

Me: Making Your Netflix Experience Better

Don’t get too jealous, but I recently received an invitation to fill out a survey online regarding my experience with Netflix. I’d taken “quick” surveys before, asking on what day I received “Project Runway Season 1 Disc 2” and so forth, but this survey was serious: it was all about you, my friends. Part of it was easy: “Do you pay attention to Netflix’s taste-in-movies similarity rating?” (YES!!), but part was more challenging: “Are your Netflix friends close friends or casual acquaintances?” (most of them are people I’ve met in singles chatrooms who I coerce into adding me as a friend and then continuously recommend Fisher Stevens movies to them so...close friends!) Perhaps because I have “more than five” Netflix friends, and I answered “yes” to “Did you recently notice a change in the Friends homepage?”, Netflix asked me for further comments. I made sure to word my criticisms carefully, so they wouldn’t be offended when I mentioned the site’s inability to set default views, and praised the “streamlined” nature of the new design. I also requested an easy way to recommend movies to friends without having to think of witty notes to leave with them. Because what do you say, exactly, about Short Circuit 2?

24: Good or Evil?

As some of you may know, I started watching 24 last season because everyone else watched it, only to stop at “nine p.m.” to finish my tenure with Everwood. When I realized Season 5 wasn’t coming out on DVD anytime soon, I turned to Season 1, only to find out that 24 is my new drug.

I was getting the DVDs from netflix, but they just weren’t coming fast enough. I’d watch all four episodes in a sitting, then pace around my apartment for the next two days waiting for the next disc. Over Labor Day weekend I downloaded 4 episodes off of iTunes, then, finally, drunkenly stumbled over to a friend’s house at 1 a.m. to download the rest off her computer because I couldn't stand the thought of going to bed without hearing Jack's insistant whisper/gun shots beforehand. But here’s what you may not know/remember: I don’t have a computer. So I was watching all this on my tiny video ipod. Here’s what it looked like:

My eyes started to dry out and I had to start putting eye drops in. My ears hurt from having headphones wedged in them for so long. But just to see Jack Bauer run around and save the day was worth it. I just wish he had to take his shirt off more. Now my question is, do I go on to Season 2? Or is my addiction too dangerous?

Confession: I find Tony Soprano hot

I'm deep into the third season of The Sopranos (via Netflix), and I just saw the episode where Tony and has mistress go at it at the zoo. And I realized, I can try to deny it all I want, but I really do find Tony Soprano to be totally hot.

This is kind of embarassing because my friends recently busted me secretly thinking Treat Williams, the bearded nerosurgeon dad on Everwood, was totally hot. But I'm gonna come out and say it: I wish my boyfriend was a well-dressed, gun-toting mob boss who could have practically anyone he wanted killed. But I don't think it's just that...I have no desire to do Pauly, or the guy from Springsteen's band who owns the strip club. And I find Christopher hot only in a drug-addict kind of way. No, I think Tony Soprano is intrinsically sexy, and therefore I am not ashamed.

Granted, "Tone," as I would call him, would probably smack me for opening my big mouth at some point or another, and then I'd have to leave him, leaving me with no place to get my heroin. Guess I'll have to find someone else to have monkey-house sex with.