Cause It's All In My Head, I Think About It Over And Over Again

I'm all for second chances. Shoot, if half of the people I ever met didn't give me one, I wouldn't have any friends. Because of this, I'm much more prone to dole out extra lives. Plus, every now and then I get surprised about things.

Take for example the movie "The Skulls". It rolled out in 2000 and featured Joshua Jackson (Charlie Conway from the Mighty Ducks) and Paul Walker and was a constant target of ridicule during high school. However, AMC, in their infinite and absolute wisdom and authority, has dubbed it a "new classic". I gave it another viewing recently and have to say, it is much better than I remembered. The ridiculous gaps that I thought existed (i.e. where did the expansive luxurious courtyard come from in the middle of college campus) were easily and believably resolved. I would actually recommend watching it, if you caught it on tv. It's not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth purchasing for anything over $2, but it is worth seeing.

The downside to giving things another shot is that often you discover that you wasted time and effort on something that still sucks. Case in point here has to be the movie "Down to You", another 2000 film.

This came out on video, much as the skulls did, when I was working at blockbuster. I venture to say that just about any major motion picture that hit VHS format immediately preceding or during the summer of 2000, I have seen at least once. And this one was one of the many that left me wanting my time back. It's simply horrible, going nowhere, bringing nothing to the table. It is the definition of half-baked. How did it get green-lit you ask? Simple. It was 1999 and the producers were told we already have Freddie Prinze Jr and Julia Stiles signed on as the leads.
(Can you name a bigger celebrity, Prinze that is, in our life time that burned out so quickly? Really, he was on top of the world for years. The I know what you did last summer series, she's all that, boys and girls, and not to forget that he married Sarah Michelle Gellar, and then after this movie, he went on to do the scooby-do movies and a slew of voice overs. In three years he went from A-list movie lead to nobody. Amazing.)

By the way, it was, and is, on MTV. When did they start getting movies, and why did they follow the forever classic Rudy with this turd? It does leave the door open for them to choose absolutely any other movie they want.

This brings me to my list of things that I thought were horrible in high school and still wreak of failure. In no particular order, but they are the top five collectively:
1. Down to You. See above. And let that be the last you see of it.
2. My Best Friend's Wedding. I can not begin to describe how absolutely horrible this movie is. But, for the sake of the argument, the people making this movie knew it was so horrible that they worked in a song and a dance number into the middle of it that became the only memorable moment of the two hour torture.
3. Chumbwumba. They were the first band that the machine put out that I stopped and thought to myself, "This is bad. I know it is, but everyone else seems to enjoy it. Something is wrong."
4. The WNBA. How is this still operating, especially in today's economic situation?
5. The National League. Although they have won four out of the past 10 Fall Classics, they're still second rate to the American League. They just are.

Word.