Liz has been out of town this weekend, which means I go to a lot of movies. Well, two.
Yesterday I saw the Harry Potter movie with some friends. That was entertaining, if a bit long. You could have easily cut a good 30-40 minutes out and not lost a thing. Would have been better, actually. Overall, though, a good fantasy dealie with halfway decent acting and a cool horse-chicken.
What's up with the little evil kid, though? He's laying on the evil a bit thick, isn't he? We get it, he's bad, he doesn't have to hiss every single word. It's like Frodo and that damn pained expression he managed to keep on his face for 18 hours or however long those movies were.
The best part of the movie was the lady in front of us when we were buying tickets. She was with a couple of kids and she said everything about two notches too loud. It was as if she had calibrated her voice precisely so that everyone in both ticket lines couldn't help but hear her.
"Are there any tickets left for the 4:30 Shrek 2?"
The teenage girl taps the computer screen at least 12 times, finally answering, "Yes."
"Oh good. One adult and two children and yes, I will donate $1 to the diabetes research."
"Uhmmm, this week it's cancer research."
"Oh, well that's fine."
I gave them a dollar too, because their guilt tactics are very effective. Maybe the movie studio could just donate 1% of their profits and just go ahead and cure cancer. If they can spend $50,000 on the special effects on their logo, they can maybe spare some. I'd settle for a crap logo.
Today it was The Day After Tomorrow, which was really, in every real sense, stupid as hell. If you've seen Deep Impact, you've seen this movie. Replace the asteroid with a killer instant Ice Age and the space mission with Dennis Quaid trying to get to his son in frozen New York and there ya go. If you haven't seen Deep Impact, well it's also exactly like Armageddon, Independence Day and about a thousand other movies.
I've noticed that movies have taken to killing people in more and more gratuitous and graphic ways, in this case dropping buses on them and smacking them into oblivion with flying billboards. It's sort of cartoonish, but still just seems unnecessary, designed only to make the audience wince.
And then, as if a massive, global climate change inside of one week that can freeze people to death right in their tracks isn't enough of a problem for our heroes, some mean-ass wolves escape from the zoo and go on a rampage. I had to applaud the filmmakers' spunk for throwing in some mean, nasty, computer-generated wolves.
Much has been made of the political overtones of this film, some calling it "The Movie the Bush Administration Doesn't Want You To See." The character of the Vice President in the film -- looking an awful lot like Dick Cheney -- is the guy who won't listen to the scientists until it's too late and he's doomed millions with his inhuman blindness and lines like, "our economy is just as fragile as the environment." He says this while tornados are leveling Los Angeles.
My favorite weird political moment, though, had to be when everyone was being evacuated south and Mexico closed its borders. Americans were cutting fences and wading across the Rio Grande, but apparently not being hunted by dogs as people are when they go in the other direction. After some negotiations, they agreed to open the border in exchange for the United States forgiving all Latin American debt.
I love it. Sock it to us.
