Reviews and More

One genre that I hardly ever bother to watch is horror, mostly because these types of films are hardly ever done well. There have been very few horror movies that I’ve actually liked over the years, so I eventually just gave up on watching them. Unfortunately, my husband loves this genre and frequently rents DVDs like The Faculty, which he brought home last weekend. He convinced me to watch it with him, but didn’t succeed in changing my mind about horror movies in general.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The Faculty takes place at Herrington High School in Ohio, where the teachers have been acting a bit strange recently. They drink copious amounts of water, say strange things, and just don’t seem to be themselves. This arouses the suspicions of a student named Casey Connor (played by Elijah Wood), a photographer for the school newspaper.

Casey goes to his editor Delilah (Jordana Brewster) with his concerns, but she just laughs at him. Casey finally convinces her to sneak into the faculty lounge with him to do some snooping around. They don’t find anything out of the ordinary — until Coach Willis (Robert Patrick) and Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie) come in and proceed to attack Nurse Harper (Selma Hayek). Casey and Delilah don’t see exactly what happens, but after the attack, Nurse Harper begins acting just as weird as some of the other faculty members.

Casey tries telling his parents that something’s not right at school, but being adults in a teen horror flick, they of course don’t believe him. Gradually, a few other students are let in on the secret, including Delilah’s ex-boyfriend Stan (Shawn Hatosy), an outcast girl named Stokely (Clea DuVall), 5th-year durg-dealing senior Zeke (Josh Hartnett), and newcomer Marybeth (Laura Harris), who just transferred from Atlanta.

Stokely posits the theory that the teachers’ bodies are being taken over by aliens, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Everyone except Casey thinks that idea sounds dumb — until they have a run-in with the science teacher Mr. Furlong (Jon Stewart). Furlong tries to attack them, but Zeke manages to stab Furlong in the eye with a ballpoint pen loaded up with his special drug concoction. The drug, mostly powdered caffeine pills, acts as a diuretic and instantly causes Furlong’s body to shrivel up. This incident both confirms Stokely’s ideas about aliens and gives the students a way to defeat the enemy.

The rest of the film then deals with the students’ attempts to single out the alien queen so they can destroy her and help the infected faculty and rest of the student body return to normal.

My Reaction: I went into this viewing fully expecting to hate the movie, so I was a bit surprised that I found it to be very watchable. The action moved right along and there were very few boring parts along the way. Unlike other horror movies I’ve seen, The Faculty didn’t take any unnecessary detours from the main plot, and saved the inevitable student hookups for the very end when everything else was resolved already.

There’s not much I can say about a plot that involves alien parasites invading the bodies of students and teachers at a small high school in the middle of Ohio. I mean, yeah, the concept is pretty ridiculous; but once you accept that as the premise of the film, the script isn’t all that bad. There were even a couple of nice twists along the way, and I wasn’t able to guess who the queen alien was until just a few minutes before the actual reveal on screen.

Overall, I thought The Faculty was an above average horror flick. I give it 6.0 stars and recommend that you check it out if you haven’t seen it yet!

My husband and I need to get a new laptop soon. We were originally going to go with a Dell or something similar, but recently my husband has been talking about maybe making the switch to a Mac. I was a bit hesitant at first because I had this preconceived notion that all Apple laptops are automatically more expensive than other brands, but after doing a bit more research I now know that’s not necessarily the case.

I’d never really shopped for Mac laptops before, so I had no idea what kind of features they come with. After checking out the comparison page on Shopping.com, however, I saw that Macs are loaded with everything my husband and I are looking for in a laptop. Plus, they don’t come bogged down with a bunch of superfluous programs that we don’t need.

So far, I’m very interested in the 13-inch Mac Book. One of the complaints I have about my current laptop is that it’s too large and unwieldy, so this Mac Book should be perfect. And it’s actually within our budget, which means we might be getting one for Christmas this year! I just hope the switch from PC to Mac is painless….

Episode 4×02 of House aired last night, and, as with the premiere, I found that I liked it a lot. We basically got a continuation of House’s hiring process, as about 40 candidates began vying for the three positions left vacated by Chase, Cameron, and Foreman. The initial elimination process whittles the field down to five candidates by the end of the hour; it’ll now take several more weeks to identify the strongest of this smaller group.

And here’s what else happened on “The Right Stuff.”

Patient of the Week: A fighter pilot named Greta Cooper (played by Essence Atkins) walks into House’s office and puts $50,000 in cash on his desk. Greta wants House to find out what’s wrong with her — but she needs to do it completely off the record. She’s in an astronaut training program, and if NASA discovers that she has medical problems, she’ll be history.

House agrees to take her case, not because he’s interested in helping Greta, but because he’s intrigued by her condition. She says that she’s hearing with her eyes.

House then puts his job candidates through their paces by sending them on various errands related to the case. Some people break into the patient’s apartment to see what they can find, others run tests and labs, and still others simply wash House’s car. House observes what they are doing, fires the ones that obviously wouldn’t fit in, and keeps the rest hanging around to do more tests on the patient.

It turns out that Greta had cysts in her lungs, which were caused by some obscure genetic disorder that I forgot the name of (it had a hyphen in it). Greta didn’t even want surgery to remove the cysts because she knew the NASA doctors would see her scars, but one of the candidates, a plastic surgeon, suggests covering that up by giving Greta a boob job while they’re in there. That way she can explain away the scars.

Like I said, by the end of the episode, House narrows the field down to five contestants: #6/9, #13, the plastic surgeon, a black LDS from Brigham Young University, and a bitchy blonde chick. Oh, and he keeps an older guy around as his assistant even though the guy doesn’t have a medical degree.

Character Interactions: We finally got to see House’s former assistants again! It turns out that Chase and Cameron (now blonde, BTW) are both still working at PPTH. Chase is surgeon, while Cameron is doing a stint in the ER. Chase’s appearance was cool, as he suddenly appeared in the gallery while House was performing surgery on Greta. When all the newbies were stumped by one of House’s questions, Chase instantly rattled off the answer.

House also caught a glimpse of Foreman walking through the halls, but Wilson told him Foreman is head diagnostician at Mercy Hospital in New York. Then again, Wilson also told House that Chase and Cameron were engaged and living in Scottsdale, so who knows what the truth is!

Cuddy made a couple of appearances to reprimand House about his latest doings, but that’s about it.

My Reaction: I’m not really feeling any of the remaining candidates thus far. Olivia Wilde’s character, #13, already bugs me to death — and she hasn’t even said that much! The plastic surgeon also irks, but I think that may have more to do with his looks than anything else. He looks like a poor man’s Steve Carrel, so I expect him to be funny whenever he opens his mouth, but of course that’s not the type of character this is. It’s very disorienting!

The 6/9 guy seems like he has the most potential as a long-term character, so I’ll be looking for him to stick around.

I’m not digging the older assistant at this point because of the age thing. When House is abrasive to his younger staff, it feels somewhat tolerable since he’s supposed to be the teacher/mentor and all. But if he starts being snarky to an older person, it’ll come off as completely disrespectful and rude, which is something I don’t really want to see on a weekly basis. Maybe that’s just me….

I really loved seeing Chase and even Cameron again. Chase was so awesome in the gallery, coming up with the correct diagnosis after just a few minutes of watching. I guess it just goes to show how much he really learned from House!

I’m definitely looking forward to more eps because I’m interested to see how this new dynamic with the job candidates develops. (I should probably check the scheduling though because I know the MLB playoffs always screw with FOX programming.)