Tag Archives: Movies

Movie Review: Olympus Has Fallen

What is Olympus Has Fallen about? Because the commercials don’t really tell you anything, other than that it’s an action movie. It’s a big action movie, true to form, never straying at all far from the tropes of the genre. It’s about the President, kind of. The opening scene is of the President boxing one of his secret service agents at Camp David. It’s a big action movie.

I think it’s President Asher or something like that, but that kind of stuff never matters. In fact, just hearing “President Asher” only serves to remind the audience how not real any of this stuff is. Which to me is fine. You go to see an action movie, you have to suspend your belief in lots of things if you want to have a good time. But hearing stuff like “President Asher” kind of messes with the illusion somewhat.

Whatever, that’s a small point, Aaron Eckhart, who plays the President, is hardly in the movie at all. The boxing scene at the beginning is about as good as it gets, because almost immediately after, his wife dies in a freak falling-off-a-bridge accident.

The movie isn’t really about the President. It’s about the Koreans. And Gerard Butler. But really the Koreans. They don’t tell you any of that in the commercials. Because the Korean people are not well represented in this movie, that is, coming from this non-Korean’s perspective. I’m assuming it’s why it was left out of any advertisements.

They’re going for a good old-fashioned America vs. movie. America vs. what? You had Red Dawn in the eighties, but now there’s no Soviet Union anymore. And didn’t they just reboot that movie also? I can’t imagine how the story stood up to the geopolitics of 2013. So no Russia, no Middle East, I mean, those actions movies are all too depressing, too weighed down in the realities of the past decade.

North Korea. It just might work. There’s a sort of real threat coming from that direction. Technically we’re still at war, right? Brilliant, North Korea it is. Without ruining the movie, I’ll tell you that a rogue group of North Koreans stage an all out assault on the White House, capturing the President and some other senior officials in an underground bunker.

Before you say, “But, how? That doesn’t make sense,” the movie already has it answered: “It takes fifteen minutes for the armed forces to get to the White House. We took it down in thirteen.” Actions movies like this don’t have to rely on making sense or logistical plausibility, as long as they keep the helicopters crashing, the knives stabbing, and the Abe Lincoln busts bludgeoning, the audience will accept that the terrorists somehow got their hands on a prototype US antiaircraft gun. “How they hell did they get that?” somebody screams in the situation room, to which some general responds, “It doesn’t matter how they got it!”

After the White House is in enemy hands, our nation’s only hope lies in Gerard Butler, a former secret service agent who had a little something to do with the first lady falling off of that bridge. He sees the White House under attack, and he runs there, making it inside, everybody else dead, just he makes it, on foot, and eventually he finds a conveniently placed Bluetooth cell phone that somehow maintains constant communication with the situation room.

Also, Morgan Freeman, in a surprise move, is demoted from Hollywood’s favorite black President to America’s first fictitious black Speaker of the House. I was like, what the hell? How can you have a table full of fake officials and not automatically defer to Morgan Freeman? But it’s OK, because after the Vice President gets executed, Freeman gets to be acting President for the rest of the movie. That’s more like it.

Olympus Has Fallen was entertaining, although not as entertaining as say The Rock, or Con Air, or Apocalypto. I feel like six months from now we’re all going to be watching it on USA or TBS. This movie looks like it was made specifically for strategically placed TV commercial breaks. The pace definitely slowed down toward the end, and I didn’t have that same sitting on the edge of my seat feeling that I usually get toward the climax of good actions movies. But that’s because I think it was a relatively safe film, a pretty safe script, a safe cast, a safe time of the year when not a lot of cool stuff is playing in theaters.

But it’s an OK movie, if you like over the top action flicks. I don’t want to spoil anything, but somewhere around the middle, Butler tells the main villain, Kang, that he’s going to “stab you through your brain with my knife.” Who do you think wins in the end and how do you think he does it?

A bunch of movie reviews

I really don’t like Forrest Gump. I think it’s such a cheap trick, making basically this giant nostalgia video montage of pop culture and Americana. Look everybody, it’s the sixties! And now over here, it’s the seventies! And the eighties! Remember that? Remember the Beatles? Yeah? Remember Vietnam?

I didn’t lake Saving Private Ryan either. Come on. And then what, he’s an old man at the end? Like the whole thing was a dream? Please. How do I know that it ever really happened? Old people have notoriously bad memories. You don’t think that he didn’t spice it up over the years for dramatic effect? I do stuff like that all the time. I think about something that happened to me two years ago, and then I’ll think of it again, and I’ll be bored. It’s like watching the same episode of TV over and over again. So I add new stuff. That’s what’s going on in Saving Private Ryan. Or he could have been crazy.

I hated Toy Story. What kind of a parent gets their kid some lame-o cowboy action figure? When I was a little kid, it was WWF action figures, or Ghostbusters action figures, or superheroes. Not just some generic cowboy. And then you pull that rope and he’s like “Yee-haw!” right? What kind of a name is Woody? At least Buzz Lightyear had some sort of a back story, a cool marketing trick that made me believe kids would actually want to own one. But a cowboy? I already said it. Lame.

You know which other three hours of my life I’ll never get back? That time I went to see Castaway. Honestly, I thought the volleyball was the best part of that whole movie. It was definitely the best actor. You could actually see the pain on its face as it was forced to endure all of those mind numbingly boring years stranded on the island. It got to the point where the ball finally killed itself, drifted off to the sea, just to get away from that wacko. I actually would have much preferred a movie with just the volleyball, sitting there, no other actors, no dialogue, nothing. That would have been better than Castaway.

Hold on. I just started thinking about Apollo 13 and I had to suppress the vomit sensation growing in the back of my mouth. It’s just lazy, you’re going to make a movie about space, about space travel, about the moon, and you pick the one mission where they screw it up so badly they don’t even get to land. What’s next, a movie about the Challenger explosion? Way to applaud failure. It’s like that whole film should have been condensed to a blooper reel that played at the end of a real movie about a space flight that actually succeeded. And why go historical? What’s wrong with sci-fi? I probably would’ve much rather just seen another Star Trek movie. Is it too late to call up the movie theater and demand a refund?

You ever see that movie Big? Do me a favor. Do yourself a favor. If you haven’t seen it, don’t. It’s two hours of a grown man acting like he’s a little kid. Talk about boring. It’s just encouraging everyone to act like an idiot. They should make movies about little kids that act like adults. That way there’s no screaming or crying or throwing temper tantrums or being spoiled little babies. And we should force our children to watch this movie, so they learn how to behave.

The other day I was channel surfing, and this one channel was playing Splash. Mermaid movies? Give me a break. So I flipped the channel. The Money Pit. Fantastic. Let’s watch some stupid married couple bicker over home-improvement projects gone bad. Flipped the channel again. I didn’t even wait for the image to pop up. The cable box told me it was some movie called Joe vs. the Volcano. Nice try cable TV. Trying to get me to watch the unwatchable.

I thought, forget it, I’ll just watch a sitcom, something classic, a sure thing. I turned on one of those repeat channels and Taxi was on. Perfect. The episode had some larger story, but this one scene revolved around Jim, the coked out bum that … well, did that guy drive taxis? That seems a little dangerous. Anyway, they did a flashback to his college days, how he was really smart, a genius, but then some idiot roommate made him eat a pot brownie and he instantly turned into a junkie. It was the worst. Not the story, but the actor, the nobody that they got to play the roommate. What a terrible casting decision. I know it was only a one minute role, if that, but come on, have some respect for the show. That no talent hack ruined an otherwise great episode.

Get on you knees and grovel before the lords of soda

I just went to see a movie. All of the employees at the theater were wearing t-shirts about choice and personal liberty, all decorated with slogans about how New York is a city of freedom. Then, when I sat down in my seat to be force fed all of those nonsense commercials that play before the movie starts, it was a lot of the same deal, don’t let anyone take away your freedom, blah blah blah. Normally I’d just zone out, but in a movie theater, I’m actually kind of forced to sit and pay attention to what’s playing in front of me. And what was playing in front of me? I realized that this wasn’t just any freedom or liberty we were talking about, this was about soda.

New York made headlines a couple of months ago after the mayor introduced a measure banning really big sodas at movie theaters and restaurants. And so this must have been part of the corporate backlash. Whatever, I think Mike Bloomberg is a dick, but not because of this soda issue. There have been a lot of professional opinions about soda drinking since the Mayor passed his law, and most of them say that people will always automatically go for the default option, in soda’s case, it’s always a large.

A large isn’t even really large. It’s gigantic. And it’s what everybody gets. Have you ever tried to buy a small soda? First of all, it’s only usually around three to four cents cheaper. And you order the small soda and the cashier immediately tries to stop you, gives you that don’t-be-so-cheap look and says, “Come on, you sure you don’t want a large? It’s only three cents more!” Of course you’re going to get the large. One time I insisted on the small, the cashier had to go back to some storeroom to see if they actually kept any small cups in house. She found one, and it was still bigger than any cup I have in my house.

Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone had giant glasses in their houses? You could buy a two liter bottle of Coke and pour the whole thing right into one of those cups. It’s not fair. Only at shitty restaurants and movie theaters is it OK to hold a cup that you literally can’t carry without using both hands. That’s not normal. That’s not how normal people eat and drink in their houses.

Which is why I get so pissed off when I go to see a movie and I’m bombarded by a political campaign about soda. Yeah, it’s about freedom, that’s it. It’s about, um, choice. Right, yeah choice. Who’s financing this counter-campaign? Why is it only at the movies that I’m seeing this nonsense?

Because you go to the movies and you have to get a snack. And you can’t bring in snacks from outside the movie theater. So you wait on line where the employees are making like three dollars an hour, and if I were making three dollars an hour, I’d be working even slower than they are. And by the time you finally get to the cashier, you just want some popcorn and a Coke. There’s no prices listed. There are never any prices listed. You just know that it’s going to be ridiculously expensive.

Popcorn and a Coke? Fifteen bucks. Awesome. Thanks for the popcorn and soda. I know it cost you like fifteen cents to produce this nutritionally hollow garbage. Fifteen bucks. Whatever, at least it’s gigantic. At least it’s so big that I’m probably not going to be able to finish it. And even if I do finish it, I can always get up in the middle of the movie and waste fifteen more minutes waiting on that line again for a free refill.

And that’s really the only way that these opportunist theaters can get away with charging ridiculously high prices for large cups of sugar water and bags of popped chicken feed. Because it’s so big. The word value just automatically pops in your head. Like when you go to Costco. Big. Value.

Can you imagine what it would be like if you ordered a large soda at a movie theater, then they handed you a sixteen-ounce cup, and then still tried to charge you ten bucks? The price would have to come down. And that’s what this whole campaign is about. Coke and Pepsi and AMC theaters don’t care about choice, or freedom, or liberty. They’re pissed off that a Mayor of a large city is trying to stop them from ripping everybody off. All they care about is taking your money, selling you a product that’s basically toxic in such large quantities, and not having to be held accountable for it. And when government threatens this normalized fleecing, they get all pissed and put together a campaign, try to rally up support amongst the people they are robbing.

I don’t get it. If you’re going to sell me a giant Coke, don’t take my money and then ask for help and support overturning a governmental proposal that would limit you from taking even more of my money. You should have collection boxes on the way out, asking your customers for donations. Please, give us even more money. Would you like to donate a dollar for cancer with your popcorn purchase? Screw you. You donate a dollar, because I just gave you upwards of thirty bucks on a movie and snacks. Don’t try to guilt me into giving up even more. Absolutely shameless. Does anybody ever go to the movies, spend thirty bucks, and then say to themselves, wow, that was totally worth it. Money well spent. I can’t imagine having a family, like two or three kids. That’s like a whole day’s work, down the drain.

Freedom. Give me a break, do I look stupid? How about hiring some more employees for the snack lines so I don’t have to wait around like an idiot? How about offering some better snacks? How about selling beer or cocktails. How about cleaning the floors once in a while so it’s not so goddamn sticky every single time. How much more money do you want from me just so I can see a movie and have some snacks?

I just thought of the greatest idea for a movie

Ever since I saw the trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’ve felt a wave of inspiration to write a bunch of other historically inspired thrillers. My first one is going to be called Calvin Coolidge: In Space. It’s going to start off at that famous White House party, the one where that woman walks up to President Coolidge and says, “My friend made a bet that I can’t get you to say more than three words,” and just as Silent Cal is about to say, “You lose,” a group of space explorers, from the future, appears out of nowhere.

“President Coolidge!” they’ll cry. And Coolidge will turn to the camera and say, “Here we go again,” and they’ll all be teleported aboard a spaceship in the future. And when they appear on the bridge of the ship, Coolidge won’t be wearing his suit and tie anymore, he’ll be wearing a spaceship captain’s uniform. And the ship will be under heavy fire. And Coolidge won’t even have to say a word, he’ll just calmly make gestures to his crew, and they’ll all understand him, and they’ll somehow destroy the enemy vessel just in the nick of time.

Then there’s going to be a flashback to a young Calvin Coolidge growing up on the moon of some distant planet even further in the future. And you’ll learn how he became a space captain, and why he got to be so quiet, and how he wound up in the past on that first spaceship, and then how he wound up even further in the past to become President. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think that Calvin Coolidge: In Space, isn’t a descriptive enough title. It’s terrible, disgusting. Nobody’s going to want to see it. They’ll think it’s stupid and boring. I’m going to call it, Calvin Coolidge: Captain Space President of the Future in the Past. There we go. Seriously, let’s do this.

And then after I’m done writing that movie, I’m going to write another movie called, Joan of Arc: Witch Doctor. Everybody knows that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, right? And everybody thinks it has something to do with religion, right? Wrong. This movie is going to tell the untold tale of Joan of Arc, where she was actually a sorceress from a parallel magic universe. Some enemy goblins escaped from her dimension to our dimension, and she has to follow them here to stop them from taking over our world. And she does it, but everyone is scared of her powers so they wind up burning her at the stake. But she’s a witch doctor, so she just let’s everybody think she’s dying up there, but she’s really just teleporting back to her own reality. So it’s like a new, happier ending for Joan of Arc. Kind of like when they killed Hitler at the end of Inglorious Basterds. Maybe if we enter another Dark Age, where all the books get burned and knowledge is banned, maybe thousands of years in the future, as society struggles to rebuild, to find out what happened before the second Dark Age, someone will come across a copy of this movie buried in a monastery somewhere and they’ll think that this is how it really happened. Just imagining that as a possibility is enough to motivate me to come up with these great ideas, nonstop.

I could think of movies all day long. Isn’t there a movie coming out called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? OK, well, how about Crime and Punishment and Robocop? Or let’s do War and Peace and Mummies. And then Law and Order and the Plague. I mean, it’s really easy. You just find existing movie titles or book titles that consist of two nouns separated by the word “and.” And then after the second noun, you make a third “and” and you just add something wacky, like Beauty and the Beast and the KKK. Boom. Can you imagine if I were actually in charge of an actual movie studio? I would’ve made millions of dollars just by writing this paragraph. Your loss Hollywood.

And I could do kids’ stuff too. Because at the same time that I’ll be producing all of these blockbusters, I’m going to be writing another movie, a children’s movie, called Christopher Columbus vs. Pinocchio. Columbus was Italian right? Perfect. In this movie, we’ll find out that Geppetto actually already had a son. And the son’s name was Christopher Columbus. But Christopher Columbus’s mom died during childbirth, and the little boy was left all alone. And he really wanted a brother so bad. But his dad was consumed by his work as a puppeteer, and didn’t have any time to go out looking for a wife or having any more kids. But then one of Columbus’s toys, Pinocchio, comes to life. And at first they are both happy. But then Pinocchio turns out to be a huge brat. He’s constantly crying and complaining to Geppetto that Columbus isn’t playing fair or isn’t sharing his toys.

“But you are a toy!” Christopher Columbus will say to his new brother. And Pinocchio will respond, “Not anymore! And now you have to share all of your stuff!” And that will be the whole movie, just the two of them the whole time engaged in nonsense sibling rivalry. We’ll market it as, “The untold story, before he discovered the New World, Christopher Columbus discovered that brotherly love conquers blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” you get it, right? Think about it. It’s going to be a Disney film and it’s going to be in CGI and it’s going to be in 3D. But there’s a twist: the theatres will be playing the movie on two screens side by side. So they’ll advertise the movie as 6D. It obviously won’t be six-dimensional, because I don’t think that string theory has been able to empirically prove the existence of extra dimensions just yet, but people are stupid and won’t really mind paying an extra four bucks for the added novelty. It’s going to be a huge success. Make it an extra eight bucks. Yes, all of them huge successes. No, you still can’t keep the glasses. And why would you want to? Seriously, what are you planning to use them at home? They only work at the theatre, not on your TV. Besides, you look like an idiot wearing them. And can you imagine how many people have worn those on their greasy heads before you? Gross.

This is why I don’t leave the house

Whenever a movie comes out that I’m really looking forward to see, I used to like to head over to the theatre the night before to watch the first showing at midnight. But I’m beginning to realize that I hate everything about this. I hate having to compete with everyone else, waiting in line for hours, buying a ticket, making sure I find a good seat, taking turns with whoever I’m there with getting up to going to the bathroom, buying snacks, all while I’m sitting in this crowded theatre for an hour before the commercials even start, watching stupid commercials for another hour before the previews even start, watching some ridiculous previews for movies that I have no intention of ever seeing, (I always say never, but there are always exceptions to watching bad movies, like if I’m on a long flight and, after trying not to look at the screen, I find myself watching regardless of whatever else I may feel like or not feel like doing,) having random people come up to my row, pointing to that pile of coats next to me and saying, “Is anyone sitting there?” and I have to try to act polite and say, “Yeah, sorry, my friend is in the bathroom or getting snacks or stretching his legs because he’s been sitting in this seat for the better part of a day and he’s worried about developing a deep vein thrombosis or he’s making a phone call and didn’t want to be rude or he had second thoughts about our friendship and only told me he was going to the bathroom but he really snuck off and won’t be returning any of my calls again in the future, in which case, you would be welcome to the seat, but I’d hate to just assume the worst, so if you come back maybe fifteen minutes after the movie starts, and he’s still not here, then you can have it, but that wouldn’t really make much sense, because this is his coat, so even if he did want to ditch me, to ditch our friendship, to ditch everything we’ve been through, you’d think he’d at least take his coat with him, so, yeah, I’m sorry, the seat’s taken,” and I have to act all apologetic for having the nerve to occupy such a desirable seat, and I look up at the people asking, hoping that they aren’t rolling their eyes at me in contempt, but it’s too dark in the theatre, so I can only make out a general outline of their faces, not the specific facial expressions that they may or may not be taunting me with, but like any dark space, where you can only kind of make something out, but not really, the mind has a way of filling in the blanks, and for some reason, whenever I tell people that the seat’s taken, I’m automatically looking up at potential faces of disgust, anger, just barely held back rage, but who knows if the people are really that pissed off or not? And then it turns out that the joke is usually on me anyway because, even though I got there super early, even though I waited there and sat through all of that nonsense, right before the ambient lights go dark for the movie, the last member of the group of people in front of me arrives, better late than never, just in the nick of time, without a second to lose, and his friends move the pile of coats they were using to save his seat, and it’s right in front of mine (no wonder I thought my seat was so perfect; it was a mirage; it wasn’t real; there is no spoon) and the guy happens to be eight feet tall and his head is right in the bottom right corner of my view of the screen, not enough to completely obscure my line of sight, but just enough that I now have to stretch my head awkwardly to the side so I can see everything, and I have to hold it like that for the entire movie, and I’m not even fortunate enough to be able to lean into my friend next to me, which, no doubt, is still a little awkward, but not nearly as awkward as what I have to do now, which is to lean really close to the complete stranger next to me, the dude who ordered a small soda cup of nacho cheese sauce, and he’s just holding it, and you can’t see if he has any chips, (he must right?) because what else would he be doing with that stuff, and I want to focus on the movie, but I also want to see if this guy is going to do something with the cheese, like maybe he’ll just dip his fingers in there every now and then and take a lick, but I never catch him and it’s driving me nuts, so I only see like half the movie, and every time I look to the cheese, the audience erupts in a huge cheer or a laugh, and I look up at the screen but I totally missed it, and it might look like something cool had happened, but it’s currently no longer cool enough to elicit such a loud response, in which case I just have to assume that I missed something, or saw something partially potentially cool but totally out of context. And then the movie ends and it takes me forever to push my way out of the theatre, and I always wind up eating way too much popcorn, so my lips hurt, my tongue hurts, I have those stupid little pieces of popcorn shell stuck way up in between the spaces between my back molars and the gums they are attached to, and I’ll just say to myself, Rob, listen, you’re not going to be able to get them out without floss, so just ignore them and wait until you get home, but while my head is convinced of this plan’s logic, my tongue never really gets the memo, and proceeds to play with the kernels and to try to maneuver and twist its way back there, and I always accidentally wind up biting my tongue, and every time I think the piece is about to be lodged free, loose enough to where I can stick my finger in there and pull it out, it always backfires, and I’ll pick at it with my fingernail, but when I go to inspect the area with my tongue, it’s always in the same exact spot, or maybe even pushed a little further in, and I’ll think, OK, did I pick at the wrong tooth, because teeth feel much different to the tongue than they do to the fingers, and I’ll count from the back tooth with my tongue, one, two, it’s the third one in, and I’ll do the same with my fingers, one, two, three, nothing, so I’ll just put it out of my head and go home to floss, but my friend wants to go get coffee or something even though it’s super late, and I always say yes, because I don’t want to give my friend any reason to doubt our friendship, the kind of doubt that will start out small, but it will linger, until the next time we go out to see a movie, the next thing I know I’m sitting next to an empty seat and, look at that, he did take his coat this time, maybe that’s it, maybe I’m ditched, maybe that other person does come back to see if the seat’s open fifteen minutes later and I have to give it up, and then I won’t be able to enjoy the movie because, even though half an hour has passed, even though an hour has passed, I’ll keep thinking that, my friend’s going to come back, and what’s he going to say when he sees that I’ve given up his seat?