This is just a quick post today.

First off, I'd like to mention a couple one a day vitamins that are extremely beneficial when looking for ways on how to relieve stress. You can find them at the vitamin shop, but I would suggest heading over to Mark Sisson's website to get the juicy details.

Second, I'm just hear to warn you not to see 10,000 B.C. It's awful. I can't say enough about how awful it is, so I'll just mention these two things.

1) You can't tell any of the characters apart. They all wear dreadlocks, and have toned bodies. Once the action scenes start, I don't know who's good, bad, the main character, the villain, I gave up.

2) They travel over rolling tundra, icy white staggering mountains, a tropical forest, and the dunes of a barren desert, all within the span of maybe a week. It was like hyper Earth or something screwy on the Discovery Channel. I just couldn't take it.

So don't see the movie. And I'm done.

Usually I don't take much stock in sequels. There have been a few greats, but usually you know exactly what you're getting, which is not much at all.

I rented Elizabeth: The Golden Age thinking it wouldn't be a typical sequel. After all, it was nominated for two academy awards, which is no easy feat. One academy award can be considered a fluke (see Norbit), but two or more means the movie has got something. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Elizabeth 2 covers the queens later years, her famous years where she avoids assassination, chops off her cousins head, and destroys Spain; no easy task even for the mightiest of rulers, certainly this is an epic tale. And yet this movie had no epic and no tale about it. It was like an extremely well costumed and production designed BBC miniseries. Events that should have raised the hairs on any historians head, fell into abysmal summary mode in this film. For instance, the sinking of the Spanish Armada. This is perhaps one of the greatest battles in western history, it is glorious, and yet the movie covered the battle with as much flare as Ken Burns covers a Civil War scene, all the information and none of the zip.

But where the movie really fails, ironically, is in Kate Blanchett's performance. She is an extremely talented actress, and certainly as Elizabeth she's at her best, but she has no where to go with the character in this film, the script gives her nothing. She starts out disenchanted and a bit cynical, and she continues on a plain path of hollowing out for the rest of the film. It's as if the last five minutes of Elizabeth I were being repeated over and over in this movie. The joy of Elizabeth I was watching Blanchett change from an endearing British girl into the cold, commanding queen who led England. In Elizabeth 2, she simply continues to be cold and commanding for 100 more minutes. And in reaffirmation, in the bonus features of the DVD, Kate Blanchett even mentions that she thinks she missed all along with her portrayal of the character in this film.

All in all, it wasn't a terrible movie, it was simply a sequel.

And now for the important part of the post, the ways in which you can find a natural cholesterol cure! Or more aptly, Here's a bevy of links about damage control, vitamin information, and omega 3 supplements. Happy healthing and see you in a month.

Jessica Alba may be America's Sweetheart. Her perennial charm in everything she does can make even the dreariest of movies watchable. Point in hand: The Fantastic Four franchise.

Her smile is winning. The problem is when she's not smiling.

In the recent flop "Awake," Jessica Alba plays the fiancee of New York billionaire kid Hayden Christianson. The first act of the film is sweet and melancholy as the now bristled Darth Vader prepares for open heart surgery. He hugs and kisses his smiling Alba, and tries to make amends with his overprotective mother before taking the plunge into surgical darkness. Or so we think...

Apparently there's some condition where a person is awake during surgery, yet paralyzed. Thus begins Christianson's long journey laying on a table. You can see the problems with this plot. The main character DOESN'T MOVE for the rest of the film. We hear his thoughts, and when he goes to his "comfy place" he does a sort of out-of-body thing, but for the last hour of this 90 minute film, the protagonist takes no action and has no affect on what unfolds.

Amazingly, I don't have much of a problem with this. Rear Window is a similar movie in which the protagonist simply observes for 80% of the film.

The real problem comes with the film's first major twist. Christianson's "happy place" is memories of Alba, until we find out....Alba is the bad guy!!!!!(girl) She's actually one of four diabolical med-students in a plot to take Christianson's inheritence. This is a great twist. But there's a problem Jessica Alba IS NOT DIABOLICAL.

It's simply impossible to believe this girl could actually pull off a femme fatale and kill a lover for greed. Her face just can't convey that. I truly believe she's a talented actress, but having her play the murderess works as much as having Sylvester Stallone play Hamlet. Awake was a well conceived movie, which is unfortunate that it receives a FAIL.

What doesn't receive a fail are these websites about health, fitness, and well-being. How to deal with stress and the best multivitamin are the two websites I've found. Until next time, keep taking your vitamins and keep on watching bad movies.

I wasn't a Donnie Darko disciple. I thought it was good, but not mind boggling. My friend had a minor role in the film, which was the main reason I watched it in the first place.

Almost a decade later, the director of Donnie Darko makes Southland Tales. It stars The Rock, Buffy, and Stiffler, as well as most of the cast of Saturday Night Live from the late 90's.

This is normally the part where I go into depth about a nonsensical plot, good acting being stifled by awful directing, unchecked production design, and just poor editing, but instead I'll just sum it all up in a word...

FAIL.

The unfortunate thing about this movie, is it really tried to be something different, which I respect. I salute the film maker and hope he tries again, but this one isn't going into his book of successes.

Instead of seeing Southland Tales, go get some omega 3 capsules or find the best antioxidant. Vitamins can never do you wrong.

I love a good David Lynch film. A good David Lynch film is psychotic, creepy, disturbing, ironic, suspenseful, delightfully confusing, and utterly unpredictable. I consider Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet to be two of his best. The imagery in these films is just dazzling. Every actor is at peak performance. And I leave the film completely askew emotionally, I'm somewhere new and I love it.

Notice that only good David Lynch films do this to me.

Wild at Heart is what happens when David Lynch fails. A David Lynch film sours when it loses what Lynch is the master of, his film sours when it becomes predictable.

In Wild at Heart, Lynch falls back on tricks he has played in previous movies. He inserts absurd lines and creepy moments simply because a Lynch film is expected to have these moments. An old beggar woman creeping across a road at a discreet moment doesn't add any tone or emotion to the film, it just falls flat, it's the gifted child run amok syndrom.

The saddest part of all, though, is the terrible waste of such a talented cast. For all his action drivel, Nick Cage can act the pants off of most Oscar winners when he's guided right. But as the thug heart throb Sailor he's just a bad Elvis impersonation. His only shining moments are the glimpses what a great physical actor he is, like when he back flips out of a convertible catalact. But the accent, the walk, the talk, and the character have got nothing else to offer. Laura Derna and the rest of critically acclaimed cameos have the same washboard two dimensionality.

The only good thing about Wild at Heart is knowing that David Lynch can make such a terrible film and still bounce back to come up with a masterpiece like Mulholland Drive a decade later. I'm still hooked on Lynch, even if he has the capability to disappoint. Whether artful or disastrous, at least I know I'm never in store for mediocrity with this film maker.

And in true David Lynch fashion, if you want to buy vitamin, the best antioxidant you can buy is a toothbrush and a half gallon of peanut butter.

Yes, yes the summer's been over for a couple months. But, I just started this blog, so I still have a right to spit my venom at the most over hyped and pretentious films of the summer.

I'm sure many would disagree, but I thought Rocket Science was the worst independent movie of the summer. It's a low budget coming of age film that was praised at festivals and got a mildly wide release, apparently the marketers were trying to mimic the success of Little Miss Sunshine with this one.

The film is about a 14 year old boy with a stuttering speech impediment who decides to....get ready for the irony.....join the debate team! Ho! ho! Get it, he stutters, but he's on a debate team, it's a funny set up, right?! The plot holds about enough weight for a Saturday Night Live sketch, but this movie is stretched to an hour and a half by a multitude of random scenes between quirky side characters.

The word "Quirky" is key to the downfall of this movie. The director might as well have just put a scrolling ticker along the bottom of the screen reading "QUIRKY QUIRKY QUIRKY QUIRKY" the whole movie, because it would have produced the same blatant affect, but I might not have tired of a scrolling ticker as quickly as I did of these characters.

Let's take the eight year old boy who likes to put on women's bras. This 8-year-old-tranny fad started with a decent indy film, Billy Elliot. It's been used several times since (that British movie about balloons, Millions, etc.). What's the deal with film makers and 8 year old cross dressers?

And then there's the quirky Asian. He's quirky because he's Asian and socially awkward, and he laughs too loud. This was damn near offensive. This character is just a reaffirmation of how racism toward Asians is still socially acceptable in America.

Racial offenses aside, the film just didn't go anywhere. At the end (spoiler) the kid loses his little competition, but he gets to make that heart felt speech with his dad that has to do with love and growing up and junk, but the speech just falls flat. It was a tacky resolution to a movie with no climax.

I will say one positive thing about Rocket Science. The 14 year old kid was an exceptional actor. Doing a speech impediment in a film can yank an audience right out of the story if it's done poorly. A stutter will just grate on the ears, and annoy a moviegoer, and we lose all sympathy with the character. This kid played his character convincingly well, while holding up a stutter that sounded authentic and yet not unbearable to listen to. I hope the director of Rocket Science never makes another movie, but I hope the actor grows his way into stardom.

And now for the health info! We've got two bests this week. The best multivitamins and the best antioxidant aren't cut and dry information websites as much as they are health opinion bloggers writing about their lives and struggles with healthy living. Their worth a glance if you have a few spare minutes at work.

I could write a whole blog on great actors in awful movies. This movie would score a trifecta. The movie plucks out three of today's most accomplished actors and runs them through a stylized cliche mill, supposedly as a send up of cliches. But this movie is swallowed by its cliches, and the end product is that it is just another imitation of the type of movies it is supposed to be winking at.

Clive Owen could be today's Humphrey Bogart. He's got devil-may-care down to a T, and when handed juicy dialog, like the gritty pulp of Sin City, he becomes legendary. But, this movie hands Owen the muddiest of punch lines, so much so that you feel embarrassed for him when he delivers the lines. Owen's character has a "quirk" too. He eats carrots. Yeah, he's a bad ass, but he gets his A, his K, and his omega 3 supplements! It's like the screenwriter just walked out of a Robert McGee seminar and was convinced that without a signature "quirk" a character is nothing.

Then there's Monicca Belucci, usually sexy, mature, and serious. But in this, oh, here we go...
The characters in this film don't really have names, but she was credited as DQ the whore. I'm okay with women playing prostitutes in movies, but it enrages me that there's still such a widespread acceptance of the portrayal of women as subservient whores with hearts of gold. This is what's wrong with that picture:
1) Women with hearts of gold aren't necessarily golden hearted because of subservience.
2) WOMEN CAN BE SEXY WITHOUT BEING WHORES
3) Real women typically don't where sex costumes at all times.
Can we kick the bald men who are still clinging to their pubescent wish fullfillment fantasies out of hollywood please?

And finally, Paul Giamatti. You've had such a wonderful track record recently Paul, was the paycheck really necessary?