A little of this, a little of that

Might be tough to post next week, kids, as I'll be out of town on business. Like I said, that fake dog poop doesn't sell itself.

To hold you over, here's a roundup of several movies that, for whatever reason, haven't moved me to honor them with a full post.

SherryBaby

I'm you've ever wondered what Jake Gyllenhaal's sister's boobs look like, wonder no more. Maggie shows us the goods, and how, in this cheery tale of an ex-con trying to reconnect with her young daughter.

My wife may deny it, but I think we watched this movie only because Meryl Streep mentioned it in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. I hadn't heard of it before then, and it didn't come to our fair burg last year. Thanks to Netflix, though, we got to "enjoy" this rather dreary spectacle of Maggie trying to make good but finding old habits and old adversity dying hard.

Other than Gyllenhaal's general mistreatment -- by others and herself -- the most notable thing might be the meatier-than-usual role for Danny Trejo, the well-tattooed Latin guy who has been in maybe a zillion movies, maybe most famously in "From Dusk Till Dawn" and "Desperado." We love that guy!

The Magnificent Seven

This is one of those Westerns that people say they love because they haven't seen many Westerns. Oh, it's a great-looking movie with a terrific cast notable for work they would do later, plus it's got that cool opening number. But despite borrowing the plot from "The Seven Samurai," the parts don't add up to an amazing whole.

Still, it's a good story of guns for hire being ... um, hired, I guess, to protect a Mexican village against the local bandit king. The crew includes leader Yul Brynner (in what would be his "Westworld" outfit, too), Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Robert Vaughn. Like I said, great cast. I probably liked Coburn the best, maybe because his intro was the coolest and he rarely had much to say. (I'll admit, though, that I thought he was Lee Marvin at first.)

In the end, there are too many characters and too simple a plot to provide much depth, but it's a rousing "big" picture worth seeing at least once.

Hard Candy

You know those movies that have a little something for everyone? Here's one that has nothing for no one.

The setup: Two chatroom participants decide to meet. The girl is 14, the guy is 32. Ahhh, she's easy prey, right? Before you know it, she's turned the tables on him, and he's in a bad way. Basically, the girl isn't leaving until the guy is exposed as a pedophile, and she's determined to find out how far he's gone with this nasty stuff. That makes for some uncomfortable scenes amid the general mindf*cking.

I suppose some might find this gripping, and I'm sure it would make a decent play: We have only two main characters in close confines most of the movie. But a lot of this was just unpleasant and overboard, not to mention hard to swallow. But if bondage and castration are your thing ...

The Defiant Ones

Well before Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy and Mel Gibson and Danny Glover formed unconventional and combative black-white duos, we had Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two escaped convicts on the run while chained together. That's your story, but that's enough.

Considering this came out in 1958, you can imagine what some people might have thought of a black man chained to a white man, even if both were convicts. Let's just say Tony doesn't have many problems, while Sid gets a little more static. Of course, it doesn't help that Curtis hates black people as well. Not the easiest alliance for two guys trying to stay out of jail.

The tension is handled pretty well throughout, and even as the two men learn to tolerate each other, we don't get too soft, too fast as in other movies. (See "Monster's Ball." Oh, so if you can screw a hot black woman, you're not a bigot anymore? Got it.) I knew Poitier would deliver the goods, but I hadn't seen Curtis in anything other than "Some Like It Hot," and that was (a) a long time ago and (b) a slightly different buddy movie. He's pretty good here, though, even if he doesn't wear a dress.

Blade

The same store where I bought a used "Starship Troopers" DVD also had "Blade" for $6. How can you resist that price when it comes to Wesley Snipes mowing down princes and princesses of darkness?

While the trilogy became increasingly silly -- culminating in the "7th Heaven" chick and the "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place" guy playing Blade's sidekicks -- the first installment is fun and stylish. From the opening scene where Blade kills vampires in a meat factory to the finale where he kills vampires in some kind of temple, there's a lot of vampire killing.

There's also Kris Kristofferson in the Obi-Wan role, Donal Logue in the funny bad guy role, Udo Kier in the Eurotrash vampire role and Stephen Dorff -- second billing! -- in the petulant lead villain role. Heck, we even get Traci Lords for a few minutes? Sure, it's not porn, but it's something.