My Blog In the Middle of Your Net

In honor of April Fool’s Day being this week, the choice for the bad movie was one that would be befitting of the day.   April Fools is a 2007 direct-to-video release starring Obba Babatunde and Lamorne Morris among others.   It also features a performance by Lil’ Flip.   The movie is basically a retelling of I Know What You Did Last Summer , but with black actors in the place of all the whiteys.   This got me to thinking.   There are a lot of movies that copy the storylines from other movies.   What makes some work while others don’t? In this case, the quality of the movie comes down to the quality of the filmmaking.   I’m not going to outright say that a movie that copies the story of another is outright bad.   That is not the case at all.   But it has become increasingly noticeable to me how many movies actually take their stories from other movies.   In the case of April Fools , the story seems like a copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer , which was, in its own way, a

Previously on Work Stories, I told a tale about theft, deception, and annoyance.   It involved a family who lied and stole because they didn’t like what they had paid for.   Sometimes, things like that happen.   Luckily, I don’t work in a store where theft is a common thing.   If you want to check that story out, go right ahead.   This week, I’ll give you another story, from another time. This tale comes from one of my first night shifts at the museum that I work at.   I started working there during the summer.   That is the tourist season.   Therefore, as soon as I began working there, I started seeing and hearing strange things.   This is the time of my working life in which I saw the sex van.   It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (but not the worst at all). It was late night, as it has been for a few of these stories.   You see the strangest things as it gets later into the night.   That’s when all the odd things begin happening.   There are weirder peop

The quiet moments in life are something that should be cherished.   They come too infrequently as we run about our lives keeping busy.   We don’t want to think about our emotions, or what is stressing us out.   We want to be doing something at all times.   As a species, we no longer allow for as many quiet moments since we’ve got different forms of technology to fill up every waking second of our lives.   What if we took a moment and just thought about things, talked to people, or just be?   There is something special about those kinds of moments. Lynn Shelton made a movie called Your Sister’s Sister that took advantage of how special the quiet moments can be.   On July 6, 2012, Maxwell Haddad posted his review of this delicate movie .   The review can be found on The Racked Focus , as most of his reviews can be.   Rich with the flourishes of vocabulary that Max tends to weave through his reviews, this is surely one of his reviews, and one that undeniably suits the movie

An exciting real life story can be the greatest asset to a good filmmaker.   Recent movies have greatly benefited from real life stories.   These include Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lincoln.   Each of the three movies was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, this last round.   Some of the best movies of each year are movies that are written with some real events in mind.   But there is one thing that they have in common, when taking these events as an inspiration.   These events are just that for the movies: an inspiration. A movie that is based on a real event needs to add or remove certain pieces of information in order to make the overall product more cinematic.   When a movie does not do this, it does not feel like a movie.   This is the problem that I found within the television movie The Craigslist Killer.   The movie simply tried to retell the events that transpired without making it into an entertaining movie.   It felt like a hollow shell of what could have

Previously on Work Stories, I talked about another car I saw.   This time it was a replica of the car from Starsky and Hutch.   That was an exciting sight.   I never expected that.   I never anticipated it.   I never knew I wanted to see it until I saw it.   Now you know that I saw it.   This week, I’ll get away from the cars and I’ll give you a story about something else.   What?   I don’t know yet.   I’m deciding right now. I’ve got it! This story is actually somewhat a story and not just an observation.   That’s right.   Something actually happens this time!   Exciting, isn’t it?   This is a story of great consequence.   Well, not really.   There wasn’t much consequence to it, and we went about business as normal following it.   But there is a beginning, a middle, and an end to it.   So there’s that.   And now I bring you, the cup story. You might be wondering what I mean by “cup story.”   It’s simple.   The museum that I work at has a few interactive aspects, and one o

How do you write a proper review about a movie that is the fourth in a series and depends so heavily on the previous three films that they cannot be glossed over?   This is a question that Maxwell Haddad surely had cross his mind one day whilst writing his review of The Bourne Legacy .   The movie is so intertwined within the plots of the previous films that it is difficult to analyze it upon its own individuality and merits.   Max had a tough assignment ahead of him. On August 10, 2012, Maxwell Haddad put up his review on The Racked Focus .   The review was an attempted deeper look into the film, The Bourne Legacy, which got sidelined upon the realization that the preceding trilogy was so integral to the plot of the newest entry into the series.   The review then because an exploration into the obstacles created by the movie trying to separate itself from the original three films while also submerging itself into them fully.   The shift to this train of thought was exper