Yeah, what's up, indeed.
Well, here's the post on the original challenge, way back in January.

And now, we’re less than seven weeks away from the New Year (cripes!).

I was supposed to watch 9 films in 9 different genres, so 81 films total. So far, I've seen... three.

*sigh*

Well, some film related miscellania here:

A COUPLE HORROR FILMS I TRIPPED OVER WHILE CHANNEL SURFING

,,, and it's ALREADY January 29th! That's insane! And typical for me! Grrrr!

Anyway, I'm still trying to tie up some loose ends from 2008 this month and forge ahead with other plans as well.
Such as:

While checking in on the blog, The Groovy Age of Horror (I’m a sucker for the fumetti posts!), THAT blog gave a shout out to ANOTHER blogger, Holger Haase, at Hammer and Beyond. On a recent(ish) post (uh, closer to New Year’s Day), Haase talks about the 999 resolution/challenge, meaning: resolving to watch 9 films in 9 “genres” in 2009 (hence, 999). You get to "define" the genre.

It sounded like a neat idea, and when I first read the post, he and four other bloggers were participating in this. Haase sort of wished out loud that it would be neat if 9 bloggers were participating and invited others to join, so if course, being the schmuck I am… well, there’s now FIVE other bloggers doing this with him…

So, here’s MY 999 Resolution list:

 

Well, it’s October… which means Halloween’s around the corner!

In a beautiful, perfect, dreamy world, I would not only watch horror movies every day this month, I’d also whip out awesome, non-rambling reviews about them, too!

And I’d make all sorts of horror films, too! Yeah!

And… and… what the-- AAIIIEEEEE!!!

Cripes and knickers!!

Uh… don’t mind me. Sorry.

One of my cats just knocked over my wife’s cardboard Angel standee that stands guard in our computer room… and it crashed into the back of my chair.

Son of a --!

Anyway, the world I live in is neither perfect nor dreamy nor… well, it is autumn, so some of the changing leaves are very pretty…

But, my point is, more than likely my plans are merely idle daydreaming, so, don’t hold your breath waiting for stuff here.

However, I did think of something I can post.

I’m currently a member of a local film and videomakers club (uh, specifically: the Buffalo Movie and Videomakers or BM-VM) and we have a “shorty” contest coming up at this month’s meeting. In a nutshell, the idea is make an original film which is no longer than 5 minutes.

One genre of short film that’s become popular, thanks to GRINDHOUSE, the exploitation double-feature tribute conceived and executed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino and aided and abetted by Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth, faux grindhouse movie trailers are being posted fairly regularly on Youtube.

Here are merely three:
 

NOTE: This was written quite some time ago, at least a few months ago.

Well, a few things up front: watching this film reinforced my self-impression that I’m incredibly inconsistent as a movie audience.

I watched it over the weekend with my wife, and when it was done, the foremost things in my head were primarily negative. Afterwards, late at night, I went online to add some comments to Mermaid Heather’s and CRwM’s reviews of the movie at their respective blogs, and I think I mostly rambled on obnoxiously about things that bugged me or that I wished the movie did.

In my meager defense, I think I disclaimed that on a second viewing my reaction would probably be more positive, but still, my penchant for nitpicking on little details or focusing on weird questions of “Why did the “filmmakers” do this, bla bla bla?” was more than likely becoming a little tiresome.

In fact, I think my wife, the Doctor, was a little fed up with me and my curmudgeonly comments as well, considering she “enjoyed” the film, and by that, I mean, she actually said she WASN’T enjoying the movie because it was scaring her. But she stuck through it until the end—that’s my stiff-upper-lipped-cowering-buckeroo!

Anyway, I didn’t write a review or post of my thoughts about the film before commenting on other reviews because it was late and these things usually take forever for me to do… in fact, who knows if I’ll even finish THIS.

But, I’ll try and articulate my basic reactions here and see what happens…

Recently, there’ve been a number of horror film reviews posted at a couple of the blogs I regularly read, the previously referred to Mermaid Heather and blogger CRwM’s And now the screaming starts, that I’ve been avoiding reading because I didn’t want to learn too much about the movies before seeing them. Most prominent were THE MIST and THE RUINS.

But, the Doctor and I rented a crapload of DVDs a few weeks ago (like, a baker’s “half-dozen”— if there is such a thing) that we only watched, uh, one of, and that one was writer/director Richard (DONNIE DARKO) Kelly’s SOUTHLAND TALES. Among the rest of the unsampled and unappreciated was 30 DAYS OF NIGHT. Well, since I had been hanging on to these films well after their return date, I finally decided I needed to return them to Blockbuster before they sold them to me.

But I wanted to see at least ONE of them before parting with them, so I convinced my sweetums that we should sit down with 30 DAYS.

Yeah, so...
Okay.

LAST time I posted something here, it was almost two freaking months ago!
I thought I was just going to be slightly distracted by my impending 30 year high school reunion, which happened 4th of July weekend.
Well, I survived that okay.

But... I never came back!
WTF!?

Just a quick howdy to everybody!
My apologies for not being more visible here or in terms of commenting on my favorite blogs recently.
This 4th of July weekend I'll be celebrating my freakin' 30 year high school reunion, so I've been busy with that, and my work schedule's screwy this week with the holiday.
But I plan to be much more visible on the internet starting next week.
Whether that's good news or not, I dunno...

Anyway, have a good and safe 4th of July everybody!
I'll be busy having a good time visiting old friends and occasionally feeling self-consciously fat.

Awesome!

And, so that there's no confusion, that means NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
And, obviously, I've become a trailer posting whore.

But some explanations and disclaimering:

I swear to God, I'm actually working on some actual posts!
Meanwhile, I tripped over this damn thing. It looks really cool.
No, not a horror film, although, man, that first scene is kind of scarier than crap.
Seriously.

No, no, no! NO!
The title to today’s lame-assery (blog-wise) does NOT refer to Final Girl’s wunnerful, wunnerful blog.

Nay, ‘tis me whining again about how I missed yet ANOTHER Final Girl Film Club outing.

Today’s scheduled entertainment was 1988’s SCARECROWS.

So, I’m 0-1-2 for the year (Films Watched AND Reviewed – Films Merely Watched – Films Not EVEN Watched, Ya Loser).

What follows are some dispatches from the frontlines of tool-dom-ness…

That’s one of the main reasons why it caught the attention of my wife (the Doctor) (of English, mind you) in the first place at the video store, and then she read the synopsis and we decided to give it a shot.

Boy.

This was one of those few films where I pretty much didn’t like it almost from the start.

But I’m getting WAY ahead of myself…