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Hi, BOP readers! I hope you have enjoyed reading my Are You With Us? columns as much as I’ve loved writing them. However, lately I’ve been feeling as if this column needs to get with the times, so I will be taking a new approach to the movies I will be writing about. While you will find the same fun content, the films I will be analyzing will have been released the same weekend the column is published ten or more years ago. The film will also be semi-relating to one of the new movies released the current week as well. Today’s column will be going in conjunction for this box office weekend of April 15th-17th.

This might be the first time I’ve been excited for two films in the same week, let alone in the same month, in this lackluster year. I’ve been counting down the days for the animated Rio and the way-more-excited-than-I-should-be-for Scre4m (yes, this is the only way I recognize the title being spelled and it might be the most ingenious play on words…or numbers, since Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel). Hitting two birds (Rio reference #1!) with one stone, the film I’m going to write about is also set in beautiful Brazil and likewise creeped out audiences much like Ghostface a mere 14 years ago. Can you guess what it is?

In a continuation of what scares me, this week I reveal to you that I hate snakes. I have much empathy for Indiana Jones. Even though I am currently in Boston for college, I was still checking my surroundings for the escaped Bronx Zoo Cobra. So naturally, watching the movie Anaconda was no easy task for me and probably freaked me out more so than the average viewer.

Playing like the Jungle Cruise ride in Disney, Anaconda is a rip-roaring adventure down the Amazon River with a few scares here and there. Starring a cast probably working for peanuts that now command eight-figure paychecks like Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, and Owen Wilson. Anaconda, if released today, is why I believe 3D has a place in cinema and why older 2D films should be converted (screw the artistry reasons, I want to see monkeys, J.Lo and snakes on fire lunging at me through the screen!).

With surprisingly believable exposition, Jennifer Lopez plays a documentarian finally nabbing her big break, chronicling an anthropologist’s (Eric Stoltz) search for the long lost Shirishama tribe on the Amazon River with fellow snake food, I mean crew: Ice Cube as Lopez’s fellow USC-er school cameraman friend; Owen Wilson as the sound engineer who is constantly horny for the production manager (Kari Wuhrer); and Jonathan Hyde as the project’s creative force.

Traveling along the river on a jalopy of a boat, the crew makes the mistake of rescuing a shipwrecked Paraguayan snake hunter (Jon Voight). Psychologically hijacking the boat, the vicious serpent seeker uses the crew as bait to capture the largest Anaconda in the world for millions of dollars (although I really don’t know who would want something like that).

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