So far I’ve seen three movies named “Joshua”, which is a great name for a movie, for obvious reasons. Two of them were horror and one was sappy Christian. I couldn’t even sit through the sappy Christian one. The first horror was a low-budget flick by Fangoria, which I think is a horror magazine. It wasn’t very memorable, and I really don’t remember it. But this latest “Joshua” is good enough to earn such a good name. The kid named “Joshua” is very creepy. He gets away with murder, because who would suspect a little boy? Strangely I saw this just after another flick about a boy around the same age, “Birth“. “Birth” handled the reincarnation thing in a different way than “Audrey Rose”, and gives us a way to explain how the kid knows what he knows. But I’m getting off track here, aren’t I? This is supposed to be about “Joshua”! Anyway, Joshua was a good horror flick. No gore, but suspenseful and creepy. Worth seeing. The way the kid’s parents are portrayed is interesting, especially the clueless yuppie father. The yuppie father’s life is hell even before the kid starts acting out, but the kid is the final straw.

Warning: Spoilers!

Mildly interesting vampire movie. It’s hard to do a good vampire movie, there’s been so many variations on it. This one was OK, not great, but OK. The vampires were interesting- they have their own weird look and language- but more could’ve been done with them. What we get is these feral vampires going around killing people, and people running away. No thinking necessary. Where are the vampires from? Why are there so many of them? What’s with their weird language? Near Dark did the same thing, but did it better. However, I smell sequel. If this movie garners any box office, we’ll get sequels in which some of the questions raised by this movie are answered. Even Night Junkies was better than this flick. If these vampires did a bit more than scream and moan, it would’ve been better. We only get one line in the entire movie where we’re told something about the vampires, and that’s when the leader says that they’ve spent centuries getting humans to believe that vampires don’t really exist, that they’re all just bad dreams. The problem is, if a couple dozen vampires show up and waste an entire town, it would be hard to keep it a secret. Yeah so they burn the town down- you’d still think there’d be plenty of weird forensics around to give the ball game away. The idea of having them attack Barrow Alaska is mildly interesting- Barrow has “30 Days of Night” during which the sun doesn’t rise, it’s so far north. That was convincing. I mean, I hate cold weather and seeing all this snow fly around made me feel cold. So the vampires can run around all day and night long, because the sun doesn’t come up. OK- so what? And then, Josh Hartnet injects himself with Vampire blood, to make himself a vampire- that just wasn’t believable at all. He spends the whole movie fighting vampires and then becomes one? Sorry. Not the best plot twist IMHO.

This movie is mildly diverting, and if you have to see every vampire movie (it’s a sickness) then you’ll have to see this one too.

Now this is a way cool movie. It’s got some great lines.

So your success took a shot at you. What are you gonna do now? How you gonna kill it? You’re gonna become unsuccessful? Frank, we can be successful and have enemies, right? Or we can be unsuccessful, too, you know, we can have friends.

I’m not the most successful person on the planet, but I recognize the truth of these words. This line made the entire movie for me.

There’s the way the movie progresses with the Vietnam War in the background, on TV. That’s cool, because the Vietnam War was in the background for my childhood- on TV. Then there’s the music- the soul music is right on.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this movie is that it’s actually being sued by the police, who feel that it portrays them badly. This gets to the question of whether or not the story is fact or fiction. I’m agnostic on this point- although movie seemed plausible to me. Sometimes fiction is truer than fact anyway. This isn’t a newsreel, for Pete’s sake. If the police are suing, then why not the army as well? The army is complicit in the heroin being smuggled. Why isn’t the army suing? Maybe because it’s an established fact that someone in the army was complicit in the heroin smuggled in.

There’s overtones of Afghanistan too, when the Asian poppy grower says

Opium plants are hard enough to outlive any war. They’ll still be here long after the troops have gone.

We managed to kick out those nasty Taliban from Afghanistan, and afterwards there was a record poppy harvest. If you were a cynic, you might even say that those Talibans were bad for business, and that’s why they had to go. I don’t know, I’m just talking. That’s another interesting thing about this movie- the references to heroin being just another business. Oh, you see nasty shots of overdoses, but then I had a professor that claimed broadcast radio waves kill people.

That’s another interesting aspect of this movie- the honest cop stays poor. You see him making potato-chip sandwiches while the bad guys are carving up turkeys. No one can understand why the honest cop turns in the million bucks.

I love gangster movies. Kudos to Ridley Scott, for updating the genre. Yes, it echoed a lot of other gangster flix, but it was original enough for me.

I’m going out on a limb here and predict Hillary Clinton will be our next president. I don’t think Americans will elect a black guy named “Barack Obama”. Won’t happen. McCain is friggin’ scary. Who doesn’t look back to the Clinton years with rosy nostalgia? Now that Mitt Romney has dropped out, it looks to be Clinton vs McCain.

I heard someone mistakenly refer to Huckabee as “Hucklebee”. Now whenever I hear “Huckabee” I think “Hucklebee” and chuckle.

I’m never right about these things. I once bet that Carter would beat Reagan for president. However when I made that bet I was out of touch with the news, having spent the previous three years to the ‘80 election holed up in the remote mountains of Northern New Mexico reading obscure books.

My Mom always knows who’s going to win. One day when I was in high school she came home and said “Jimmy Carter will be our next President”. He was way beyond even a long-shot at that point- when she made that pronouncement, I’m serious that no one outside of Georgia had ever even heard of the dude. I told her I was volunteering for Zeese for Senate and she said that Cardin would win.

Actually, according to that soldier who came back in time from the year 2036*, this is the year that the US breaks up into warring factions. McCain doesn’t go down gracefully- he takes control of the Army and in a coup d’etat installs himself as President. This instigates a guerrilla war in which the Democrats take to the Appalachians. The economy disintegrates. McCain said he wasn’t good at economic issues, didn’t he?

*John Titor