I’m glad I had a recent run of great TV, because for a while there, I was about to lose hope for this entertainment medium. The Internet seems to be just more fun, and flicks seem to be more extravagant. There’s just so much crap on TV, I wonder why they even bother to put it on?

Here’s a recent example, after just channel surfing around one night. 

On the SciFi channel, they had a B-flick called Alien Abduction. It’s all about people who are abducted by aliens and held hostage at  a government facility. After watching about an hour, I was starting to wonder just how much money the fake blood industry must make on a flick like this. Rotten Tomato has this killer description… "unabashedly low-budget sci-fi flick…" It starred Megan Lee Ethridge, and Melanie Porter. Who? Exactly.

I stop on Last Call with Carson Daly. Why is this show still on? It’s clear Carson is phoning in a performance, as if he just doesn’t care to be there. The guest list? Lonny Ross, and the flobots. Who? Exactly.

Today I’m taking a bit of a detour. Ever since I started to blog for this site, I’ve become more attuned to people watching. And one thing I noticed is the clear distinction between men and women when they are behind the wheel. I generally avoid stereotypes, but I can’t help myself when I notice a driver doing something stupid on the road. I have to pull up close to find out if it was a man or a woman. Sure enough nearly 100percent worth watching of the time, I’m right on the money.

Just what do I mean? Well, here’s a simple comparison chart:

- When men see you about to cross a pedestrian walk, he’ll speed up in order to try and beat you.
- A women would see you at a pedestrian walk, she will suddenly stop even if she was going 50 mph and had a line of 10 cars behind her.

I feel like I’m ODing on all the crappy reality TV shows these days. It’s as if all the creative minds have left Hollywood, and the only recourse is to tag along with disfunctional 2nd rate celebs in the hopes of them doing something outrageous for the camera. Which of course, they always do. I get the feeling all this reality TV is a lot like extreme sex. It starts off with a fascination with swinging, and then the next thing you know you are into 4 ways, then bondage, and then girls kicking your crotch, just so you can get off. Next thing you know, all that guilty pleasure, just isn’t very pleasurable anymore. 

But I will say that there is one glimmer of hope: All those "educational" shows (I guess you can call these reality shows as well) you see on Discovery, or the History Channel or National Geographic. I just finished up a good marathon of educational shows, being enlightened to weird creatures like the Chupacabra, visiting the ancient temples of China, marvelling at the historical event of the 300 Spartans, and finally catching up on all the Shark Week madness I Tivoed. I feel like I absorbed more information this past 48 hours than I did all through college. And Doritos as well. I tore through a bulk size bag I picked up at Costco. My fingers have a layer of orange crust on them that I don’t think could be surgically removed. Which I’m sure one day if my body was found like this by future archaeologists and they were studying me, they would spend a whole TV show on the mystery of the man with orange fingers.

So i still got a few more good shows to go. Wanna know what they are? Hit the jump!

Review by Robert Bell (C)

With a dash of unnecessarily gratuitous violence, a sprinkle of overt misogyny and a veritable cornucopia of unintentionally amusing character traits, Bangkok Dangerous is in no danger of garnering any Oscar nominations, which for the most part appears to suit it just fine.  Despite playing it straight - which makes it that much more amusing - the film seems to be at least a little bit aware of its own ineptitude and desire to cater to the lowest common denominator, which includes guns, tits and severed limbs. 

While on a routine assassination mission in Thailand, Joe (Nicolas Cage) reflects on the isolationist nature of contractual killing and whines a bit about how hard it is to make friends while brutally murdering various baddies.  To help him out with his somewhat convoluted assignment, Joe enlists the help of a street criminal named Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm), who picks up suitcases from high-class hooker Aom (Panward Hemmanee). 

In between routine slaughters and heroin injections, Joe makes a visit to the local pharmacy to get some Bactine for a miscellaneous gash and meets the demure, sexless and conveniently mute Fon (Charlie Yeung), an inhuman male fantasy who giggles a lot.  Inevitable he starts up a flirtation with the young woman that hits a wall when he blows someone’s brains out all over her cream coloured jacket. 

Teenage boys will surely find a great deal of pleasure in the many profane utterances and bullet-ridden chase sequences throughout, as will a certain selection of grown men (business in the front; party in the back).  This flick was made for that demographic and they will likely complain only about the first lethargically directed hour before the titties flop out and the blood starts flowing.

Regardless of maturity or let’s face it - competence, Bangkok Dangerous treads along at a decent clip and can be perceived as entertaining by a variety of different kinds of people for a variety of different reasons.

Review by Robert Bell (C)

The House Bunny is Legally Blonde’s slightly retarded and far more profane cousin who would likely get drunk at a kegger, show everyone her famous ping-pong ball trick and cry about it the next day. It’s kind of amusing in its own embarrassing way but lacks any real meaning or sense of self. 

Without Anna Faris’ unique comic sensibilities there would be very little to redeem this somewhat offensive, formulaic yarn outside of a very large girl attempting to seduce a classmate by indicating that she needs to lay a deuce. All progression and character motivation - regardless of endless feminist rants from secondary characters - stem from a desire to please and attract men. The overall message seems to be something akin to “you don’t need to show the world your cooter to get respect, a little cleavage and butt-cheek is more than enough”. 

This fish-out-of-water comedy follows Shelley (Anna Faris) after her 27th birthday when she is chagrined to find that she has been evicted from her home; the Playboy mansion. Desperate to find a new home, she stumbles across a college campus and weasels her way into the role of “House Mother” to a sorority filled with dysfunctional social misfits in desperate need of a makeover.

Roughly following Snow White and the Seven Dwarves - if they were named: Preggers (Katharine McPhee), Crippley (Rumer Willis), Dorky (Emma Stone), Butchy (Kat Dennings), Stinky, Mutey and Dumpy - there is a reinvention of the freaks urged by the inevitable fear of losing the sorority house to a group of preppy skanks led by Mrs. Hagstrom (Beverley D’Angelo). Throw in a requisite love interest in the form of Colin Hanks and the formula is complete. 

Despite a fairly crappy, by-the-numbers script, Anna Faris does manage to make some of the obvious jokes unique and amusing. There are few actresses that could pull off the Marilyn Monroe standing over a vent gag with any sort of originality but Faris manages. There is an insight and intelligence to her dippy reactions and blank stares that makes it all that much droller. 

Cameos in the form of Hugh Hefner and those three hookers from his reality show appropriately but annoyingly make their way on screen and thankfully the obnoxious Kendra doesn’t laugh or speak much. 

Those who like Anna Faris will forgive the film many of its faults given her abilities, however, those who do not care for Ms. Faris will most certainly find this flick unbearable as it is essentially a retread of Sydney White with more fake boobs and pubic hair jokes.

Jack Bauer, bored of taking on terrorists and assassins, has shifted his focus to a much more dangerous target: mirrors. Yes, mirrors. In the Alexandre Aja flick Mirrors, Kiefer Sutherland stars as a security guard who begins to believe that the mirrors in the abandoned department store that he patrols are possessed with a demonic force that can kill at will.

Aja, the guy behind such gore fests as High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes, has set the bar pretty high. While not everyone loves his films, no one can argue that his two most well known pictures are disturbing and thrilling. That being said, I had relatively high hopes for Mirrors. Unfortunately, Mirrors is also based on a Korean flick, which means that it falls into the dried-up subgenre of Asian horror flick adaptations. That, in the least, is disturbing in its own right.

Thankfully, Aja has created a film that supercedes the subgenre, if only slightly. The flick does follow the pretty typical formula: a guy gets a new job, starts seeing weird things, continues to work there, begins to believe that something is truly wrong and eventually discovers that a creepy little girl may have something to do with it. Aside from that, Aja tries his best to make us forget about the thin plot - and succeeds off and on.

I didn’t love Mirrors. The first half is so-so, as there are some plot holes, sketchy moments and so on and so forth. It’s never explained to a believable level why an abandoned department store that is halfway burned to the ground needs to be patrolled on an hourly basis, or why Sutherland, who lost his job as a police detective, needs to work a night job when he could just as easily land a normal gig during the day. Of course, there’s always the problem that even if you think you’re crazy, why the hell would you go back to a job when you see dead people in the mirrors? Furthermore, Sutherland isn’t anything special; at least Paula Patton and her cleavage make up for his shortcomings.

Nevertheless, if you can look beyond its flaws, Mirrors is pretty scary. The use of mirrors has always been an easy approach for directors to scare the living daylights out of their audiences, and Aja has made a flick made of nothing but mirrors. There are quite a few scary moments and several of those will make you jump. As far as gore goes, the flick pales in comparison to Aja’s other films, but there are still some decent neck-gouging, jaw-splitting death scenes.

The ending, as far as horror flicks go, is also quite decent.

Mirrors isn’t a great flick and it isn’t for everyone, but as far as Asian remakes go, it’s pretty good.

Don’t bother asking Aronofsky himself, who is more difficult to decipher than the plot of “The Fountain” (zing!). When MTV News caught up with him at the Toronto Film Festival, all Aronofsky would say of what attracted him was that “it’s an interesting landscape.”

“But we’ve got to get a screenplay. We’re deep in it,” he added. “But there’s not much to say until there is a screenplay.”

We had much better luck talking to the film’s producers last month, when they told us, among other things, that the film wasn’t a direct sequel and that it would have a hard R-rating.

Aronofsky, meanwhile? Well, he did drop one little nugget. Asked where the film would be set – whether it would be Detroit again or some other American city, the director casually replied “I don’t think it’s set anywhere that’s recognizable.”

Of course, it’s probable he wasn’t talking about a brand new city, but just a city of the future – which because of new advances in technology and other such nonsense isn’t really recognizable to people of today.

We’ve asked it before and we’ll ask it again: Is Aronofsky the right man for a “Robocop” re-boot? Since he’s being so coy, take this opportunity to let him know what YOU’D like to see in the film. Sound off below.