Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #18 - The Terminator

The cyborgs are taking over! Judgment Day is inevitable!
The future isn't written. There's no fate, but what we make for ourselves!
Oh wait, those are from all the sequels...

The Terminator is a low-budget 1984 science-fiction film written & directed by then newcomer James Cameron. Cameron hired Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to star as the villainous cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the savior of mankind. Michael Biehn stars as Kyle Reese, the future soldier of war sent back through time to protect her. The mother of the savior of mankind? Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor.

The movie starts at an observatory. The Terminator appears in a time bubble and kills three street gang members, stealing their clothes in the process. At that same moment, Kyle Reese arrives in downtown LA 1984, stealing clothes from a hobo and shoes from a nearby department store. He then seemlessly sneaks into society as he and the Terminator race to locate Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor, the savior from the future who destroys Skynet and restores mankind's dominance in the world.

The Terminator stops and steals guns from a gun store owner. Kyle steals a shotgun from a police squad car. The Terminator strikes first, killing a Sarah Connor out of the LA phonebook. Off screen a little while later, he kills another Sarah Connor, this time Sarah L Connor. Sarah loses her plans to go out on a double date with her roommate Ginger and Ginger's boyfriend Matt that night, so she decides to go see a movie. She stops at a pizza joint, and sees the broadcast of the two Sarah Connors' deaths. She then leaves and goes walking down the street, but Kyle is close behind. Believing Kyle to be a stalker or a potential threat, she sneaks into a club called "Tech Noir" where she calls Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) and Sgt. Vukovich (Lance Henrikson). They tell her to stay put and they send a squad car out to her. Meanwhile, the Terminator breaks into Ginger and Sarah's apartment, kills Ginger and Matt, and overhears Sarah's voicemail to them stating where she is, giving the Terminator a location to come find her. It arrives at the club looking for her and picks her out of a crowd, but Kyle pumps shotgun rounds into the Terminator, takes Sarah and flees.

The Terminator chases them throughout the streets of LA. They hide in a parking garage, where Kyle tells Sarah about the horrors of the future. Kyle tells her that she's been targeted for termination because her future son, John Connor, rallied the remnants of mankind against Skynet, the automated self-aware super computer that initiated a nuclear holocaust against mankind. He tells Sarah that the Terminator is an efficient killing machine that "can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with", and that it "doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever" until she is dead. Sarah decides to trust Kyle, due to his faith in his story. The two are later captured by the LAPD after they once again escape the Terminator in a car chase. They're taking to LAPD headquarters where Sarah is informed of Ginger's death and Kyle is interrogated by Dr. Peter Silberman. He tells Silberman the same thing about the Terminator, and how it'll wade through them all like they are nothing and kill Sarah. Silberman, Traxler and Vukovich try to convince Sarah that Kyle's a liar, but she still persists in believing in Kyle.

The Terminator, after a self-repair session in its hideout, attacks the police station where Sarah's being kept. The Terminator starts shooting threw cops and blasting up the police station in search of Sarah. Kyle breaks free from his custody and moves to find Sarah too. Kyle gets to her first as Traxler and Vukovich are gunned down by the Terminator. Kyle and Sarah escape from the police station and spend the night under a bridge. The next day they get a motel room to stay covered. Kyle purchases some bomb building materials and that night they make dynamite sticks for when the Terminator finds her again. Kyle later then confesses that he came across time for Sarah because he loves her, and the two make love that night.

The Terminator arrives and shoots up the motel but Kyle and Sarah escape in a truck. The Terminator shoots Kyle during the chase, mortally wounding him, but Sarah uses the truck to crash the Terminator and damage it. The damaged Terminator then hijacks a semi and chases Kyle and Sarah, who are on foot. Kyle sticks a lit dynamite stick into the truck's exhaust pipe, blowing it up. Kyle and Sarah embrace, believing they've killed it, but the Terminator rises out of the flaming wreckage, now just a metal endoskeleton since the flesh burnt off. The chase resumes on foot through a computer factory. Kyle sticks dynamite in the Terminator's abdomen, blowing it into two pieces, but the shockwave of the blast kills Kyle. Sarah is left to fend for herself when the Terminator's torso reactivates and starts chasing her again. Sarah finally corners the Terminator in a hydraulic press, tells it "you're terminated, fucker" and crushes it, killing it for good.

Nine months later, the a very pregnant Sarah is recording tapes for her future son to listen to. She stops at a gas station in Mexico, where a young boy takes the polaroid picture of Sarah that John gives to Kyle that Kyle falls in love with. The older store owner tells Sarah that there's "a storm coming", to which Sarah responds "I know..."

The Terminator is a science-fiction noir masterpiece. James Cameron catapulted both himself and Austrian best-buddy Arnold Schwarzenegger into super stardom following this movie's success. They would go on to reunite for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, often called the greatest motion picture sequel of all time. Arnold would come back twelve years after that for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which would be Arnold's last starring role before his term as governor of California. The movies may have gotten worse and worse with each new entry after T2, but with news of James Cameron coming back to executive produce a new trilogy of Terminator films, we should expect nothing but great things on the horizon. Never forget though, this is the classic that started it all.

Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #19 - Tremors

Continuing onward into the top 20. As Han Solo would say "This is where the fun begins".

Tremors is a 50's science-fiction B movie made in 1990. It takes place rural Nevada, in a town of approximately twelve people, called "Perfection". Tremors follows the story of two handymen-for-hire, Valentine "Val" McKee (Kevin Bacon) and Earl Bassett (Fred Ward). They frequently do business with and have idle chit-chats every day with fellow Perfection residents; Miguel (Tony Genaro), Nancy Sterngood (Charlotte Stewart) and her daughter Mindy (Ariana Richards), teenage village idiot Melvin (Bobby Jacoby), Nestor Cunningham (Richard Marcus), shop owner Walter Chang (Victor Wong) and the most badass couple ever put on film, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross & Reba McEntire). On their way into town, Val and Earl meet Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), a graduate assistant studying seismology in Perfection Valley, whom Val develops an interest in.

After a septic tank sprays them with fecal matter, Val and Earl snap and vote to leave Perfection for Bixby, the supposed "bigger city" that's thirty-eight miles away. On their way out of town, they come across a man strapped to the top of an electrical tower, a man named Edgar. They find that Edgar's dead, clutching the tower and his Winchester rifle. Jim Wallace, the town doctor, tells them that Edgar died of dehydration, afraid to climb down off the tower for an unknown reason. At that same moment, another unseen force kills "Old Fred" and his flock of sheep. On their second attempt to flee Perfection, Val and Earl come across this and find Fred's face sticking out of the dirt. They race back to Perfection, bypassing two road construction workers who are also attacked and killed by an unseen underground force, causing a rockslide that blocks the only road out of town. Val and Earl return to town, find the phones are down because of the construction, and the come across the blocked road. Isolated from the rest of the world, the residents of Perfection realize that they're own their own.

Val and Earl borrow Walter's horses and decide to ride to Bixby across the country. They find the doctor's house abandoned and his car buried in the sand, both his wife and him eaten by the underground monsters. On their way to Bixby, Val and Earl's horses throw them and then are overtaken and eaten by the monsters. They each make a run for it, failing to leap a dry canal all the way. The underground monster crashes into the wall and kills itself. They find Rhonda, with whom they dig up the carcass of the creature and learn it's sheer size. Rhonda learns there are at least three more monsters in the valley, based on her seismograph readings. Another one appears and chases them up onto a rock. They spend the night on the rock, still unable to climb down since the creature can hear seismic vibrations and detect where humans are through sound.

Val, Earl & Rhonda escape through pole-vaulting across boulders to her truck and race back to town. Soon, the group explains their findings to the rest of the townsfolk, who all agree to get out and get to Bixby. Melvin and Walter agree to call them "Graboids" because of how they grab people underground. All hell breaks loose when all three Graboids converge on Perfection and start picking people off one by one. With various distractions and diversions, all the residents of town end up on their roofs. Val runs across town and hijacks the old bulldozer to drag a semi trailer with all the residents in it out of town. Burt kills one that breaks into his basement with his powerful guns and agrees they should all flee the town before the other two can kill them.

When one of the Graboids digs a trap and crashes the bulldozer, the residents flee across the desert onto a collection of rocks. Sitting on the rocks, they decide to start using pebbles as bait to entice a Graboid to come to the surface, then throwing a stick of dynamite out so the Graboid takes it down. One of them falls for it and explodes, leaving only one Graboid left in the valley. The last Graboid doesn't fall for it and spits the dynamite out. It lands on the other dynamite and explodes, leaving Val, Earl & Rhonda with one stick of dynamite left. Val uses himself as a distraction and runs off, allowing the Graboid to chase him. The Graboid runs at Val, who's on a cliff. Not recognizing where the underground ends, the Grabiod breaks through the cliff wall and plummets down to the cavern below, exploding on impact. With no Graboids left, the people of Perfection return to town in peace

So what is Tremors since it's not really a masterpiece? It's a goofy, 50's B movie tribute that pays homage to the crazy monster movies of old. It has the look and feel of being from the 50's but was made in the 90's. It's got goofy dialogue, awesome characters, and a story that's actually really intriguing. Believe it or not, I used to be afraid of this movie when I was really young, but growing up I realized the hilarity of it. It's a horror-comedy. I love this movie quite a lot. It may not be Oscar-worthy, but it is a ton of fun.

A Review of "The Defenders" Saga: Luke Cage (season 1)

Daredevil is good for The Defenders, Jessica Jones is all geared up. There was still two more series that Marvel had to set up in order to get there. One of which was about the super-strength man with unbreakable skin.

Luke Cage is about...well...Luke Cage. A silent African-American man living in Harlem who works as a cleaner at Pop's Barbershop, as well as a dishwasher at Harlem's Paradise, a local nightclub owned by Cornell "Cottomouth" Stokes. Cage used to be the an inmate at Seagate named Carl Lucas. Lucas was subjected to a deadly experiment during his incarceration by Dr. Noah Burnstien. The experiment "backfires" and Lucas is tortured in his acid bath. He wakes up after a bit and breaks free of his captivity. Realizing he's got unbreakable skin now as well as super strength, "Carl Lucas" breaks out of Seagate by literally punching the wall down and becomes "Luke Cage".

Anywho, like I said, Cage works as a dishwasher at Harlem's paradise, but one night he fills in as a bartender for Dante, who's actually shooting up a deal between Stokes and Domingo Colon with two other boys named Shameek and Chico Diaz. Shameek kills Dante after he panics and together the two go into hiding. With help from "Shades" Alvarez, who works for Stokes' supplier Diamondback, Stokes tracks and kills Shameek and retrieves his share of the money. Stokes' men also support his cousin Mariah Dillard, a councilwoman, and demand contributions to her cause from Luke Cage's landlords. Cage fights them off, deflecting their bullets and tossing them aside like common childhood ragdolls, but their payment for his actions.

In order to get to the hiding Chico, Pop gets gunned down in a mob hit at the barbershop, forcing Cage to go on a manhunt for the men who did it. The mob hit also served to get Chico's stolen money back to Cottonmouth, who throws the hitman off of the roof to teach him a lesson for killing Pops, whom Cottonmouth mourns. Cage finds out from a regular barbershop customer, Bobby Fish, that Pop's barbershop is facing closure due to unpaid bills, and Cage decides to take Stokes' money to cover the debt and re-open the shop. He visits Chico in hospital and learns that Stokes' plans to move all of his money to Crispus Attucks during a crisis. Cage begins targeting Stokes' business, framing Colon. Stokes moves all his money to Crispus Attucks in response, and Cage attacks the complex while Dillard is out, taking out her guards and stealing a small share of the money to give to Fish. Knight and Scarfe arrive soon to impound the rest of the money. Chico approaches Scarfe, offering to testify against Stokes and revealing that it was Cage who attacked the complex. Scarfe, who is actually on Stokes' payroll, kills Chico and tells Stokes about Cage. Stokes goes to the restaurant where Cage is living and fires a missile at the building.

At this point you're probably wondering how far up the ladder goes in this criminal organization. I have trouble following it myself. I know the character known as Willis "Diamondback" Stryker, is at the top of the ladder, who also just happens to be Cage's half-brother. So it's a whole Judge Dredd scenario, only better. So far as I know, Diamondback becomes only the second character in the Marvel Netflix universe to actually have his proper comic book getup, the other of course being Daredevil. His final fight with Luke Cage at the end of the show is pretty great and nearly goes the whole damn episode. Obviously, the show needed some time to tie loose ends up. Still though, it's pretty sweet to watch.

Some point during the show, they introduce what's called the "Judas" bullet, the only bullet in production that can pierce Luke Cage's skin. What makes it so special? Well one, you shoot the bullet into the person, and then they bleed for a bit, then the bullet bursts and the person practically explodes. It's also made of Chitauri metal. That's right, the alien race that attacks New York City at the end of The Avengers? The event that literally every Marvel movie and TV show relentlessly references? Those alien vehicles and weapons have their metal melted down and made into bullets. These are the only bullets that can harm Cage, and he spends a whole two, two-and-a-half episodes injured with Chitauri bullets in his chest and stomach. There's a crazy episode where Claire Temple (again played by Rosario Dawson in her fourth outing in the Netflix Marvel series) and Dr. Noah Burnstein to submerge Cage into a vat of boiling acid to weaken Luke's unbreakable skin to allow Claire to remove fragments of the Chitauri bullet. Some cool stuff right there.

I like the inclusion of "Brett" from Pulp Fiction, as detective Scarfe. He turns to be a traitorous snake-in-the-grass bastard in both that movie and in this show as he reveals he's on Cottonmouth's payroll who kills Chico and tells Cottonmouth to fire a missile into Luke Cage's apartment building. I also really enjoyed the character of Misty Knight, the NYPD detective who grew up in Harlem that knows the streets and investigations Cottonmouth, Diamondback, "Shades" Alvarez and others at the same time Luke is smashing their heads in. She does good as the "intrepid" support of the show to support Luke Cage's superhuman presence, and her and Cage even boink in the first twenty minutes of the show, so that's a plus. Crazy how these Marvel shows are starting off getting our attention like that.


We have the secondary main villain of the show in Mariah Dillard, played by Alfre Woodward, of Star Trek: First Contact variety.  She is a New York City councilwoman and the cousin of Cottonmouth, who funds her political stuff with his gun running shenanigans. Both of them are also the grandchildren of Harlem crime lord "Mama" Mabel Stokes. Though Mariah attempts to avoid involvement in Cottonmouth's affairs, his obsession with Luke Cage ultimately ruins her political campaign. Cottonmouth condescendingly calls Mariah "Black Mariah" in one of their many on-screen arguments, which provokes her into throwing a martini glass at him (it's also a killer reference to her actual name in the comic book). After Cottonmouth is arrested for killing Scarfe, Mariah beats him to death with a microphone stand when he accuses her of seducing her uncle Pete. So...that ultimately comes out of nowhere. With help from Shades, Mariah blames Cottonmouth's death on Luke Cage. After Diamondback is arrested, Mariah redirects the blame of Cottonmouth's death on him while saying Luke's real name on television, enabling the United States Marshals Service to show up and arrest Luke.  Federal marshals arrive to arrest Cage for his escape from Seagate. Claire kisses him before he leaves promising to call "a skilled lawyer she knows" (Holy Daredevil reference) to help him out. After it's all done, Misty Knight goes undercover in the club again. Claire considers taking up self-defense lessons. As Stryker recovers in hospital, Burstein visits him secretly. By the end of the season, Mariah runs Harlem's criminal underworld out of Harlem's Paradise while entering into a relationship with Shades. So I guess you can say things in Harlem aren't looking so well. Can't wait to see how they explain how Luke ends up back in Harlem for The Defenders.

Luke Cage is a very slow-paced show, and part of it serves the plot and some of it doesn't. Luke obviously has super strength and unbreakable skin, so it's going to be hard to get conflict into the story. Superman comic books ran into the same problem when Superman blew out a star like a candle. Not even joking, that happened. With Luke Cage, they come up with very creative reasons and tricky plot points to keep it interesting. The parts where Luke isn't ripping doors off of cars and using them as battering rams, deflecting bullets, mashing people into a thick paste, and basically being a walking badass, are the slow parts. There's some cool parts that aren't Luke Cage-related, but it still feels slow at times. It suffers from the "Yeah he wasn't a huge character, but Marvel had to make this show to make sure he had enough character development to make sense in the future crossover" disease. Iron Fist suffers from it too, much bigger than this one, but we'll get to that. Overall, it's still a great show, and so far Cage is my second-favorite Defender behind Daredevil, of course. So I recommend it.

A Review of "The Defenders" Saga: Daredevil (season 2)

Following Marvel's Jessica Jones, in March of 2016, came the long-awaited second season of Marvel's Daredevil. Unlike the first season, this season was hit-and-miss.

The season opens with Daredevil chasing several men, and beating them up wherever he can corner them. He finds them in kitchens, in alleyways, and finally in a church. As Daredevil, Matt is making headlines cleaning up the city as a vigilante of the night, but his daytime best friend and law colleague Franklin "Foggy" Nelson is not so accepting of Matt's Daredevil persona. Meanwhile, Karen Page, the secretary at Nelson & Murdock continues to be the resourceful investigative secretary that she can be. I don't know, her role in the show gets very confusing. She's just there, I guess, but a very good "she's just there". Either she's the lowly secretary for Nelson & Murdock or she's totally doing more lawyer-esque work than either Nelson or Murdock. You be the judge.

So an Irish mob gets hit hard, Rambo-style. An entire mob meeting is shot to hell from an unknown assailant. The hit is initially credited to a group of hitmen, but it's later deduced that it was one hitman, and that hitman is Frank Castle, also known as "The Punisher". Jon Bernthal's Punisher is bad to the ass. Every time he's on screen, he steals the show. Kind of wonder why they bothered letting the freakin' Punisher have a recurring role in the Daredevil series when all he does is steal the spotlight. Sure, the Daredevil stuff continues to be an awesome spectacle to watch, but we just get the added on awesome dosage with The Punisher. Watching the Punisher interact with people also is a treat. My favorite is the episode in which the Punisher visits a pawn shop, purchases a NYPD mobile communications rig, the surveillance tape that shows he was there, and the shells for the shotgun behind the counter. When the pawn shop owner offers him child porn for $100, the Punisher beats him to death with a baseball bat. Jon Bernthal's performance comes off very "Shane-like" in its presentation. For those that don't know, Jon Bernthal played Shane in the first two seasons of The Walking Dead, and the performance here is very much reminiscent of that. Watch clips of The Walking Dead from the first two seasons and then watch clips of Bernthal as The Punisher...the only thing missing is the head rubbing. I'm not even joking here, there's a video compilation on YouTube of every time Shane rubs his head, and that alone has become a meme.

On the other end of things, is Elodie Young as Elektra. She's...boring. She's not bad, it's just that this sort of inclusion in the story really didn't give her anything interesting to do. This is where I feel the season starts to drag. The Punisher stuff and courtroom drama is all fascinating to follow, but the stuff with The Hand, Elektra and the resurrected Nobu just kind of drags. It already feels like every Marvel show is dragging at some point. Her fight scenes with Daredevil are pretty cool to watch, but the way she just keeps barging into Matt's life and ruining everything while the Punisher courtroom case is going just sucks the life out of me. My least favorite bit is where she and Matt are running around an office trying to find somebody's secrets (I wasn't even paying attention at this point, because it seemed to go on forever). That and "The Hand"? Jesus Christ, the Hand. Thank God Stick, the best character in the Netflix MCU, came back or else I would not given a collective shit about anything going related to The Hand.

The series picked back up with the inclusion of Vincent D'Onofrio reprising his role as Wilson Fisk, only this time he's in prison. He gets a "catch up" episode where we learn what life was like for Wilson once he went to prison, and learn that he still loves Vanessa is doing everything he can to get out of prison in a reputable time frame to see his beloved again. There's a tense scene between Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk in which Matt promises that Wilson will never get out of jail and that he'll never see Vanessa again, and Wilson literally starts pounding the shit out of him. Forget that it could net more years behind bars for him, he just wails on a lawyer and walks away completely clean. Remind me why he's in prison, again?

The downfall of Nelson & Murdock occurs in this season. Matt and Foggy that just because Matt's Daredevil, they can't be lawyer buddies anymore and end their partnership. No, really, there's more to it than that but it literally just stems from the fact Matt's more preoccupied with his Daredevil antics than he is accurately defending the Punisher for his crimes. The Punisher ends up throwing the case anyway, just because he's a psychopath badass, but still it derails their friendship and partnership and by the end of it all, Foggy joins with Jeri Hogarth, of the Jessica Jones variety, and partners with her law firm. As all this is going on, Karen has taken it upon herself again to do more investigative and lawyer work than either Matt or Foggy and ultimately is the driving force behind the defense of Frank Castle. She finds information on Frank's family and learns that they were all slaughtered in a gang shootout, and that Frank took a bullet in the head in the process. She came to sympathize with Frank and ultimately try to push him not to be such a vindictive psychopath, but the Punisher that we know and love surfaces again and tells her that he cannot change who he is.

The end of the season is just bitter and said. Sure Daredevil and Elektra triumph over the hand and seemingly kill Nobu (again), plus the Punisher debuts with his skull image on his abdomen, but Nelson & Murdock is no longer a thing, Matt and Karen's relationship failed, Matt and Foggy hate each other. I know it's all going somewhere, hopefully a lot of it is resolved in season 3 that supposed to air in 2018, but I can't wait that long.  Plus, the series ends with Matt revealing to Karen that he's Daredevil. It's pretty sweet, and totally unexpected. I don't know how it segways into The Defenders when Matt's stopped being Daredevil, but I'm sure they'll explain it. Matt's just like "I'm Daredevil, or rather I was Daredevil".

All in all, Daredevil season 2 is a mixed bag. It's still Daredevil, so it's going to be a fun thrill ride at least part of the time. The Punisher and court room stuff, again, is still very much worth the watching of the series. It's once Elektra and the Hand get involved that the show kind of just swaps between flatlining and high-stepping. The Punisher would do something that would spike the interest in the show and then Elektra would say or do something that would just slow everything to a crawl. It's still a pretty great season and I loved in during my watch through of it, I just know there are things they could improve on. Stick is always a great inclusion. Karen does her stuff and is fun to watch. Foggy's schtick of arguing against Matt being Daredevil gets a little old, but I'm sure it does for the character of Foggy Nelson as well. Daredevil season 2 is a great entry in the Defenders saga, but hopefully season 3 is the be-all, end-all entry in the series of Daredevil that it's being rumored to be.

Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #20 - Blazing Saddles

We've broken into the top 20! Now we're getting serious.
What better way to kick off the top 20, than to start with Mel Brooks' most treasured comedy masterpiece.

In the old west in the year 1874, construction on a new railroad will soon be going through Rock Ridge, a town inhabited exclusively by white people with the surname Johnson. When Hedley Lamarr (comedy legend Harvey Korman) wants to force Rock Ridge's residents to abandon their town to lower land prices and allow a smoother, better construction of railroad, he sends a gang of thugs, led by his flunky assistant Taggart (comedy legend Slim Pickens) to shoot the sheriff and trash the town. It worked, as the townspeople demand that the Governor of their state, William J. Le Petomane (comedy legend Mel Brooks himself) appoint a new sheriff to protect them. Hedley easily sways the inept Le Petomane to appoint Bart (Cleavon Little), the black railroad worker who was about to be hanged, as the new sheriff of Rock Ridge. Hedley surmises that as a black sheriff, Bart will offend the townspeople, create chaos, and force people to leave the town anyway.

With his quick wits, lovable attitude, friendly nature, and the assistance of recovering alcoholic gunslinger Jim "The Waco Kid" (comedy legend Gene Wilder), Bart works to overcome the townspeople's hostile reception and even become a renowned member of the populace. He subdues Mongo (Alex Karras), an immensely strong, dim-witted, but philosophical henchman sent to kill him, and then seduces the German seductress-for-hire Lili von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) at her own game. Lamarr, furious that his schemes have backfired, hatches a larger plan involving a recruited army of thugs, including common criminals, Ku Klux Klansmen, Nazi soldiers, and Methodists. "Hey, where the white women at?"

Three miles east of Rock Ridge, Bart introduces the white townspeople to the black and Chinese railroad workers, who chose to assist the white townsfolk in exchange for their acceptance into their community. Bart explains his plan to defeat Lamarr's goons to build a dummy town that would diver them from their real one. They labor all night to build a perfect replica of their town, but Bart realizes it won't fool the villains with no people inside it. While the townspeople construct replicas of themselves, Bart, Jim, and Mongo buy time by constructing the "Gov. William J. Le Petomane Thruway," forcing the raiding party to turn back for "a shitload of dimes" to pay the toll. Once through the tollbooth, the raiders attack the fake town populated with dummies, which are boobytrapped with dynamite bombs. The Waco Kid detonates the bombs with his sharpshooting, launching bad guys and horses skyward, leaving the citizens of Rock Ridge to storm LaMarr and his cronies.

The resulting brawl between townsfolk, railroad workers, and LaMarr's thugs breaks the fourth wall, quite literally spilling onto a neighboring movie set where director Buddy Bizarre (comedy legend Dom DeLuise) is directing a tophat and cane dance movie, and then into the studio cafeteria for a food fight, and then out of the Warner Bros. film lot into the streets of Burbank, CA. Hedley LaMarr hails a taxi and orders the driver to "drive him off this picture." He ducks into Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which is playing the premiere of Blazing Saddles. As he sneaks into the thaeter screening, he sees Bart arriving on horseback outside the theater. Bart halts LaMarr's escape, and then, in a spoof of a classic cinematic gunfight, shoots him in the balls. Bart and Jim then go into the Chinese Theater to watch the end of the film for themselves, which shows Bart announces to the townspeople that he is moving on, for his work there is done (and he is bored). Riding out of town, he finds Jim, the Waco Kid, finishing his popcorn from the movie theater and invites him along to "nowhere special." The two friends then ride off into the sunset in a chauffeured stretch limousine, despite the fact they're in the old west.

Blazing Saddles will have you in stitches every time you watch it. It frequently tops "top comedy" lists, "most quotable movies" lists, "best ensemble comedy acts" lists; it's very much worth your time to check it out. The quotable lines, the cast of comedy movie icons, the ridiculous twists & turns of the story; it's all going to have you rolling on the floor. It kickstarted Mel Brooks' comedy career following the success of his film The Producers and saw him go on to make other comedy flicks such as Young Frankenstein, History of the World - Pt. 1, and Spaceballs. Give it a watch, if you haven't because you've been living under a rock. You won't be disappointed. Even if you've watched it a thousand times, watch it again for old time's sake.

Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #21 - The Wrestler

Another Rocky-esque story of pride and redemption, except this one involves a character who is way past his prime.

The Wrestler follows Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke), a fifty-something former 80's professional wrestler who's down on his luck and past his prime. He wrestles on weekends for decent slim wages and works part-time at a grocery store loading boxes during the week. He's estranged from his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) and woos the interest of a stripper named "Cassidy" Pam (Marisa Tomei). He frequently somberly relives his glory days as an 80's superstar, including that of his fables match with "The Ayatollah" that symbolized his career.

Following one of his club shows, his promoter comes to him with the idea of a 20th anniversary rematch with The Ayatollah at a Ring of Honor show he's hosting, with the idea that completing the match would send him back into super-stardom. After he accepts the offer, he decides to intensify his training to look more in shape, including taking steroids. Unfortunately, he suffers a heart attack after a brutal hardcore match that sees him bloodied and battered. The doctors perform coronary bypass surgery on him and he survives, though he must retire from professional wrestling.

Pam suggests that Randy visit his estranged daughter to rebuild a relationship with her. Randy visits Stephanie and is immediately rebuffed. He then goes out with Pam to purchase a gift for Stephanie, making intimate advances toward her when they sit at a bar, but Pam turns him down. Randy takes his gift to Stephanie, who then agrees to walk the pier with him. During their walk, Randy breaks down and apologizes for abandoning her in her young age. Stephanie agrees to have dinner with Randy that next Saturday. Randy buys a card for Pam to thank her for helping him buy a gift for Stephanie and getting her back in his life. She angrily declares that "he's a customer" and that "she can't date the customers". He angrily chides her for being a stripper, demands a lap dance and is thrown out of her strip club. Randy decides to go see a wrestling show and go to a post-party with some of the wrestlers. He's seduced by a random woman and snorts cocaine, having sex with her in the bathroom. He wakes up and realizes that he's missed his dinner date with his daughter, and goes to her home. She angrily declares she never wants to see him again, that "he's a fuck up" and he always does this to her, before throwing him out of her life for good. It gets worse that Randy explosively quits his grocery job after a patron recognizes him as Randy "The Ram" from the 80's, "except older". Randy jams his thumb into the meat cutter and storms out.

With both his daughter and his love interest angry at him, no grocery store job and having nothing left in his life, he decides to go back to wrestling against all doctor's wishes. He agrees to the 20th anniversary match with the Ayatollah. Pam learns of this as she catches Randy leaving his home. She goes to chase him but can't stop him from going through the curtain one last time, as he says "The only place I get hurt is out there (in the ring)" and that "the world don't give a shit about me". He then goes out to the ring and gives one of the most beautiful speeches in motion picture history (See clip).

He then goes on to wrestle a hell of a match with the Bob "The Ayatollah". As the match progresses, Randy's heart begins acting up and he begins having another heart attack, this one more fatal. Randy ignores Bob's wishes to close the the match with a pin, instead climbing the rope for his signature finisher, the "Ram Jam", officially turning his back on the world that turned its back on him. The movie ends with Randy diving off the top rope, leaving his fate ultimately ambiguous. The viewer decides if he survives and beats the Ayatollah or dies in the ring.

The Wrestler is a masterpiece. It shows all the negative aspects of the wrestling business, sure, but it's a hell of a story. This is the movie that brought Mickey Rourke back to super-stardom, much like Randy's own quest for redemption. Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood; they all deserve accolades for these performances. It truly is an awesome movie. It's a real tear-jerker at some points too. I'll admit it made me tear up the first time I watched it. The scene where Stephanie throws Randy out is utterly heartbreaking and watching him turn his back on society and ultimately do what he wants to do, regardless of how society feels about it, is rewarding. The ending leaves it totally in the dark whether or not Randy survives the move or the rest of the match. Give it a watch. You won't regret it.

Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #22 - Django Unchained

We just got done talking about Rocky, a story about triumph and redemption, and this is another story just like that. Although instead of being family-friendly and for children of all ages, this one's brutal, violent and vindictive but still sees the good guy overcome all odds and triumph over the strongest of adversity; being an African-American in the Confederate States in the late-1850's.

Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a bounty hunter in the south who makes his living bringing corpses back to government officials for money. His latest target is the "Brittle Brothers", three slave traders. To find them, he finds and purchases "Django" (Jamie Foxx), a slave who was abused the Brittle brothers, and enlists him to help him find the Brittles to bring them to justice. Django and Schultz travel to "Big Daddy's" plantation and finds them. Django kills Big John and Little Roger, and Schultz snipes Ellis. Over the next winter, in terms of their success, Django and Schultz make an excellent living returning bounties to government officials for money, building a large financial portfolio. It is during this time that Django tells Schultz of his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) and how he plans to buy her freedom with the money they've accrued. Schultz, as a sign of good faith and "feeling as though he's responsible for Django", agrees to assist Django in finding and rescuing his wife.

They find that Broomhilda is in the ownership of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), and together they venture to his large slave plantation "Candieland". They pose as "Mandingo fighter buyers", looking to buy a slave to work for them in Mandingo fighting for $12,000. Candie agrees to the $12,000 offer for a Mandingo fighter and they arrive on location at Candieland. Django is immediately distrusted by Calvin's house slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), whom he resents for being a free man. That night, the group holds a dinner. It all goes according to plan, Schultz secures  "Eskimo Joe" for $12,000. The scheme takes a turn for the worse when Stephen realizes that Django and Broomhilda know each other through their glances and reactions. Stephen informs Calvin of their plan, having realized they're not after any Mandingo fighter and that they've hornswoggled Calvin and wasted his time just to purchase Broomhilda. Calvin then demands that to leave with Broomhilda, the price is $12,000 they were going to pay for Eskimo Joe.

That night, once Broomhilda is freed, Calvin demands that Schultz shake his hand in defeat to prove Candie got the better of him. Schultz brandishes and hidden sidearm instead, unable to resist getting the better of Candie, and kills him. Django then takes any sidearms he can and kills multiple of Candieland's plantation aids before being captured. Calvin's sister, Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly (Laura Cayouette) sells Django to the Le Quint Dickey Mining Co. En route, Django tells the Le Quint Dickey people that there's $11,500 waiting for them back at Candieland to collect. He then tricks them, kills them, and heads back to Candieland.


The night after Calvin's funeral, Lara, Stephen, and the plantation hands return to the bloodied Candieland to mourn. They find Django waiting for them, who then kills each and every one of them except for Stephen. He mortally wounds Stephen and uses the Le Quint Dickey people's dynamite to blow up Candieland with Stephen inside. Together with Broomhilda, Django escapes to freedom.

Django Unchained, in my book, contends with Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill as Tarantino's best work. It's not a movie I love for being Oscar-worthy, it's one I love for being just fucking wild. It's a wildly violent romp that's insane to sit through, and it's also an epic tale of redemption and revenge, but again, told in a the most gruesome way. Django comes from being a slave that is separated from his wife, to being able to kill the vicious people who own her and take her back. He doesn't go about the best way to save his wife, but he certainly shows that he'll do anything to get her back. By the end of the movie, Django has conquered the slave owners and sits on top of the world of a guy you don't want to mess. Truly "the one in ten thousand". Tarantino's finest western work and I recommend for it wholeheartedly.

A Review of "The Defenders" Saga: Jessica Jones (season 1)

Following Marvel's Daredevil, comes to a different sort of Marvel superhero, rather than that a Marvel anti-hero. Marvel's Jessica Jones follows the first season of Daredevil in terms of continuity.

Immediately following the events of Daredevil, their rises another heroine in Hell's kitchen. Out of Alias Investigations is Jessica Jones, a private investigator who works private cases for private people. She also has inexplicable super powers that I'm not even sure on, I think mostly just super strength and high-jumping, I'm not sure. As far as these cases, they mostly consist of housewives charging her with finding out if their husbands are cheating on them or not. However, one case comes through where Jessica is tasked with finding and locating Hope Shlottman, who's been reported missing. Through her detective work, Jessica learns that Hope is with Kilgrave, a man with mind control abilities who once mind-controlled her, leaving her with PTSD. Jessica's adoptive sister and best friend, Trish Walker, convinces her to help Hope despite her PTSD. Hope, then under Kilgrave's control, kills her parents.

Jessica Jones

When not spying on people committing adultery, Jessica spies on a local tavern bartender named Luke Cage. He sees her looking into his bar and offers her free alcohol as a "Ladies Night" promotion, which leads to the two of them pounding each other into the mattress that night. Jessica gets investigated by Oscar Clemons, who's upset about the photos she took of Luke Cage and some mysterious woman. Luke gets attacked by friends of the woman's husband, but he easily subdues them and reveals to Jessica his unbreakable skin. 

The rest of the season follows Jessica as she hunts Kilgrave down and moves to destroy him. She finds the ambulance driver to whom Kilgrave used his powers to convince the driver to donate to him both kidneys, hooked up a dialysis machine. She then locates the doctor who anonymously donated the dialysis machine who volunteers to testify in court for Shlottman. On top of that, Jessica finds out that Kilgrave has been spying on her this whole time and that he's even recruited her neighbor, Malcolm Ducasse to spy on her.

In terms of the characters, Jessica Jones is well played by Krysten Ritter. She's stubborn, jovial and yet mocking when she's annoying. Ritter plays Jones as though she's always being watched, and the PTSD angle is played up really well. Ritter knows how to make Jones feel paranoid and insecure, while also making her tough and brutal. The way she plays the PI role is just spectacular. She never quits and she never surrenders to the odds. She will stop at nothing to find Kilgrave and to bring him to justice or kill him for what he's done to people. Hell, she even starts a Kilgrave support group, thanks to the pushback she's getting from her friend and colleague Jeri Hogarth, whom Jones strong-armed into taking Hope Shlottman's case.

Kilgrave

...but the guy who takes the show, runs with it, dunks it into the basket, gets the rebound, runs back the other way, and dunks it into the other bucket, is David Tennant as Kilgrave / The Purple Man. Kilgrave is such a sarcastic, British dillhole, you almost laugh at his twisted sense of humor and forget the fact that he's done terrible things. Some of the things that he makes people do is priceless. There's a part where he makes a man throws a coffee into his face, a part where he tells his own father to cut out his own heart and an even better part where he plays poker with a bunch of mob bosses, convinces them to go all in, goes all in himself, then convinces everyone else to fold. He wins the entire pot just by being a sarcastic asshole. When one of the guys try to stop him from leaving and to get their money back, he tells him to "see how long it takes to put his head through that post". Sure enough, the guy starts knocking his own head against the wall repeatedly until his head goes through the post. The way David Tennant gives those hypnotic stares and comands those goofy commands just makes him awesome to watch. "Assholes try, I just do".

There's also Will Simpson, a former police officer who gets recruited into a secret program regarding super soldier combat enhancement. He comes across Kilgrave and is told to walk off a ledge. Jessica arrives and stops him from doing so, so Will dedicates himself to fighting with Jones and her friend Trish to stop Kilgrave. During this super soldier program, Will is given three bottles of pills to take: red pills to increase his adrenaline, white pills to balance him out, and blue pills to cool him off. This is where Will ceases to be Will and becomes "Nuke" from the comics, but it isn't explicitly stated as such. In the comics, Nuke wasn't "Will Simpson" but was some other character named Frank Simpson. Pretty cool stuff.

Trish Walker

The series kind of drags at points. It takes a good while for the plot with Kilgrave to get going and until then, the show kind of just sits there and goes in circles. Jessica makes it interesting as much as she can, but I don't find a whole lot of the first four episodes very interesting or fun to watch. I was actually pretty bored watching them. In my opinion, the show picks up starting with episode eight, gets really good until like episode twelve, then it slows down again. My biggest gripe is that there isn't enough substance in the story to make it fun to sit through. Sure, I kind of forced myself to watch it since Marvel's The Defenders is on it's way, but I still feel like the show could've done with just a bit more action that Daredevil had. There was just something about Daredevil that made each and every episode fun to watch and that the story never got old or lame at any point. Jessica Jones kind of just feels like it's forced. It suffers from a lot of what Marvel puts forth at this point, but yeah, It just feels force and because of that, it can drag at points. It's still a good show, David Tennant makes it fun to behold and every scene he's in is spectacular, but the stuff he's not in his okay in entertainment value. Jessica's schtick can get really old really quick, since for the first half of the show, she's the only one the plot follows around.

Jessica Jones is fun at times and dull at others. It's not a healthy mix, but it's a decent addition into the Defenders-verse. It's fun to sit through at points, but other times it can make it feel like time is slowing way, way down while you're watching it. I still recommend it, though. Anything these days with Marvel in the title is worth the one view. Anything beyond one view means it's really good. I know I gave Jessica Jones the one view. Don't know if I would give it another one. Still worth the shot to me, but don't expect a show on Daredevil's level.

Movie F*ck-Ups, Part Deux: 15 MORE Things That Screw With Your Favorite Movies

Ready for more exciting plot holes that'll jar your head and make you think twice about the movies you love? I know I am. We're going to have fifteen more holes, goofs, and blunders in different movies that'll rock the boat of viewership to the point where you'll question your own existence. Don't take that too seriously.

Movie Fuck Ups, Part Deux:
Let's get this rolling.

1. The Dark Knight Rises - "Bruce's Instant Transmission": This one's popular enough on the internet to point out. Bruce Wayne gets left in the Pit as Gotham gets walled off by Bane and sits under his occupation. Then, just before the bomb goes off, Bruce returns to Gotham totally out of the blue. Sure we saw him escape the Pit, but that's not what I'm referring to here. Remember, all his money was taken away in the stock exchange debacle so he's broke. He's also in a foreign country with no ID, no money, not even any clothes of his own. So, how in the piss did he manage to get pack to the U.S. in record time prior to Bane's bomb going off? What writer did he pay off to allow him to just jump through space back to Gotham?

I come from the futuah bearing plaht holes

2. The Shawshank Redemption - "The Poster": This one kind makes sense as a plot hole. In the movie, Warden Norton comes storming into Andy's cell, realizing he's escaped. When he throws a chess piece through a poster of Raquel Welch, it pings down Andy's man-made hole. The Warden then fingers the hole (giggity) and rips the poster off of the wall, revealing the tunnel Andy dug with a rock hammer over nineteen years that he used to escape. Question: If Andy crawled into the hole to escape, how did he manage to put the poster back up on the wall behind him?

3. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - "Khan Remembers Chekov": This one's huge among Star Trek fans and its cringeworthy each time you watch it. The Wrath of Khan movie acts as a feature-length sequel to the original series episode "Space Seed", in which Khan Noonien-Singh, a super man from the 20th century, takes over the Enterprise before being banished to Ceti Alpha V. In Wrath of Khan, when Chekov and Terrell set down on what they believe is Ceti Alpha VI, they still come across remnants of the SS Botany Bay and Khan Noonien-Singh. Khan then says to Terrell "I don't know you", but moves over to Chekov and says "...but you, I never forget a face." How could Khan know who Chekov is if Chekov wasn't in "Space Seed"? Walter Koenig wasn't even brought into the series by that point. The character of Chekov didn't even exist when Khan took over the Enterprise.

4. Toy Story - "Buzz the Space Ranger": In Toy Story, Andy receives a toy for his birthday called Buzz Lightyear. When Buzz is first introduced, he has the mindset like he doesn't believe he's a toy. He believes himself to be a real space ranger. So why, when humans come around, does he even bother freezing? You see the toys freeze whenever Andy comes in a room, but Buzz doesn't believe he's a toy (at first, anyway). Buzz shouldn't give a rat's ass if Andy sees him moving or not.

5. Citizen Kane - "Rosebud": In what is often considered the greatest motion picture that has been produced by mankind (I personally find it to be a snoozefest, fell asleep when I watched it), Charles Foster Kane dies just after uttering what became is final word spoken; "Rosebud". Once Rosebud is heard, an all-out scramble to learn what it means goes underway as the rest of the movie is spent looking back at the life of the most powerful man in the world. Except, no. No one was around with Kane when he died. Kane died alone. So who heard "Rosebud"?

What cheap sorcery is this?

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - "The Curse is Lifted All Wrong": In the final swordfight of the first (and best) Pirates of the Caribbean film, Jack Sparrow and Will Turner move to end the curse so they can kill Barbossa. The curse can only be lifted with the blood of "Bootstrap" Bill Turner, Will's father, or Will himself and every last coin put back in the chest. So why does Jack slice his hand open with the coin inside to have Will drop it in? No seriously, watch the end of the movie. Jack slices his hand with the coin inside, to signal that Jack is dousing the coin with his blood, and then he tosses it to Will to put it in the chest to end the curse. Jack's blood shouldn't do donkey dick. It should've been Will slicing his hand open.

7. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - "Barbossa Dies, Jack Does Not": Two plot goofs from the same movie in one list. God help us all.

So as I stated, there was already one fuck-up regarding this in the movie, but now there's a second. Will drops the coin in the chest, and then the bullet that Jack shot into Barbossa wounds him and kills him. He shot the bullet into Barbossa's chest, then the curse was lifted, then Barbossa dies. Didn't Jack get stabbed during their duel? Jack took an Aztec coin from the chest so he could be cursed too. So why isn't Jack's sword wound that Barbossa gave him opening up and killing him after the curse is lifted? Is there a time frame as to when the injuries become null and void? Don't think curses work like that. This curse has more "fine-print" than a fucking legal agreement. Jack should be dead too and there should've been no more sequels.

8. Rocky - "Blink and You Miss It": So, it goes without saying that the first Rocky film is a triumph and a masterpiece of sports drama cinema. In the final fight, Rocky gets his ass kicked in the fourteenth round real bad, so bad that Mickey has to cut his swollen eyelid open so he could see. Rocky wobbles as he rises from the stool for the fifteenth and final round. Apollo, bewildered that such an opponent would last this long and even start outboxing him, sighs as he enters the fifteenth round. It's the final three minutes to decide who's going to be heavyweight champion...

...then the fifteenth round lasts for fifty-three seconds and the bell rings. Fifty-three goddamn seconds out of three minutes and then the bell rings. They don't tell us the fight is stopped, they don't tell us anyone threw in the towel, the fight just ends. What a rip off. Right as Rocky was winning too.

The man on the grassy knoll shot "Nice Guy" Eddie

9. Reservoir Dogs - "Who Shoots 'Nice Guy' Eddie?": In the ending of Reservoir Dogs, a tense talk turns into a mexican stand off. The dying Mr. Orange lies bleeding out on the floor with no gun. Joe Cabot has his gun trained on the dying Mr. Orange, whom he believes to be a cop. Mr. White has his gun trained on Joe Cabot to protect Mr. Orange, who he believes to not be a cop. To protect his father, "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot trains his gun on Mr. White. Unfortunately, things go south. Joe pulls the trigger and puts another slug into Mr. Orange. In a split-second response, Mr. White shoots Joe Cabot and kills him. "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot pulls his trigger and puts a slug into Mr. White. That seems to be everyone covered. No, it isn't, because nobody shoots "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot and kills him too. No guns were trained on him, and if you rewatch the scene you can see "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot shoot Mr. White, and then fall over and lie dead like he's been shot. Glaring plot goof if you ask me. Very glaring. Not like Tarantino to overlook something like this.

10. The Karate Kid - "No Touching of the Face": Yeah, you've heard of this one. Hell I'm sure you've pointed it out yourselves. Everybody knows about this one. It's the most glaring sin in motion pictures it seems like. In the end tournament of The Karate Kid (the good one), it is clearly stated that the entrant in a fight to knock his/her opponent in the face will be disqualified. Daniel-san decides to deliver the final blow and win the whole damn thing by kicking Johnny right in the face. Daniel-san should've been disqualified, and disqualified with haste. But nope, everyone celebrates like his kick to Johnny's face cured everybody's cancer for years to come. Bravo, Daniel-san. No wonder John Kreese was roaring pissed at the end. He got ripped off.

11. The Terminator - "The Entire Goddamn Timeline": It's true that the Terminator franchise is overwhelmingly subject to criticism over its mishandling of its own timeline. The entire franchise as a whole is a travesty in terms of its timeline. The very premise that the entire thirty-plus year franchise is based on is a glaring goof in the rules of time travel. Skynet, the world's dumbest super computer, sends a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger back through time to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor to prevent John Connor, the future leader of the resistance, from being born. This way, they will ensure their own victory. John Connor learns of this, and to protect his mother and himself, he sends back Kyle Reese, who ends up planting his seed in Sarah's rose garden that ends up sprouting into...John Connor. (I'm saying...I'm saying they had sex). So, uh-oh, Skynet fucked up. Being from the future, Skynet would surely know that Kyle Reese is John Connor's father through access to all medical record databases, so in order to truly "change the past to protect their future", Skynet should do nothing at all. Not sending the Terminator back to 1984 would not necessitate the sending of Kyle Reese to 1984, and he would never violate Sarah Connor like a parking meter and John would cease to exist in 2029, and Skynet would win. Ipso-facto, Skynet is it's own worst enemy in the entire franchise. Boom.

Man, and you thought Terminator: Genisys was the worst thing about the entire franchise.

The legal illegal kick

12. Spider-Man 2 - "Ock's a Clumsy Dick": In Spider-Man 2, arguably the best Spider-Man movie put out by anybody so far, Harry Osborn convinces Doc Ock to find and bring Spider-Man to him so he can kill him, in exchange for the last bit of tritium on the planet. When Ock asks how to find Spider-Man, Harry tells him "Peter Parker". So how does Ock go to get Peter's attention? Well...how about throwing a fucking car at him through a diner window? You know that would only...kill him? Yeah, kill him. Remember, Ock doesn't even know Peter is Spider-Man yet, so to Ock, Peter's just a regular nerd with bony-stick arms who couldn't lift the toilet seat without wheezing. A fucking sedan flying through a coffee shop window and rolling to the clear back of the store would crush him, leave no trace of him, leave Ock without finding where Spider-Man is and fresh out of tritium. I mean, he could just kill Harry and take the tritium, but then what's with all this shit regarding finding Spider-Man for him?

13. Terminator 2: Judgment Day - "Only Living Tissue Can Go": Again with the Terminators and their lousy writing.

In The Terminator, Kyle Reese tells the police that a time field will only allow "living tissue" to go through. Anything dead gets vaporized, because of the "field generated by living tissue". Makes enough sense for me to not probe it for inconsistencies. That is, until the sequel rolls around. Terminator 2 has the T-1000, a bad guy made entirely of shape-shifting liquid metal alloy that only simulates the look & feel of flesh, but isn't real flesh. The T-1000 should not have been able to go through the time stream, and should have been vaporized in it, leaving the movie to be about five minutes long. What a powerhouse sequel that would've been! Arnold Schwarzenegger travels back in time, beats up bikers for clothes, and then the T-1000 gets incinerated in its own time bubble. End credits. RAVE REVIEWS, I'd say.

14. Back to the Future - "Biff's Our Best Fr--, wait.": In the 1955 events of Back to the Future, George McFly goes to the car expecting to fight off Marty molesting his own teenage mother (quite the bullet Marty chose to swallow to save his own ass) but instead comes across Biff sexually assaulting, practically raping Lorraine in Doc Brown's car during their school dance. Of course George fights him off and saves Lorraine and they fall in love and Marty's future is restored.

But why befriend Biff in the restored 1985? When Marty returns to the present, it's been altered due to his meddling in the past, and now Biff is friends with the McFly family who greets them joyfully. Did Lorraine just decide to forgive Biff for violating her in high school because she still married George anyway? What kind of sense does that make? I don't know how sexual assault recovery works, but I know it's not like that.

Khan "remembers" Chekov

15. Rocky IV & V - "Aging Has Its Perks": In the middle of Rocky IV, Rocky leaves his then six-or-seven year old son, Rocky Jr. in Philadelphia as he goes to Russia to fight Ivan Drago. At the end of Rocky IV, you see this same six-or-seven-year-old Rocky Jr. watch on TV as Rocky defeats Drago and give his speech that practically ended the fucking Cold War in real life. So what's wrong here?

Well, in Rocky V, the movie opens exactly where Rocky IV ended. Rocky and Adrian are still in Russia and wrapping up after fighting Drago. They return to America after what appears to be a few days that passed. Rocky, overzealous that he's back home in the US, asks Adrian where their son is, as he's supposed to greet them as they got off their plane. Out of the crowd comes a past-puberty, high-school aged Rocky Jr. This is just a middle finger to continuity. I refuse to believe the filmmakers just overlooked this. They consciously made this error and they should feel bad. It doesn't just suspend disbelief, it takes belief out back and puts two shotgun slugs in its head and buries it next to Jimmy Hoffa.

Well that's it. Fifteen more goofs from some of your (and my) favorite movies. Now that reality has been twisted into a pretzel and has bent my very processing of real events out of whack, I must lie down with an ice pack over my head and rest before my head bursts like a tomato. Thank you for reading. I hope you had fun.

Cody's Top 30 Favorite Movies of All-Time: #23 - Rocky

The true-to-life underdog story of a small-time club boxer that gets a shot at the heavyweight championship of the world. Based on the real-life title fight between "The Greatest of All-Time" Muhammad Ali, when he took on the relatively unknown "Bayonne Bleeder" Chuck Wepner. Wepner was perceived to lose quickly to Ali, knockout in the third, maybe even the second round. Wepner then shocked the world by going the distance with Ali, the entire fifteen-round heavyweight title fight, even knocking him down once in a notorious photo. Ali still managed to beat Wepner by knockout in the fifteenth round, the very end of the fifteenth round, but there was one man in the audience of that fight that was inspired. That man was Sylvester Stallone.

The story of Rocky follows a 30-year-old club boxer named Rocky Balboa (Stallone) who lives in the slums of Philadelphia. Rocky spends his nights getting his face knocked in by various boxers for slim wages. He goes his day life by visiting "Might Mick's Gym", the boxing gym owned by the elderly prize fighter Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith) who's verbally abusive to Rocky for being a loan shark for Tony Gazzo (Joe Spinelli) as opposed to the "good fighter" Mickey knows he can be. When not getting mocked at Mickey's Gym, Rocky visits the local pet store in Philly to woo the liking of its clerk, Adrian (Talia Shire). Rocky also hangs out with and gets the advice of how to woo Adrian from her brother, Paulie (Burt Young).

Soon, the Heavyweight Champion of the World, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) comes to town and announces a title fight in Philadelphia on the country's bicentennial. When his proposed opponent backs out due to an injury, Creed goes to make the fight about the opportunity; to give a local underdog Philly fighter an opportunity to fight him for the Heavyweight Championship. He chooses Rocky out of a directory and makes the match official.

The rest of the film, Rocky trains hard and even successfully woos Adrian to be his girlfriend while he does so. Mickey, having at many times criticized Rocky for his life choices of being a loan shark, even volunteers to become his trainer and manager. Rocky initially rebuffs him out of spite and fear for the fight, but eventually agrees. Of course, there's also the iconic training montage, covered over with Bill Conti's epic composition of "Gonna Fly Now".

The fight sees Rocky and Apollo trade hands vigorously in the first two rounds, with Rocky actually managing to knock Apollo down for the first time in Creed's career. The two men then trade hands well into the fourteenth round, where Rocky's eyes are swollen shut and his face bashed in. Creed knocks Rocky down, and Mickey beckons for Rocky to stay down so as not to get hurt anymore, but Rocky gets back up anyway. The fifteenth round sees Rocky begin to dominate the exhausted and bewildered Apollo in the ring, but fails to knock him down before the final bell rings. Adrian rushes to the ring and declares her love for Rocky, who returns the sentiment, saying he loves her. They embrace and kiss as Apollo is declared the winner by points decision.

Rocky is a sports drama triumph. It was so popular, it's spawned five sequels and a spin-off. Maybe we'll go over them some time. Sylvester Stallone became synonymous with Rocky Balboa and has played the character in all of his iterations in everything since this. Rocky is inspiring, it's a rags-to-riches tale of going from the worst possible position in life to the triumphant point of success. Rocky is an figure of inspiration in and of himself. While the ending to the film could've been the typical Disney-esque ending that has Rocky winning over Apollo, but this ending is more powerful because it shows you can even triumph without winning. All you need to do is win the girl and you're title-fight was a success, regardless if you beat the champion or not. Ten-outta-ten. Recommended fully.