Let’s see. Saw Green Hornet on Saturday. Got up for the early show (even stopped with Paul and Holly to grab some French toast for breakfast first), so the ticket was six bucks. My expectations were purposely kept pretty low, and on that level, the film was satisfactory. It never got better than you expected, but it maintained a fairly solid B- level of consistency. I will say that Cameron Dias really seemed to be just jammed in there so that the film had a female lead. They tried to justify her presence, but she could have been jettisoned pretty easily.
Let’s hope that Green Hornet’s middling success helps move along Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man movie, which promised to similarly mix comedy with superhero action, albeit presumably more successfully.
I should note that there was a simply awful array of trailers first. I started defining the trailers in one or two word descriptions. “Jeremy Strathen stars in STUFF!” “Adam Sandler stars in CONTRIVED!” “Martin Lawrence (in another Big Mama film!) stars in CONTRIVED STUFF!”
I’m not kidding, trailers are awful now. I guess it indicates why (new) films are less important than ever to our culture. Everything has to be spelled out in advance. There was an teenage alien on the run movie called Number 4 or something, and the trailer when on and on, eventually blowing what was obviously meant to be a major plot twist from the final third of the movie. It wasn’t even the sort of twist that would seem to help sell tickets (“I see dead people”). Seriously, there was no obvious reason why they considered it advantageous to reveal this twist. It’s more like the trailer people now are just given a book that tells them to lay out everything until the last 10% of the movie or something. It’s bewildering.
Went back to Paul and Holly’s. Paul’s a bit younger than Holly and I am, so we introduced him to some ’80s standbys, Buckaroo Bonzai and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Haven’t seen the latter in a long time, it struck me that Hot Tub Time Machine was sort of a similar movie, and I thought about how gross that movie was, and wondered why all comedies now have to be filled with dick and feces jokes. I mean, some of them, yeah (Hot Tub Time Machine was fairly amusing), but all of them? Bill & Ted seemed to be able to largely stay away from blue material and still be funny. Maybe somebody should look into that.
Watching BB got me thinking, now that Tron’s been successfully revived, it’s actually possible that other failed ’80s stuff like Buckaroo Bonzai or Remo Williams could be revived. Hey, anything that gets Fred Ward back on the big screen.
We watched the Packers game, for obvious reasons. It was scary. The Bears (unsurprisingly) easily won their game too, but against a weaker opponent. I’m not a huge football fan, and even I’m going to feel humiliated if the Packers beat the Bears next week. I can’t imagine how the real hardcore fans are feeling. Of course, if we beat them, it will be the most glorious thing ever. I think it will come down to whether we can sit on Aaron Rogers. I don’t think we want to get into a shooting match, so defense will be key.
That’s what I got, how about you guys?
