Your friend Fully Baff Baff answers your questions!

"How do I know if a movie is good?" - Jason from Corn, Washington



First, check the boxart: does it have one or two really big heads on it? If not, put it back and keep moving. As with Basilicas, Mosques, and football stadiums, the prominent placement of large domes lets the customer know that whatever this thing is, it's got the power of Jesus inside of it. Noggin-fueled DVD covers are Hollywood's coded method of alerting the 'insiders' which movies are worth their time. The practice has its roots in one of Variety's many industry turns of phrase: much the way a long-running theatrical release has 'legs,' a surefire DVD winner is bound to get plenty of 'facetime' with potential viewers.

Here are some examples of winners, and a few losers too:

Pretty good, too much talking though.

This isn't bad. Too many people, but the gun man seems to have it in check.

Oh this is nice, great profile, but why is everybody so sleepy looking?

It's like the studio couldn't decide if this was great or garbage. Top half says yes, bottom says mess.

Basically perfect

Once again perfect


Don't see why they couldn't have centered it, but you can tell this is a good movie right away, so I guess they did their jobs.

Incredible, Whitaker was so good they gave him two giant head closeups plus a bonus third picture!

Okay what is this garbage, who are these people? Is that Clint Eastwood? I don't know, you don't know, and how could we? This is a terrible movie.

What? Clearly a shitty movie since half the cast is tiny, blurry, and monochrome

What is this, a book? And who's Henry Fonda, a knife?


Jesus christ, take a lap.

Unbelievable, maybe the worst movie ever

Okay let me get this straight, you don't bother to show me the faces of the stars and on top of that you put the names of a bunch of old dead people instead of Liam Neeson? Madness

Usual Buttsex more like

Three movies and this is the best you could do? You couldn't find one single picture of ANYbody that was worth using? Try making a movie with without using the ugliest people in the world next time, huh guy.



"But," I hear you saying, "What if the movie isn't available on DVD yet? How then could one ascertain its relative goodness?" Well, generally speaking, movies that don't premiere first on DVD aren't really worth your time anyway. Known as DTT's, or Direct-to-Theaters, these releases feature the kind of prurient chicanery and slapdash cash grabbing that were responsible for Hollywood's dark age (AKA shit age, roughly 1891-1998) in the first place. Avoid at all costs.



"Did you know that Speed Racer is coming out in like two weeks? And what are you doing to prepare for it?" - Jessica from Buttonwillow, California

Uh yeah, right, like I didn't know that Speed Racer was coming out in two weeks. Bleep, bloop I guess I'm the Dumbatron 5000. So yeah, hi Jessica, maybe you didn't know this or you were born all gay or something, but I've written the third most articles here on Roosterflix (out of like SIX writers you fucking gash*) and that kind of counts for a lot around here. So yes, yes I did know that Speed Racer was coming out. Go fuck yourself.

As for the rest of your question, oh boy, what haven't I been doing to prepare for it? I finally upgraded to Blu-Ray just in the nick of time and am planning on making a memory on the day that I make Speed Racer my first Blu-Ray purchase. And no, this isn't some post-irony Road Movie: From Two of the Writers of Meet the Spartans horseshit, I am genuinely super excited and can't wait

*Ed.'s note: Only three of the writers employed by Roosterflix are active



"So, what is a movie anyway?" - Greg from Curdey, Wyoming

Ah yes, by far the most commonly posed query we encounter here at Roosterflix. To properly understand what a movie is, one must first approach the task by noting the sheer scope of the subject. A movie is so large that even if one were to somehow reach its edge, scientists postulate that you would have actually ended up right back where you started! My third graders like to ask me how long it would take to walk a movie, and of course it would be impossible, but even in a zoomin' airplane with an endless supply of fuel the journey would take so many generations that by the time the flight got to the end of the movie, nobody would know who any of the characters were or why exactly they were fighting over the little blue test tube in the first place (Spoiler alert: It was the antidote).

So a movie is big, what else is a movie? Why don't I let Cecil and Decoy fill in some more of the details for you?

Cecil:

ok 1st of all number 1. If ur a dumb movie,
stop acting like you don't know it.
The lil captions under you poster that says
"top model pose"
doesn't convince anyone.

2. 2 the people who have like 25,098 dvds,
are u serious?
Nobody in this universe has that many dvds.
You're stupid.
Go kill yourself.

3. Don't ever write stuff and say
"OMG, I'm hate that movie"
because if you did,
you wouldn't post them,

4. PS Nobody cares about threats.
Don't try to act hardcore.
Fighting is like racing in the olympics;
even if you win a record,
you're still retarded.

5. Making 20 ads a day
about how you have new movies
and begging people to go see them is pathetic.
Make the dumb ad once if you have to,
and those who actually care about it
will look at it.

6. If all ur movies are the same,
don't make them all.
Please put some variety in your stuff.
Nobody wants to see a actor's face
8 different ways.

7. Who really gives a rat's ass if
I don't accept you as a actor?
MOVE ON.
Don't send me another diss or message asking
"what's up with you not liking me?"
I don't want you as a friend;
than's what's up!

8. Little 6th and 7th graders who do ponos
and look like sluts,
go somewhere else
because nobody wants you here.

9. And if you open a movie review and it says something like
"you will die in 10 days if you dont watch this,"
IT'S NOT REAL!
QUIT BEING A DUMBASS!!!!!!!!

Decoy:

I’ve long hated the New York Times Arts and Entertainment section. The articles that make it to the front page are typically pretty good, but the summaries are sometimes misleading, poorly worded or written by someone who clearly had no idea what the movie was actually about. Worse, and the actual source of my hate, are the comments each submission acquires.

Whenever I read the comments on a movie about Quantum Information (or some other field I actually know something about), I find the number of comments which contain pertinent information to be small, and those that contain accurate information to be entirely negligible. Reading the comments of such reviews is infuriating. Why people read a naive explanation of some movie about a physical principal and then assume they know all there is to know about it, I don’t understand. Why they claim this knowledge and then publicly demonstrate their ignorance is further beyond me. Extrapolating, I long ago decided that comments on all of the reviews were, with high probability, similarly misinformed, so I simply stopped reading the Gray Lady. A better solution might have been to stop reading the comments, but knowing just how terrible the comments were, I lacked the will power to stay away from them; I was the moth, they the flame.

Anyway, movies suck.

Hope that helps!

Keep sending in those questions everybody!