MTV Movie Award Winners

Best Movie: Napoleon Dynamite
Best Male Performance: Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator
Best Female Performance: Lindsay Lohan, Mean Girls
Breakthrough Male Performance: Jon Heder, Napoleon Dynamite
Breakthrough Female Performance: Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls
Best On-Screen Team: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, & Amanda Seyfried, Mean Girls
Best Villain: Ben Stiller, Dodgeball
Best Comedic Performance: Dustin Hoffman, Meet The Fockers
Best Musical Performance: Jon Heder's "election dance" in Napoleon Dynamite
Best Frightened Performance: Dakota Fanning, Hide And Seek
Best Kiss: Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, The Notebook
Best Action Sequence: the destruction of Los Angeles in The Day After Tomorrow
Best Fight: Uma Thurman vs. Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill, Volume 2
Achievement Awards: Tom Cruise and The Breakfast Club

Anyone who says Lindsay Lohan is better than Uma Thurman or that Napoleon Dynamite is better than Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles is a damn dirty liar!

Sutton out.

Happy Birthday, Jason Voorhees

It's official: child molestation is legal in the state of California. Thanks for finding that out for us, Michael.

In other, happier news, today is someone's birthday. Twenty-five years ago today, Paramount Pictures released a low-budget movie with a cast of unknowns, and it went on to become an indelible part of '80s pop culture. That film is none other than Friday The 13th. Happy birthday, Jason, ya big lug.

I went and caught the late showing of The Longest Yard on Thursday night, and it's great. I know I'm two weeks behind the times, but I planned on seeing it by hook or by crook. Chris Rock is hilarious, Adam Sandler is great, but many of the funniest scenes involved the supporting cast. I'd have no clue who most of them were if you told me, but I thought they were wonderful. And even though they're pro wrestlers and not actors, I really liked Kevin Nash, Steve Austin, Bob Sapp, and Bill Goldberg. Nash getting loaded full of estrogen pills is funny, I don't care what anybody says. Three and a half stars for the remake of The Longest Yard.

Meanwhile, watching wrestling with a six-sided ring on TV is one thing, but experiencing it live is another. I caught an indy wrestling show on Saturday, and they used a hexagonal ring that made them at least look very professional, as opposed to the cheap homemade ring that was used by the previous promotion that occupied the building. The new promotion also seemed very similar to Ring Of Honor in nature, with an emphasis on a more technical/high-flying product. (There weren't any ROH guys there, since it was all local guys.)

One match went at least twenty minutes and was awesome, but only ended when one of the wrestlers apparently blew out his knee after missing a corkscrew moonsault. Meanwhile, the main event was a "fan's choice" battle royal, where a new wrestler would enter every so often and at random moments, the emcee would call a timeout and have the fans choose (via the volume of their applause) who they wanted to eliminate from the match.

One of the participants entered fourth (out of ten or twelve, I think), and went at least a half-hour. He spent most of the match getting the crap kicked out of him, but he ended up making the biggest splash. He got the (relatively sparse) crowd behind him with a huge flip over the ropes onto two guys on the floor, and started hitting crazy flying moves like it was going out of style. It ended up with him and another guy as the final two, and they spent at least ten minutes hitting some of the most insane spots I'd ever seen. Said flip-over-the-ropes guy ended up winning, because anyone who can hit a standing shooting star press with a 360-degree twist deserves to win a match or two.

And that's all I have. Sutton out.

Sutton Briefly Goes To The Movies

Since I don't really have a whole lot to talk about, I'll do some quickie movie reviews.

Madhouse: I saw this direct-to-video flick after my little sister Bet added it to her Netflix list, and my oh my is it a good one. The basic plot of this hidden gem is that somebody or something is killing the residents and employees of a mental hospital haunted by the ghosts of the past, and a college student interning there (played by Blair Witch Project star Joshua Leonard) is trying to get to the bottom of it with some cryptic assistance from an enigmatic resident of the schizophrenic ward in the building's basement. Directed by Texas Chainsaw Massacre III cast member William Butler, the movie not only proves that at least one Blair Witch Project cast member can actually get work, but proves that you don't need a theatrical release to have a good horror movie. The movie is a giant mishmash between a "whodunit" thriller, a typical slasher movie, and a haunted house movie, and it surprisingly works. Josh Leonard is wonderful in the lead role, showing that he has acting ability beyond getting mad at a foul-mouthed shrew following him around the woods with a camcorder. Jordan Ladd is likable and engaging as Leonard's coworker and love interest, and Natasha Lyonne is stellar (yet sadly underutilized) as a mental patient who perhaps knows a little too much. The film has some genuine shocks and scares, and although the twist at the end may leave you saying "I think I saw that coming," it's still less predictable than The Village. Madhouse gets three and a half stars and a vote of confidence.

Cellular: This was another Netflix viewing, and it was... well, it was okay. The movie starts quickly enough, as a group of armed men break into Kim Basinger's house and kidnap her for reasons known only to them. They throw her into some attic in the middle of nowhere and smash the phone, but she's able to put some of the phone's pieces back together. But since the keypad is nonexistent after the goon busted the phone, Basinger has to do some fancy hotwiring and get the phone to dial a random number. She ends up reaching Chris Evans's cell phone, and urges him to help her any way he can. Naturally, he's skeptical, but he stays on the line with her after he hears one of her kidnappers threaten to kill her family unless she cooperates. The movie goes from one improbable twist to another until a policeman preparing for his retirement (William H. Macy) gets curious and begins investigating. Cellular is one big thrill ride, no matter how little sense some of it makes or how improbable it seems. The movie can't decide if it wants to be a comedy or a drama, which ends up hurting it in the long run. However, the acting performances are sound, and the movie's fast pace never allows it to get boring. As with Natasha Lyonne in Madhouse, cast members Jessica Biel and Eric Christian Olsen were sadly underused, which caused their subplots to go nowhere. However, I can understand why they were rarely seen, because they would have just taken away from the main narrative. As a whole, I'll give Cellular three stars. It's worth a rental as an easy way to kill 95 minutes, but outside of that, it's just kinda average. You're not missing much if you don't see it.

And this has been Sutton Briefly Goes To The Moves, signing off. Sutton out.