Alhpa Dog Should Be Neutered and Cold Mountain Should Be Melted

Briefly I would like to adjust my top 10 movies for 2006, having seen some new films and considering the films I had seen:

10.Notes on A Scandal

9. Letters from Iwo Jima

8. An Inconvenient Truth

7. Pan’s Labyrinth

6. Blood Diamond

5. Children of Men

4. Invincible

3. Dreamgirls

2. The Departed

1. United 93

I felt I needed to do this to reaffirm that there are good films out there because last night I saw a film that makes Miami Vice look like the Godfather. The film was Alpha Dog and it really brought awful to new heights for me.

Justin Timberlake is one of the stars in this film and says the word bitch approximately 455 times. The “star” of the movie, Emile Hirsch, plays a rich suburban gangster drug dealer and is so bad I wanted the actor to go to jail, not just his character. But the worst performance of the film and perhaps the worst performance in movie history is given by Ben Foster. He plays a drug dealer whose debts lead to the kidnapping and murder of his baby brother. This performance is so bad it is literally laughable. Every time he spoke the theater erupted in laughter.

Justin Timberlake or as my friend Phil calls him, “Bustin Tendercakes,” has been getting praise for his acting, but it is only because the rest of the acting is so atrocious. I was so disgusted at how bad this film was that I bought a puppy, named it Alpha and then kicked it off a bridge Jack Black-style in Anchorman. So for my first review of 2007 I give Alpha Dog an F-.

To make matters worse though I have just finished, after about 7 weeks of reading, the “acclaimed novel” Cold Mountain. I did not see the movie and many people have told me that the book is great. So I read it. Here is a paragraph to summarize what reading this book is like:

“The dew of the early mountain morning glistened in the new born Sun like the sweat off of the brow of a field hand who has just learned that the work in the field is not yet done and whose fingers are numb with pain from the tedious and arduous work that has marked his years of existence on the soil. The earth smelled of the fertility as if it were an expecting mother unsure of what the future holds, but sure of the potential for growth and power within. Then someone gets killed.”

We get it Charles Frazier – you like metaphors and you want your book to be called literature and not just a novel. I read about 35 books a year of varying topics and length. Cold Mountain has eaten up almost 1/6 of a year (12/06-1/07). So if you can’t trust Justin Timberlake or Cold Mountain, who can you trust when looking for some good entertainment? Not a good start 2007.