The MacGuffin

AMC has proven over the last three or four years that they have the most provocative shows on television.  They have controlled the Emmy wins in the drama category, letting the Big Four know that they can hold their own on the battlefield too.  This is all due to their two big shows, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the latter of which is currently my favorite show on television.  Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle fame and Aaron Paul, as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, respectively.  Bryan Cranston has won three straight Emmys (all three years the show has aired) for Best Actor in a Drama, while Aaron Paul finally won the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Emmy this past year.

Judd Apatow had been the show runner for a couple of television shows before Freaks and Geeks, but most that are familiar with his work will agree that this was his true masterpiece.  Set in Detroit in the 1980’s, the show follows Lindsay and Sam Weir as they attempt to survive the reality of high school.  What Freaks and Geeks offers that other teen shows like Dawson’s Creek don’t is a look at the other side of high school as the tag line says so eloquently, “What high school was like for the rest of us.”  You get to see high school from the side of the “Freaks” (a.k.a. the druggies and burnouts) and the “Geeks,” which as some of you may know, will give you a completely different look at high school.  As a side note, this show is basically the flagship for “Before They Were Famous.”  It is almost inconceivable to look at the actors (and even some of the guest actors, including Ben Foster and a very young Shia LaBeouf) starring in this show and see where they went after this.

Ahh, we have reached the end of an era. Regardless of whether we like it or not, Saw is the horror franchise of the last decade. I also read today that Saw is the third highest grossing horror series after Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. After this one though, who knows if it will surpass either of those. Jigsaw has joined Freddy and Jason (and Michael Myers) as a classic horror icon. Now on to the actual movie.

I have been absent from the MacGuffin site for quite a while now.  Part of this was due to starting school and having more of a busy life lately.  However, part of it was also due to the fact that I have been watching fewer movies and more TV shows lately.  I have fallen in love with the idea of the television show.  It allows you so much more time to get to know the characters and experience their lives.  With that in mind, I plan to write more reviews than I have been in the past, but they will primarily be television reviews, starting below with Skins.

Freezer Burn directed by Charles Hood sounds like a good movie.  A scientist falls for a younger girl and he decides to freeze himself so that he can wake up and be with her in the future.  This was an interesting enough synopsis for me to place this in my Netflix Instant Queue.  I would come to immediately regret this decision. 

What if you could find out the exact moment that you were going to meet your soul mate?  Would you do it?  Would you want to know?  Or would that ruin the excitement of it?  If you want to know the instance when you will first see the person who will make you happier than anyone else in the world, it will just cost you $79.99 and easy monthly payments of $15.99.  However, we are not responsible if you are unhappy with the soul mate you receive or if you are upset by how long or short it may be until you find that one.

As my last review was Reign Over Me, it seemed appropriate to follow up with Adam Sandler’s other big dramatic role in Punch-Drunk Love.  Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson who would later bring us There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love was an offbeat romance starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson.  Sandler played Barry Egan, a small-business owner who is attempting to deal with anger and depression issues while keeping all seven of his sisters off of his back.  The movie drew me in right away because of the somewhat bizarre opening.  It began with and maintained a somewhat quiet nature with minimal dialogue and music.  While it was a bit slow, the story was interesting enough to keep me watching.

Eraserhead is the first feature length film from writer/director David Lynch, who has brought us Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. While I have heard great things about both of those films and Mr. Lynch in general, this was the first of his movies that I took the time to watch. If I only had one word to describe this movie, it would be bizarre. One type of movie that I am always a huge fan of is bizarre, but this film took it way over the edge. It took the weirdness so far that it distracted from the plot which there was not much of anyway. David Lynch has gone on record as saying that no one has ever gotten the true meaning of the film and that he likes it that way.

When you think of Adam Sandler, you think of the comedies that you grew up with, the potty humor and the cheap laughs that he gave you. One thing that you do not think of right away is great dramatic acting. While he has dabbled a bit in dramatic acting with Punch Drunk Love and Spanglish, his characters from movies such as Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore generally seem to come to mind first. After seeing this movie, it became clear to me that Adam Sandler has a mild form of what I like to refer to as the Jim Carrey disorder. When Jim Carrey first became a household name in the 90’s, he was popular for his character acting and his over-the-top comedy style. He began to test his dramatic limits with The Truman Show and The Majestic and then went on to star in one of the greatest movies of recent times Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey can be a very funny guy, but he is also an extremely underrated dramatic actor. He tends to choose the funny roles over the serious ones, and it appears that in the case of Adam Sandler the same can be said.

Upon first reading the synopsis for World’s Greatest Dad, I was immediately reminded of the 80’s hit, Heathers. Somehow it always happens that every ten years or so there comes a dark comedy centered on teenage suicide.  Heathers started the trend and was followed in the late 90’s by the not-as-good, Jawbreaker. The place where World’s Greatest Dad differs from these two films is the lead character; Heathers and Jawbreaker both follow female leads that accidentally murder fellow high school classmates.  The girls then decide to make it look as if their dead friends had offed themselves, planting fake suicide notes.  World’s Greatest Dad followed a different path than this, showing a father in a similar leading role.