Crazy, Stupid, Love and Rise of the Planet of the Apes

So this past weekend, Mandy and I had the opportunity to watch two movies from Redbox. It's been awhile since we have sat down and watched a movie together, so with absolutely nothing to do, and it being pretty miserable weather wise, we thought it was a good time to do so.

Crazy, Stupid, Love was a movie that when we first saw the trailer for it so many months ago, we laughed, and thought it would be a pretty decent movie, however, at the same time, it didn't look funny enough for us to spend the $495 plus tax to see it at our local Georgia Theater Company, so we put it out of our head.

Then a good friend of mine said we had to see this movie. To me, it was so far removed from what I expected this guy to like, that it immediately went to the top of our to rent list...when we actually got around to renting stuff, and we were not disappointed. It was a very good romantic comedy that didn't play like most romantic comedies. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Stone played their parts very well. I've always been a big Carell and Stone fan, but Gosling impressed me as the ladies man that starts to fall in love with the ultimate hard to get lady, played by Stone. Carell was very similar to what he plays in most every movie, but it works for him, and combined with everyone else, he was great as well. I've never been a huge Julianna Moore fan, but I didn't have a big problem with her in this movie either.

This would be a movie I could see buying, because it was fun, and both guys and girls would enjoy it. I do recommend watching it, as it was a very good movie...even if you don't like that kind of stuff.

Next up was Rise of the Planet of the Apes. You can thank word of mouth for me to finally get around to watching this movie, because the trailers didn't interest me at all. I was never a fan of the originals, and I thought the Planet of the Apes movie with Mark Wallberg might just be one of the worst movies of all time, however, I heard a lot of people talk about how good it was, until I finally said, what the heck, and rented it.

And it turned out to be a surprisingly good movie. The story itself was so well done and the actors did a great job in it as well. I can definitely see why there's a faction of people in Hollywood that want to give Andy Serkis an Oscar nomination for his role as Caesar, the super smart chimpanzee that started it all, because he is by far the real star of this movie, and his motion capture performance is perfect. The movie has one of the best character development that I've ever seen in a movie with Caesar, and most of that is thanks to Serkis's acting.

Even Mandy, who had no intentions of sitting down to watch the movie, started getting into it, and found the movie to be very good. I will even go one step further in the fact that I would say Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the best overall movie I've seen from 2011, which is pretty good seeing I didn't want to see it in the first place.

All in all, it was a very good weekend for movies. Two movies that I would highly suggest to people.

Main Street Players present "A Tuna Christmas"

For all the details on this funny upcoming play, visit Main Street Players's website at http://www.mainstreetplayers.org. I designed this video using my Canon Rebel Ti to shoot the video and Windows MovieMaker.

Address is Approximate

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

When I Hear the Learn'd Professor

When I hear the learn'd professor,
When I finally get to meet this man of knowledge,
When the rhymes of reason in his teachings finally rings a bell
When the constant barrage of questions finally begin to find answers
I put my head down to the desk,
Waiting for the lecture just to end,
Finally striding across the board with diploma in hand,
Realizing they were learn'd after all.


*Notes: This poem was written my senior of college in Dr. Slay's Creative Writing 101 class at LaGrange College. Dr. Slay was one of my favorite professors in college, especially at LaGrange. Partly because his classes were so interesting, but also because he was just that good of a professor. You never felt forced to go to his classes. You couldn't wait to get there. This particular poem was an assignment where we had to imitate another poem. Out of all the poems we had to write, it is probably my favorite, and still one of my favorites to this day.