Here's to Action Heroes!

The recent action extravaganza The Expendables is pretty much what you'd expect from an action movie, if it was the action movie to end all action movies! Kind of light on story, but with some subtle and not so subtle layers of subtext thrown in, just to make you smile a little and feel like a ponce about getting older. Then there's the action. Holy damn! It's been a while since I got wound up watching the action scenes of a movie, but this one hits you like that. While all the gunshots, kicks, and punches are slamming you from all sides, you get this brief moment of thinking..."So that's what it would look like if Rocky IV's Ivan Drago took on any of the number of bad asses Jet Li has played in movies for the the last several years. Good to know."

Cops and Comedy.

The movie The Other Guys is your basic buddy cop movie that I had a fun time viewing. I don't know if Mark Wahlberg is cut out for comedy but he did a reasonable job playing the straight man next to Will Ferrell. They both cracked me up, which is what you want when you go watch a comedy, right? The biggest laugh of the movie didn't come from them, however, that honor goes to Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. Spoiler! Their death scene had me almost pass out from laughing so hard. That alone was worth my $12 bucks.

Oh poop.

So the other night I looked in on the film Despicable Me. I don't see a lot of animated movies in the theater anymore, but I still usually manage to get a kick out of them when I do. The best thing about this movie was the minions, I'd see it again just for them alone. Kind of wish I had me some minions...ah to dream.

Life is just a dream.

It's not often that movies hit me upside the head while I'm watching them, but this little film Inception did just that. I'd say more, but the less you know about this movie going into it, the better.

Gnarly dreds dude.

Tonight I saw the new Predators film and while it wasn't as much as I had hoped for, it was still decent. I wonder if someday the powers that be behind these movies will wake up to the fact that they should ditch the humans and go with an all Predator cast, and do a story about them, among them, with no people in it at all. The people in this movie were far more interesting than in the two AVP movies, but I still felt they were only put there to die, not to add anything to the story. The only character that generated any interest with me was Laurence Fishburn's character, the rest were just throw aways. All that aside, however, the movie was okay, not great, but okay. Perhaps someday Hollyweird will be brave enough to make a big budget movie without a love interest or a pretty face to be seen, all about a race of predatory alien hunters, but they aren't there yet.

Outer space

Even though it's the height of the summer blockbuster season, I haven't seen much lately that I feel like throwing in my two cents on. I thought for today I'd go back a little bit and talk about the show Spaced. No it's not a movie, it was a British TV series that garnered up only fourteen twenty minute episodes, and launched something that continues to thrill me to this day. So kick back on this Fourth of July and take a trip back in time with me.
In late 2004 my friend was on a zombie kick, and I went along for the ride. I've never been a big zombie movie fan, and before that the only real zombie flick I'd watched was the first and second Resident Evil movies. Over a period of a few weeks we watched 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, and a couple others I can't name off the top of my head, but after so long I'd had enough. The last one we happened to watched was this little known British movie Shaun of the Dead, which I was shocked to see in a local theater. I didn't like it on that first viewing, I think because by then I was zombied out. However, the next Tuesday was Election Day and I was going to be damned if I was going to stay home and listen to all the rhetoric of political foolishness. The only movie playing I thought was worth watching was Shaun of the Dead, so I decided to go see it again...and I loved it! A few years later when I heard about the movie Hot Fuzz, which was made by the same people with the same actors, I took a two and half hour trip on a Friday afternoon to see it. Yeah, I was that hooked on these guys and their movies.
And yet it took me several years to finally pick up on what started this group in the first place, the TV show Spaced. Last year I was bored and surfing around the net when I ran across Hulu, and combing through the list of shows they had available, I discovered they had the entire series of Spaced available. I decided to give the first episode a watch and then get up and do something else, but after watching the first episode, I settled in and watched them all in one sitting. There are several classic episodes in the series, and you can really get a sense of where the team that made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz started out. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright, along with Jessica Hines deliver up a fun ride of a show, that even after ten years since it began, I could enjoy and appreciate as if it were brand new. If you like those movies, I would suggest you go to Hulu and watch some of the episodes, or better yet buy the complete series as it is available on DVD too! What are you waiting for, go watch it.

Rewind.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a big fan of the trilogy Prince of Persia games, consisting of Sands of Time, Warrior Within, and The Two Thrones. It was not something instant but developed over time, so when I heard they were doing a Prince of Persia movie, I hoped that they would adapt the story of these three games to the big screen. There were some strong elements of those three games in the movie, but as itself, this movie stood alone. So did that mean I didn't like the movie, no not at all. In fact I enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems like I've been hearing nothing but negative opinions about this movie since it was first announced, but I for one have been eagerly awaiting this movie. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a fun adventure that I thought played out very well. There's my two cents.