Deadly Friend

There are two things in Deadly Friend that really stand out. The first is BB, the robot. BB looks like a shittier version of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit and sounds like R2D2, if R2D2 had been voiced by Stripe from Gremlins. The other thing that really stands out in the movie is the scene where Kristy Swanson's character throws a basketball at Anne Ramsey's head and her head blows up real good. It's almost as good as the exploding head in Scanners, almost. And even though Deadly Friend's exploding head has been meme'd to death, the best part of the scene is actually what happens right after the explosion.You get to see the headless body run around the room spurting blood for a few seconds before it flops to the floor. It might have been my favorite part of the movie.

Rating: 59%

(Image from Wikipedia)

He Got Game: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

I don't remember too much about the movie He Got Game other than liking it when I was 18, but the soundtrack was amazing. Spike Lee paired music by Public Enemy with what is essentially a "greatest hits" collection of music by composer Aaron Copland. I never bought the Public Enemy disc, but the Copland disc is essentially what got me into 20th century classical music. Everybody knows "Fanfare For The Common Man," which is on this album, but there are a lot of other wonderful mid 20th century capsules of one of America's greatest composers here, from Copland's nostalgic reinterpretations of traditional folk melodies to his dissonant reconstruction of the icon Billy the Kid. So you can be miserly your whole life and blame the economy or you can try to at least enrich your sophisticated half by buying the classical part of a soundtrack to a failed movie indicting college sports if I remember it correctly (and probably racism).

RATING: 84%

Semi-Pro

I don't know, I guess I just wanted it to be possible to live in a world where the movie Semi-Pro starring Will Ferrell was funny. Sure, it probably couldn't have been and also wasn't, but wouldn't that have been great if it somehow pulled it off? The plot is it's the 1970s and Will Ferrell is the eccentric owner/announcer/coach/promoter/point guard on a struggling fictional ABA team, the Flint Tropics. The movie practically writes itself (bad thing).

RATING: 21%