The MacGuffin

Spencer and John give Avatar a second take, give their DVD picks of the week, and close out by sharing some of the films that they are looking forward to in 2010.

The 2010 Streamy Awards are coming soon.  The Streamys honor the best in original web content and the public can place votes for their favorite web series in a number of categories.  Voting is open until January 22 and you can vote once a day.  So head on over to www.streamys.org and vote for Adler & Zenith (www.adlerandzenith.com) as the Best Comedy Web Series.  We checked to see if it could also be voted for as Best Web Series Featuring a Host of the Macguffin Podcast, but it turns out that category doesn’t exist.  Oh well, maybe next year.

Link (1986): An orangutan butler goes apeshit (ha ha ha) and stalks a young Elizabeth Shue. The best of the killer monkey subgenre. 6/10

Since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Brittany Murphy in it, I felt I owed it to her legacy to watch one of her films. This SyFy channel-appropriate movie is about earthquakes ripping through the country across faultlines and swallowing whole cities. The feds send in seismologists to research it and they don’t get very far. Brittany Murphy is one of those experts.

Despite some confusion surrounding the name of this film, it is not about a certain adult film star’s younger lesser talented brother. It’s about Sherlock Holmes, the world greatest detective and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. They solve a variety of crimes thanks to the amazing gift of combining minute pieces of information/evidence together into a story. This film iteration of the literary series stars Robert Downey Jr. playing Holmes and Jude Law playing Watson.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes place during World War II in Germany. A young boy comes home from school to find his family is planning for a dinner party and discussing moving to the countryside since their dad got a promotion. The young boy, Bruno, isn’t pleased about the move since he loves the house they’re in and all his friends. The family’s new home is a bid drab and gloomy and not at all warm and inviting like their last home – more of a walled compound than a home. It’s also in the middle of freakin nowhere in the countryside.

Some people hate Will Farrell, and some people wish they could hate Will Farrell, but can’t. I’m in the latter group. Step Brothers is about two single parents that get combined (thankfully, Mary Steenburgen is the smokin’ hot mom, so SCORE for me) and two adult children living at home are now forced to live with each other.

This Italian film opens with a bunch of guys getting tanned and manicured together. Two guys pull guns and start blasting the other guys, spraying blood all over the salon. There are multiple local crime bosses, the Camorra, who take a fee on what people make. They get money from drug dealers, prostitutes, old people, whoever. That’s how things operate in this area, I guess.

This is a Polish film that starts with a guy who appears to be a butcher, a mailman, a pooper scooper, and a bartender – I think this is the comedy part (Oh, those crazy Pollacks!!!). The real plot is actually about a British couple spending time in Prague and worrying over whether he turned off the iron in their room before they left. A statue falls from a building while they are walking and crushes the wife – seriously, DESTROYS her.

A nursing home nurse is being considered for a job promotion due to the crap (literally) she deals with every day at work. Her boss tricks her into coming into work on her day off and the nurse isn’t happy about it. This film is about the rough day this nurse is about to have. This film is supposedly based on a true story about a woman in Texas to which this happened – I’m not sure I’m buying it based on this film.