Hey there, guys! I just got home a little while ago from watching Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore's latest comedy, Blended. It was kind of a spontaneous decision. I got off of work early tonight so I thought I might as well check out a movie. I'll be posting a review soon. This is actually the first Adam Sandler movie I've seen in full since Sandler and Barrymore's last get-together, 50 First Dates. Sandler gets a really bad rap among most movie critics these days, but any true fan of his will know that most critics are cynical a-holes. I personally happen to like Adam Sandler, and really enjoy quite a few of his movies. I'll save any comments on Blended for the review. I also am seeing Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West on Thursday night, so I'm having back to back movie theater nights! I'll try to keep you guys posted and get those reviews available for you as soon as possible! Stay tuned!

Now you all have the chance to argue over review scores with 5 Minute Movie Guy! I have successfully added comment boxes at the bottom of my review pages, using a website called Disqus. You can log in through various social media accounts, including facebook, twitter, google, disqus, or even as a guest if you so choose. I'd love to hear from you guys! It is my hope for 5 Minute Movie Guy to eventually grow into wonderfully interactive community. Feel free to agree or disagree with me as you will. I'm totally open to discussing and debating movies with you guys. All I ask is that you keep things respectful, and I'll do the same. I'm also willing to answer your questions about my reviews, and will be sure to get back to you promptly. Thanks for all of your support!

I'd also like to give a big thanks to my buddy Vincent for suggesting Disqus to me, and for all the help and advice he's given me for making this website, and over the years. You're an amazing person and friend, and I want you to know I truly appreciate you.

I finally got my X-Men: Days of Future Past review posted. Much later than I had intended, to be sure.  I feel like it is rather imperative for me to have my reviews posted by Friday considering that I don’t get advanced screenings of the films and am already behind other movie critics. I’m going to make an effort to work on that, and that also requires me to make some adjustments to my current work schedule which should happen fairly soon. The more often I write reviews, the faster I should be able to get them up, and get them properly formatted and posted.

I ran into some issues with posting the X-Men review, and I suppose that should be expected. After all, I’m still getting familiar with running my first website. Fortunately, I was able to resolve those problems and learn from them, and it should be a smoother experience next time. I should also point out that it’s been brought to my attention that mobile users can see changes on my website before I even make them public, so some of you got a sneak peek look at the beginning of my X-Men review under the “Reviews” page before you could even access the full review. Heck, at least a couple of you saw it before I had even finished writing the review. So I apologize about the confusion with that mishap, and now that I’m aware of it, I can take steps to prevent it from happening again.

I told you guys I was going to write a review for X-Men: First Class, and when that wasn’t finished before Thursday, I decided to put my attention towards Days of Future Past first instead. I’ll get back to work and get that up soon while the movie is still relatively fresh in my head. As I stated in my Days of Future Past review, after seeing the new movie I want to watch all of the other films now. So I’ll probably gradually review the others over time, but I don’t want to post a smorgasbord of X-Men stuff all at once. Or perhaps I’ll do an X-Men week where I knock it all out at once, but in the meantime I want to focus on building a greater variety of content for you guys to enjoy.

Another thing I wanted to discuss with you guys involves movie soundtracks. In all fairness, I feel like I never really gave Godzilla’s music a fair shake in my review. It really just wasn’t that memorable to me, but I find that movie soundtracks have to be heard at least a couple times before they really stick with you. Maybe that’s not true of some of the legendary ones like the Jaws or Star Wars themes, but I think it’s typically true for most movies. When it came to Godzilla, the times when the music was most noticeable to me was when I thought it was used really ineffectively. Aside from that, I only remembered the music from the plane jump featured in the trailer, which I did enjoy. Regardless, I want to be able to give a better analysis of film scores and soundtracks in my reviews because I think it’s a very important aspect of movies that should not be overlooked. Therefore, from here on out, I’m making it a personal obligation to listen to a film’s music while writing its review.

In another news, this week I’ll be seeing Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West in theaters. I'll certainly try to have a review up more quickly this time. I’m a big fan of comedy films, though as I’ll no doubt explain to you in time, I have some issues with the state of today’s comedy standards. Not that I think all of today’s comedy films are bad, but I think the genre has mostly devolved into raunchy, excessively vulgar, mindless garbage. Here’s to hoping that A Million Ways to Die in the West doesn’t fall into that landfill!

I've decided to add two new pages to 5 Minute Movie Guy; News, and Rear View Reviews. The News page will allow me to share and comment on up-to-date movie-related news, so I can keep you guys informed while offering my own two-cents on what's going on in the movie world. The Rear View Reviews will have their own place in the Reviews section, and that's where I'll post reviews for movies that are no longer in theaters. As you will see, the Reviews tab in the header is now divided into "Now Playing" and "Rear Review Reviews", which hopefully will help avoid any confusion about which movie reviews are current and which reviews are for older films. For instance, once I finish my X-Men: First Class review, it'll be available for your reading pleasure under Rear View Reviews. Meanwhile, my review for X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I'll be seeing tomorrow night, will be under the Now Playing section. Thanks for reading!

Okay, okay... I'm gonna come clean about some things, guys. Some of these things, they're a little embarrassing. I gotta let it out. I gotta make things right. Some of you are going to be disappointed, but I'm gonna try here, okay? I don't wanna let you down. I'm gonna make some changes in my life from now on! Okay... Okay... Here it goes. Okay. I’m ready to tell you my secret now.

I, 5 Minute Movie Guy, have never watched a Harry Potter movie. I’ve never seen any of The Fast and the Furious movies. Haven’t seen any of the Transformers, Planet of the Apes, or even Star Trek movies. I’ve never even seen more than 5 minutes of a Back to the Future movie, man, and Robert Zemeckis is one of my favorite directors! I also have never seen a Superman movie, and in fact, I’ve passed on the majority of superhero movies. For cripes sake, I saw The Godfather for the first time in my life about a year ago! Oh, the shame!!

But now I’m trying to change all of that, and make up for some lost time. I see the error in my ways! Until today, I had never seen an X-Men movie. I just finished watching X-Men: First Class to better prepare myself for X-Men: Days of Future Past which I’ll be watching in theaters on Friday. I think the new movie looks great, and what a killer cast it has! I’m going to work tonight on writing a review of X-Men: First Class for you guys, even though most of you have probably already seen it by now.

There’s a reason why I’ve never seen most of the films. The truth is that they never appealed to me. I kind of missed out on the Harry Potter hysteria because I was older than its target audience, and to be perfectly honest, wizards and magic typically aren’t all that interesting to me. Apparently it’s unforgivable for me to have not seen any of them, so I’ve got it somewhere on my to-do list. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight. I never liked Transformers even as a kid, so I avoided the movies. Street racing isn’t up my alley, so I didn’t bother with The Fast and the Furious films. I’ve wanted to see J.J. Abram’s Star Trek movies but I’ve just never gotten around to it. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, but I have some good news. Over the next couple months, I’ll be able to strike 3 more franchises off of my list, since I’ll be seeing Transformers: Age of Extinction, Fast and Furious 7, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes all in theaters, and all of them will be reviewed. So please, if I have offended you, take mercy on my soul. I am making an effort to fix this. Now that I’m running a movie website, I’m going to try to expand my horizons some more to provide a wider range of content for you all. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Well, my Godzilla review is finally up. It's a little later and a lot longer than expected.  Being my first review on the site, and having to find an effective way to format it took some extra time. Plus the review itself is almost 5 pages long! Haha. I wasn't exactly aiming for that, but I do suppose it's fitting for 5 Minute Movie Guy. If you've checked out the review already, you'll see that I'll be using a 5-star review system and additionally will summarize my reviews with 5 main points. I want to make it clear that there will be no half-stars in my scoring system. It's strictly 1 through 5. If I'm gonna bother with half-stars, I might as well just make it out of a 10 point scale, right? But I'm 5 Minute Movie Guy, so naturally I'm typically going to be working with the number 5.  Also, I like the 5-point review scale because it challenges me and forces me to make a more difficult decision. I feel as though it gives my verdict more weight. I would have no hesitation giving a movie a 7 out of 10, but with a 5-point scale, I'm forced to choose between whether I'm going to give it a 3 out of 5, or a 4 out of a 5. That's  a much harder decision and a pretty substantial difference in the score. That's the point. I have to choose. ;)

Speaking of being 5 Minute Movie Guy, I suppose this will be a good opportunity to explain my name to you. It's actually a name that was coined by my closest movie buddy, long before I ever even had the idea to make this site. He and I often discuss movies, and many times when he asks me if I've seen a movie, my response is, "Only about 5 minutes of it".  I guess he heard that so regularly that one day he jokingly replied, "Okay, Mr. 5 Minute Movie Guy!" I guess I kind of liked the sound of it, and decided to stick with it. I think it's a pretty catchy name. It's also an appropriate name for me. You see, if I ever start watching a movie that's already started or that someone else is already in the middle of watching, I'll only stick around and watch about 5 minutes of it. There's a reason for that. I feel that having missed the beginning of the movie, if I continued watching any longer, I would be somewhat taking the entire movie out of context. I'd much rather watch it from beginning to end. Just limiting myself to 5 minutes lets me get a feel for it, and if I like what I see during that time, I'm much more likely to watch the whole thing later on. Even with movies that I love, when I jump in at a random time, it can end up altering the experience. Something that I may have thought of as being awesome could come off seeming cheesy this time, because I'm basically taking the moment out of context and don't have the same emotional investment as I would if I had sat down from the beginning. So that's why I've only seen 5 minutes of so many movies, and that's where my name comes from. As you can imagine, now that I have my own movie website, I'm going to make a greater effort to watch more movies from beginning to end.

Getting back to Godzilla, this is actually the first full-length professional movie review I've ever written. I'm pretty pleased with it, and I hope you will be too. I really didn't want my first review to be a negative one, but I guess that's sort of fitting too. I'm known for being a pretty tough critic. Although I certainly don't want to establish a reputation for being overly harsh or unfair.  I was really looking forward to this movie, and in my opinion, it just didn't deliver.  I'm gonna talk a little more about it in another blog post shortly so I can touch on some spoilers. Don't worry! As I noted in my last blog post, the spoilers will be hidden, so only those that want to see it can. I also plan on making 5-minute long video reviews for movies in the future. That might still be a couple months away. I don't have all the equipment I want for that, nor do I have any experience with making video reviews, so please be patient and bear with me.  I have plenty more in store for you guys in the future. This is just the beginning! Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for reading!

I am posting this blog entry to inform you all that my reviews will be completely spoiler-free. Trust me, I hate spoilers as much as the next guy. Nothing kills a movie's dramatic effect more than knowing exactly what's going to happen. However, if I should decide that I want to discuss spoiler-related material regarding a film, it will be done so in a blog post instead of the review. Additionally, I will give a clear spoiler warning, and the spoiler itself will be written hidden under a "Read More" break, so you will have to click that button to reveal the content. That way people who don't mind reading spoilers can check it out, while those that do mind can avoid the spoilers entirely until after the see the movie for themselves. With that said, there's plenty more I'd like to say about Godzilla that involves spoilers, so I'm going to add a spoiler blog after I post my review. Thanks!

Thanks for visiting 5 Minute Movie Guy! Now that the website is up, the real fun can begin. I think my first blog post would be a good opportunity for me to just talk about the site and tell you what it's all about.

I'm a guy who loves movies. I enjoy talking about them and writing about them nearly as much as I enjoy watching them. The purpose of this website is to give me a platform to express my passion, and to share it with others. It is my hope that 5 Minute Movie Guy will be a website that you enjoy coming to, and will want to be involved with. Whether it's to check out reviews, read some articles, comment on blogs, or just watch some funny videos. I'm interested in your opinions as well, and encourage your participation. I'm even going to let you readers help determine what movies I should review by writing one user-nominated movie review each month. I am truly appreciative of your time and support, and with your help, I hope to evolve 5 Minute Movie Guy into something that is truly special. Thanks!