The Convalescent Critic Top Ten

Yes I have a cold. I'm pretty sure it's a cold and not H1N1. First cold in a long time for me. I suppose it's better that I should get it when I'm not working, (I'm on holidays now), because although I like missing work, if I don't miss exactly a week it's a real hassle trying to get everybody back on the same schedule. More of a hassle than dragging my sick arse in there.

But even so it's not such a bad thing. I don't mind so much having a cold. I haven't tasted food in a few days. There are positives to that. I bought some pretty disgusting hamburger patties from Costlyco last time I was there. And, of course, since it's Costco I had to buy about 18 hundred of them. Since I can't taste them and I have to eat them to make room in my freezer I've had burgers twice in the last three days. I used lots of the crappy Yoshida's barbecue sauce on them of course because I bought about 9 gallons of that at Costlyco too. I also made some leftover vindelou. Just used veggies that were getting old, added some meat that had been thawed for a while and some packets of boil in the bag curry and voila: getting rid of leftovers in a healthy way. It's too bad though cuz I think it would have tasted pretty good, that curry. It might have been spicy too but who can tell when you're breathing through your mouth while eating?

Still, try as I might, I just can't eat a lot of food. This too is a plus for a guy like me. I have what you might call a few extra pounds that I'd like to pare away if I could. Loss of appetite is a bonus. Only it's kind of offset by the loss of energy that goes along with it. I don't do a lot of exercise when I am convalescing.

However, I DO get LOADS of ab work. And when I exercise abs are never a target area for me any more. So this cold is really making me feel the burn. No kidding! Wake up, cough for an hour. That's a great ab burn! Eat a meal, cough for another hour. I'm blasting my abs three times a day! At least! And then to keep the burn going between workouts I blow my nose every 10 minutes or so. I washed clothes today. ON MY ABS thank you very much!

I haven't left the house really in 3 or 4 days. That forces me to get some tedius stuff done that I just haven't wanted to do since last cold. I fixed some of the error messages I've been getting on my computer. Actually going into safe mode and deleting stuff from the registry! I am pretty proud of myself for that! And I upgraded to a gig of ram. It has sped up the old computator a little bit. I scanned for spyware, defragged and cleaned disks. But the thing that probably helped the most is when I blew a small, grey tumbleweed of dust out of my computer. It's UNbelievable the dust that builds up in this place! That's another thing I've been doing is dusting and vacuuming areas that I usually don't. Like under the bed, behind the computer and such. The dust in this place is the reason why I'm always at least a little stuffed up in the sinuses.

But I don't want to give the impression that I was as energetic as all that. The main thing I've been doing while recouperating has been downloading and watching about 20 movies. Maybe even more. Some old classics like Treasure of the Sierra Madres, Doctor Strangelove, Cool Hand Luke, The Philadelphia Story, Old Man and the Sea, The Public Enemy, The Eiger Sanction, The Revenge of the Pink Panther, The Omen, The Meaning of Life, The Maltese Falcon, High Noon and some others. And I've seen some fairly new movies that might be classics in 10 or 20 years like Son of Rambow, Appaloosa, Felon, Resurrecting the Champ, Superbad, Cashback, Food Inc., Ghost Town, Wall E, Couples Retreat, World's Greatest Dad, Paper Heart... how many movies is that?

This has got me thinking. Not about what it is that makes a good movie. No that just wouldn't be me. I got to thinking about what it is that makes a real stinker of a movie. Things that if I saw them in the movie trailer I wouldn't even bother going to see it because, much like shopping at Costco, you go into a movie pretty much blind. And it's usually a pretty big investment. Those burgers and that barbecue sauce looked good enough. They were attractively packaged. I had heard no negative buzz about them. Now I wish I had. That was probably about 40 or 50 bucks I'll never get back.

And when I watch a really bad movie I often wish somebody had warned me about it so that I wouldn't spend money on it. Or even if it was free, the time spent watching it was 2 hours I'll never get back. So here comes another of Dave's Top Tens. You may disagree. I know some of these there will be people who COMPLETELY disagree. Maybe even a majority of people. These are just MY hints.

The top ten things in a movie that give you a strong feeling that it's not going to be good. I'm not going to list actors or actresses because even the worst like Keanu Reeves has been in some good movies although they would have been better with almost anyone else cast in his place. Rene Zellweiger, same. Never absolutely necessary to a good movie but often the cause of bad ones. The stinker movie/stinky acting royalty in my books would be Vin Diesel and Paris Hilton. I don't think either has ever acted well or been in anything good. (that wasn't filmed with a night vision camera).

But that's not what this list is about. It's about scenes, cliches, situations, characters that we see quite a lot and almost never in good movies. These are not necessarily in order but I'll do my best to save the best for last.

Top ten things in a movie that give ME a strong feeling that it's not going to be a good one.

10: The Mexican Standoff- When two macho characters or more are pointing their guns at each other waiting for someone to flinch so that somebody can blow somebody away and remove all doubt about exactly how UNmacho they are! This is becoming very popular in modern movies about gang violence in the hood. Only diff. is the guns are tilted 45 degrees. A "good guy" who "heroically" blows people away just doesn't do it for me very often. Exception: Dirty Harry.

9: Singing- Now I know some great movies like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, The Blues Brothers and a few good Disney flicks had singing but that's why this is only number 9! GENERALLY, Chicago, Dreamgirls, West Side Story, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge, faaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrttt!!!

8: Martial Arts- Take a movie like Kung Pow. Compare it to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I don't see a difference. I am not sure which got more laughs from me. Martial arts movies are COMEDY, people! If you take it serously when people spin around in the air kicking 5 or 6 guys out cold, fly through the treetops, do a horizontally spinning drill move that knocks over several people, I have some very cheap but high quality electronics and some pills that will increase penis or breast size to sell you! These movies are Oriental musicals. The fights are choreographed and augmented with a soundtrack. Nobody can really fight like this. And if they could, it sure wouldn't sound like that. But it IS much better than people singing and dancing if you approach it as comedy.

7. "I'll have a beer."- Now I now a lot of people are going to think I'm nitpicking here but this has become such a pet peeve of mine that it distracts me to the point where I can no longer appreciate the movie. And it's not just the ordering of "a beer" like you're at a fraternity kegger and there's only one kind, it's the fact that 9 out of 10 beverages in movies, alcoholic or not, are rarely touched much less finished! It takes me half a reel of film before I forgive the characters for this. And the director? Forget it. Most movie heroes are from the world where people buy specific beverages and finish them. Maybe the Hollywood cinematic elite don't, but in the interest of realism, get this right, will ya?

6. Two beautiful people who hate each other- Come on! Though I think a lot of love scenarios are lame and often out of place, this has to be the worst. Okay, maybe only second to the superhero who messily kills 15 heavily armed and trained warriors and then in the arms of his girl turns into, "Hi Honey, Poopsi, Sweetiepie! Mwuh mwuh mwuh I weely weely missed my girlfwiend!" Alright so these two will share number 6. You can pretty much bank on the characters who hate each other the most hooking up by the end of the movie. If they're both attractive. Simplistic movie making and it needs to be accompanied by ingenious, Taming of the Shrewesque character development if it's to be at all stomachable. And usually it ain't.

5. A friggin vampire!!!- Just exactly how are goths and vamp kids obtaining the cash to support all these damn vampire movies? It's often true of kids in middle school and high school that intelligence is directly proportional to amount of black worn. Eye make-up, nail polish etc. But if these kids are so smart then they will have to realize sooner or later that the vampire genre has it's limits and they were eclipsed sometime WAY before stupid movies like Blade or Underworld. I think after Interview With a Vampire I was pretty much finished. But I'll probably get my blood sucked for saying this.

4.Willful destruction of property- Another of these things that is just a personal distraction. I really feel bad for the bartender whose bar gets trashed in a barfight and nobody pays him anything. At least in the old western movies the hero would likely flip him a couple coins and appologize. No more! Now people overturn fruit carts in the street with regularity and without even so much as an apologetic backwards glance. And car chases. Forget about it! The cops are supposed to be good guys. It is strongly discouraged for cops to chase bad guys in reality. Again, when are movie makers going to choose realism over gratuitous destruction? Car chases don't happen because things get damaged and people get sued. There could be a huge volume of movies about a personal injury lawyer who sues movie characters for all the destruction visited upon the general public. And I'm only talking about the GOOD guys!

3. Hand grabbed over the edge of a deadly drop- How many movies can you name? Heck how many CLASSICS? To Catch a Thief, Cliffhanger, So I Married and Axe Murderer, there are too many. But this is something I've personally tried. The physics of it STRONGLY favour BOTH people going over the cliff or off the roof or into the crater or whatever. The faller has the inertia. Unless the hero is considerably larger than the person rescued he/she will just topple right over the edge with the other person. Furthermore it takes a TREMENDOUS amount of strength to hold someone hand to hand like this for a long enough time to squeeze any drama out of it. I'm talking about world class arm wrestler hand strength. There have been a few movies in which someone was swung over to a safer place and dropped but usually there is a cutaway and we see that the hanger was pulled up by the rescuer. This is another feat of superhuman strength we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and allow. And I'm not even going to talk about all the people who almost go over the edge and grab onto a tree branch, shingle, eaves trough, girder, pontoon or whatever.

2. The gorgeous ass-kicking woman- While I have known quite a few physically tough women, (hell I'm from a land abounding with them), exactly NONE of them have been physically attractive. These days the ideal body for a woman, (and for a man for that matter), is in need of a sandwich, folks. Annorexia does not equal strength! You ever seen a female bouncer? You ever seen a gorgeous female bouncer? Nuff said.

1. The defused bomb with one second remaining- If I'm a bad guy making a bomb I'm certainly not going to provide anyone who might want to disarm it the convenience of a timer that lets him know how long he has. Sure some bombs need timers but why hasn't any bad guy yet set the bomb to go off at 00:03 or 00:04 or if it's not in a movie, how about 10:00 or something? It doesn't have to be 00:00! It probably NEVER IS! Again, how good can a movie be if the director doesn't know this? This is a cheap ploy to create tension. Stop it! It doesn't work any more! Like all the others here I don't want to watch these things in movies any more UNLESS they are being lampooned.

Hope you enjoyed my list. I have to go watch a movie. What are the odds it'll have one of these in it?