Things I've Noticed: Budgetting for Summer 2012 is tricky

So here we are at the beginning of the 2012 Summer Blockbuster season, a day before The Avengers opens (and hopefully will not be considered this years Green Lantern - btw, for anyone who decided to start watching genre movies with that one, I humbly apologize) and I'm thinking exactly what we all are...


How best can I work my entertainment budget this summer?


Yup - as  parent/blogger/video-game enthusiast/reader/film buff/couch potato/Grad Student/husband, I simply cannot see every movie/book/game that comes my way.  In fact, as grad school is pretty pricy I have to cut down from the nearly ten movies I saw last year from Thor to Fright Night.  


I think I'm going to try and get down to four movie theatre trips this blockbuster season.


Yup.  Four.


That doesn't mean I won't see more than four, it does mean (B-Day movies with kids immediately comes to mind, or my BFF Mike dragging me to see Men In Black III, quietly hoping I'll forget the irreparable harm that MIB II did to me, and that I've held him responsible ever since).  It mostly just means that most of these movies will have to wait for DVD for me to check them out.


Which four do you ask?  That's actually a kind of tricky question... Tell you what I'll get back to you next week with my finalists.


Good news for my TV watching followers however, this summer is looking up for my TV-on-DVD viewing.  After enjoying The Wire with my wife last summer, I'm thinking I'm going to give a try to The Shield this summer.

Prom Night (2008)

All right, Prom Night, the 1980 horror film starring Canadian Leslie Nielson (of Police Squad fame) and Jamie Lee Curtis (star of the original Halloween), was a pretty good B-movie. The story involved the guilt of four teens who, as pre-teens, were involved in the death of another kid (bullying mixed with negligence mixed with being stupid kids), who at their high school prom end up getting purnished... WITH MURDER!!!

The new Prom Night was, ummm… pretty much the worst 88 minutes I’ve spent this month. Honestly, I should have just slept in (I’ve been watching these movies early in the morning before the rest of my family gets up), or perhaps done some cleaning, or maybe even having finally gotten around to figuring out how to play Puerto Rico.

But for all of you, I decided to give the movie a good look.So here goes the premise – a couple years back a creepy high school teacher got obsessed with one of his female students and one night he murdered her family. Now, just as she’s getting ready for her prom night, you-know-who has escaped from the insane asylum and his heading her way. Inevitably, lots of her friends get killed.

Honestly, the closest modern horror film I’ve seen with the same premise is the 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was actually based on a YA (Young Adult) novel of the same name.

Here were my problems with this new film:

1) The kids who spend the film dying haven’t actually done anything wrong. Usually in these types of film they use drugs, steal, are rude to adults or are busy having sex with each other. These kids are all pretty decent kids, and thus their dying seems jarring and wrong. Also there is a sub-plot involving a girl who is mean to the main character's best friend (they are both running for Prom Queen) and in the end – evil girl loses the election. That’s pretty much it, she lives while all the nice kids get killed.

2) The deaths are all PG rated stabbings – not very creative and when the bodies are found afterwards, although there is blood on their clothes there aren’t actually and tears or slices in the material, meaning that the killer must have had a magic knife.

3) The best actors in the film, who played two cops hoping to save the main character, were played by Idris Elba and James Ransone – both actors from the superb HBO series The Wire, and a constant reminder that I should get around to watching that series for a third time.

4) The back story, in which a high school teacher falls for one of his students and ends up dangerously, murderously obsessed with her, would clearly have made a better (and significantly creepier) movie than this film.

5) Finally, while watching the behind the scenes feature (and yes, I’ve watched them for all these movies. It’s all for you, my dear readers) the director expresses that the film is in fact not a reimagining, or even a remake, but instead an entirely new story which happens to share the same title.

Or in other words, a total waste of my time.

Playing Genre Catch-up this summer

In just a few weeks most of my television viewing will be done for the 2009-10 season. I'll still have Breaking Bad for most of June and Mad Men will be back in July, but other than a few shows I watch with my kids, my night's are going to open pretty wide for the next few months.

Over the last few years I've spent the summer between seasons catching up on older shows I always meant to watch but never seem to get around to, and this summer will be no exception. At my public library I'll be checking out a number of BBC shows, both comedies and dramas, but for today's post I figured I would talk about the five top shows I'm hoping to catch up on in the next 12 weeks.

Carnivale

This HBO series pairs up two of the strangest story elements I could ever imagine - Magic and and the American Dustbowl during the Great Depression. I watched the first series of this show with a bunch of friends as a weekly event back when it was first released on DVD, but haven't got around to the second season yet. I know it ends on a frustrating cliff-hanger (no spoilers please), but I really enjoyed the first season and am looking forward to the second as a fun treat.

Millennium

I was really into this show when it first came out, a little darker than it's parent show; The X-Files, and with a lot more horror elements. Due to unfortunate timing however, my youngest became a toddler when the shows third season originally aired and we just never seemed to have time for it. I'm looking forward to seeing how everything ended up for Frank Black in the third season.

Northern Exposure

This show was a huge favourite of my wife Kayla when she was growing up and as it came out on DVD we've bought every season. All we have left now is the final season, where a new doctor arrives in the small town of Cicely, Alaska. I've heard this is one of the weaker seasons, but what the heck, I'm a completist.

United States of Tara

During a promo of Movie Central (Canada's answer to Showtime), my wife and I saw the first three episodes of this cool little series earlier this year. Basically it's a regular family drama, except the mom has multiple personality disorder, and she's trying to balance her life while attempting to wean herself off of her meds throughout the first season. I'm a big fan of Diablo Cody (if you haven't read her book Candy Girl - it is totally worth the effort!), so I'm really looking forward to this one.

The Wire

Finally, this summer we'll be checking out the HBO series The Wire - a cop drama set in Baltimore. This is some of the densest written drama I have ever seen and I just loved the first two seasons, This summer I'm really hoping we'll be able to see how it all ends.

So there you go, a look at some of what I'll be checking out this summer, not counting movies or other shows that we get handed to us by friends (like House, which my BFF Mike just lent us and swears is really, really good - even if it breaks his own rule that any show without flying cars must be crap).