The Fast and Furious

The movie was exhilarating. It was especially interesting how Paul Walker was torn between the excitements of the mean streets and the red tape of the long arm of the law. Quite the investigation btw, a few million dollars’ worth of merch get stolen from a few semis and all of a sudden it’s time to procure via eminent domain a house in the Hollywood hills for a command squad to operate. Also, I must add, a not so efficient one at that. But whatevs, it’s all about driving cars fast in illicit ways, and occasionally an Asian gang driving fast motorcycles. Hector was a smooth ass mofo, he was cool. That Asian gang were cool too, very family oriented, but what’s up with their huge stash of DVD players??? But it’s all about cars and loyalty and NOS and poor ja-Jule not getting that throple he was promised if he won. That poor sob, but hey it was peak ja-rule at that point, roughly a decade before the FYRE affair. One thing though, Paul Walker, you are kinda a shitty cop for mixing business and pleasure hanging with Dom’s sis, I mean what were you thinking if you were thinking? Do these drag races happen IRL? If so, count me out as a casual driver nearby because that is dangerous, but man, if there is another drag race rager out in the AZ dessert, count me in!

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle

Such a feel-good movie and so encapsulating of the early aughts era where the most important items on the agenda were getting baked and making a run for the nearest munchy outlet.

Forget everything else and don’t stop until you reach the goal: some important life lessons were learned by Harold and Kumar along the way. I am so happy that such a seemingly mundane trip turned into the life altering experience it became.

Harold is your typical post Ivy League recent grad working for some serious d-bags at an investment banking firm. Some higher ups decide to pass off weekend work on him while they go TGIF the hell out of NJ. Harold is the straight guy while Kumar is your stereotypical underachieving goofball who helps drag Harold down with him on the ultimate Friday night goal of first feeding your head then your belly. Neil Patrick Harris plays himself so well. “ Here is an extra $200, I left some love stains in the backseat.”

A seemingly improbable plot full of adventurous twists yields tangible and intangible results for this duo. As one who has gotten lost in NJ on multiple occasions en-route to a fast food destination I very much sympathize with their cause. Chris Meloni might steal the show as Freakshow, this was a nice touch.

It’s amazing how censored and sheltered the world has become in the past twenty years as probably most of the humor in this movie would cause the youth of today to huddle in a safe space. The movie came out at a time just before social media essentially destroyed the innocence and tranquility of a Friday night spent on a hapless quest for caramelized onions, cheese and ground beef.

Harold and Kumar not only found White Castle but they revealed how most of the fun is in the journey.

The Commuter

Is the quality of life this bad outside the city?

The movie begins with probably the most depressing montage of a guy who takes the train to work every day. Within twenty minutes we learn more depressing news that he is an insurance salesman. On top of that, unfortunately, he about to get fired and his personal finances are quite tight. Prior to “working for the man” for a decade he was a cop. He liked that job but wanted to focus on family. His family in fact is a ray of happiness in an otherwise bleak world of 6am 1010 wins alarms. That’s great, but when push comes to shove, he really puts his life on the line for strangers.

What left me wanting is to know more about this nefarious bogeyman who setup an intricate plot to kill a witness with the unsuspecting aid of Liam.

The literary references were fun, we had some great classics like Lord of the Flies and Scarlet Letter woven into this dark tale of the perils of light rail transit. The Shadows of the Night book was an interesting one to throw in, such a dark novel from such a dark time in Spain’s history.

Ocean's 13

Lets make a movie where its high tech to rob a casino. And lets get all the "hottest" stars to get involved.

The movie really dates itself. Where are these folks now? But I guess thats the tragedy of the aughts, the teens pushed those guys out. Clooney, Pitt, Andy Garcia, Elliot Gould, Cameron Diaz, Pacino et al. Bernie Mac RIP. So At first I was skeptical I thought hey its kind of annoying that 1) its a 3qual 2) it continues to have a huge amount of high roller actors, like the movie is basically genetically engineered to be good.

But it was alright. The plot was great, I especially like how they leave any romance, any bs whatever about these Ocean 13-ners out of the movie. Its better that way. As a guy who likes a little black jack from time to time and sometimes a little craps, it was cool to see how they could rig it, but I ultimately did not pay attention enough to really figure out the secret ingredients. Maybe it had something to do with labor rights in Mexico. Can you believe Bernie Mac passed just shortly after this movie RIP. Others, well, its really peak years or beyond peak years for most of those actors. I like the way Damon maintains his usual dorky type-cast role.

How about the muzak btw? Its like anytime there is any action by anybody…..cue the bass, drums, synth, and make it seem like there is something great happening.

Also, teamwork, I cannot say enough about how this movie is really all about teamwork. The team seemed genuinely upset when Elliot Ghould was down with health issues. That’s nice. Also management of this team seems to happen really well without someone driving the situation. They all just got in a room and said “lets rob this place”, “lets go to mexico and make fake dice”, “lets fuck around at the casino and be up in Al Pacino's face about it”. “Fuck him and lets do it”. Great spirit. Nice work.

Not a bad movie. Very formulaic, but at the same time highly detailed and extremely entertaining.

Straight Out of Compton

Paul Giamatti stole the show and apparently everything else according to Straight Out of Compton.

Granted, no one could have reversed poor Eazy's unhealthy promiscuity, but  what he if got NWA a better deal on their first album? The future/ie the present, would have been drastically altered…..No Boys In The Hood, no Are We There Yet? No 50? No Eminem, it's really back to the future-esque thinking about the capabilities of Dre. and Cube. Heck at least they came together to make this movie. One question, why have total randos play the main characters? Dre and Cube should have just played themselves. To top it off, the actor playing Snoop, that guy, wtf? He was not Snoop.

Not much adversity in this movie outside of a music tour hotel orgy shootup. Also, sadly Dre's bro dies, and of course Eazy's exit, which I fast forwarded.

Suge Night played the character well. Maybe there should have been more depiction of dog fighting at Death Row Records. How about Paul Giamatti in tears when Eazy wanted out, that is strange, what franchise was left anyways after all the other talent split? I think Paul is a big time Bone Thugs fan, and did not want to miss out on that.

I miss the ‘90s, life was simple, cops were assholes, free speech was threatened and it ain't no fun if the homeys can't have none. Hopefully you catch Straight Out of Compton around the first of the month, that way you can have some cash reserves to sip a 4 dawg and roll a blount for the viewing.

The Town

Hammer don't hurt em.

Totally unrelated comment, but just felt like saying that.

OK, Ben, great job. You win. FBI loses. Its so Sly Stallone of you to make a movie so Ben-centric. But cool. Charlestown, you know, I did not learn much about the place besides there are some coke whores running around an a lot of de-gen Irish dudes. RE your character, sad story about Mom, that’s hard. RE your totally misguided romance with the eye witness and hostage from a bank robbery, that’s stupid. Your partner in crime tried to call you out on it and you were like "dude mind your own business," but he had a great point that of all girls to fuck, you choose the one who could land you and your boys in jail for the rest of your life. BTW, great outfits. You and the crew seem to have the best looks, especially the police sunglasses Terminator look. Oh yeah, now I remember where I saw that supporting actor, maybe it was when he was a kid in Terminator. I don't know and am too lazy to fact check. On the topic of great actors in the movie I really like the lead gangster and spent a lot of the time wondering where I had seen him and by the end I concluded it was in Gangs of NY, but again, I need to fact check that. So in summary, wow, a lot of violence, it goes with the saying, people don't kill people, AR-15's really kill people, like the kids always say. Also the phrase, "if you are backed into a corner, best thing to do is to go out guns blazing" is also appropriate.

Great job Ben all around. The entire romance thing was lame and Rebecca Hall is like a poor man's Jennifer Garner, but far less annoying, but I guess it had to happen for the plot to work how it did.

High Strung

I don't really know where to begin. The movie at times was inspirational and at times really corny.

A good place to start is to give away the ending; big surprise, Johnny and his modern dance team won the competition. The string and dance event was all theirs. They brought something new and exciting to the competition that the judges had an open mind to accepting and not only accepting, but PRAISING.  Chalk one up to the good guys, the people who can bring fun, exciting and creative alive.

Stepping back a bit one must reflect on what it all means. The key points I took from this movie was that you should chase your dreams, the establishment is something to join, and if you want to make it in dance these days it's not good enough to be talented classically, you need to be flexible and innovative to make it to the next level.

A few quick points about the plot and scenery. The movie fell a little shy on character development but did do a good job making it clear who the good guys and bad guys were. The subway dance off scene was ridiculous from a number of angles; most importantly that for all the breathtaking birds eye views of Manhattan portrayed throughout the movie, the subway and subway station were clearly not authentic New York.  Maybe New York subways are too dirty and crowded for dance offs, or just not inspirational enough. The subway looked like it was from LA, DC or Milan. My big question is who are they trying to pull a fast one on? It's really a disservice that Joe and Mrs. Joe Sixpack are sitting at home in Des Moines Iowa watching a movie about creative youth crushing it in the big city and the city scenes are not accurate. Next thing you know the Mr. and Mrs. come to New York with their violins and their classical dance skills and they become massively disappointed that subways are not nearly as lively as portrayed in the movies. Also, Johnny and the Six Steps live in Ghostbusters old headquarters that is either far too expensive for them or a complete fire liability.

All this is neither here nor there, come one, come all to the big city youth of the world. Bring your hopes, your dreams, your violins, and your ballet slippers because New York is the place where you will turn all your aspirations into reality!

Knowing

I mean, WTF. Should I spoil it or just let anyone with a few spare hours and hopefully some recreational drugs and or alcohol actually sit through this blah, suspenseful, dark, cagey film? 

It's full of Cage. He is pensive, he is reflective, he is insightful and as it turns out, the harbinger for literally (quite literally) the end of the world. Thank goodness there are whispering people and thank goodness Cage's son is a chosen one, which seems very much like college admissions. 

Onto the movie, it starts dark, goes dark, ends basically dark and the alien guys disguise themselves like metrosexuals. Calamitous, yes it is. At all impactful or full of useful takeaways, no it is not. It's Cage up in Mass a few days before the end of the world drinking some booze and losing his shit. It's just too bad that his lady friend got run over by a truck, and thanks a lot movie for probably causing me some serious and deranged nightmares for the near future.

Urban Cowboy

Urban cowboy, quite an interesting movie from a number of angles. First off I was a little confused about where the urban part of the cowboy comes from. I mean Travolta goes from hanging out on a farm to living in a trailer park outside of Houston. Is that urban? It does not seem so? I was waiting for Travolta to hop a bus to New York. Well, at one point he did make it into a classy sugar mama's apartment in downtown Houston, but urban did not really come to mind when observing most of the movies settings.

But let's put the whole urban issue aside and focus on the real moral of the story, and that is if there were a time machine, Pasadena Texas in 1980 would make it to the top 5 places in time to go. Charlie Daniels rocking out the local Honky Tonk, domestic bottled beer flowing, cowboy hats all around, chewing tobacco and above all else, really serious parlor games.

Travolta is a little hard headed, self admittedly, and does a lot of stupid things and is only barely sober while he is on the job. He has a threesome as soon as he hits town, then weds a woman that he just met the day before.  All seemed to go well until the mechanical bull came into their lives. Travolta, an old soul from a different era believes a woman's role is not to be riding a mechanical bull.  His wife has other ideas and so they breakup, she moves in with an ex-con bull riding officianado who lives in a trailer parked in the Honkly Tonk bar parking lot and Travolta starts hanging out with a sugar mama who buys him custom tailored bull riding outfits.  In Saturday night fever-esque fashion the big climax has to do with a competition. However, in 80s fashion, the competition is totally random. It's parlor games; mechanical bull riding, a bar punching bag video game, and a dance competition.  Travolta gets all geared up for the bull riding competition, wins, gets his wife back (with his sugar mama very liberally offering to be available anytime he "wants to make his wife jealous") then he catches the ex- con trying to rob the competition.  Amazing; Travolta 1000, world 0. Just chalk one up for the hard working, domestic beer pounding, dark liquor swilling, tobacco chewing urban cowboy who dared to dream big.

Jurassic World

So what exactly happened? First question

Second question, what are the take aways? 

An Indian billionaire decided to mess with nature and build a themepark with dinosaurs, then things went wrong. Somewhere intertwined were this teenage kid and his tween bro, both in need of serious haircuts. Teen dude is a young romeo, and his little bro is apparently smart. Their parents are breaking up, since the little bro did some forensic work on lawyer letters to the house. Anyways, velociraptors are also involved, and in Jurassic World there is a genetically modified dino that is super crazy.  Also, the theme park has a commercial aspect, biz leaders of the jurassic world project don't want to kill any bad behaving dinos, since they are expensive. In addition, a shadowy military element is afoot with one rogue employee with paramilitary interests thinking that velociraptors would make great army war soldiers. So, as expected things go bad, especially from the start when one of the guys who monitors videos and presses buttons (not sure what job title that is) wears a Jurassic Park shirt to work. Totally ironic, and a mean no bs, super focused boss lady, the teen and pre-teen's aunt, is all about her job, from the visitors to the security parameters. Although, her hyper focus on the biz has taken a toll on her personal relationships.  At one point hundreds of flying dinos are let loose on park goers after the real mean dino breaks into a dino bird sanctuary.  Also the water dino is really cool. I am not a fan of reptiles generally, so no real interest in these animals, or fictitious animals as they are.  Good riddance, they should have leveled that island at the end of the movie, but you don't want to leave out the option for a Jurassic Galaxy type movie next. I see it now, dinos take over the USA, then figure out how to space travel, then fuck up shit on Mars or something. At least the velociraptor will make it to the earth's moon, I am sure, during the movie these animals followed some dude's orders, and then they spoke to the big mean genetically modified dino. The movie really kept me interested, and I like the straight to shock and awe approach, kudos to the setup, and please make another. I like Dinos, but sometimes the museum of natural history is enough of a fix.  

San Andreas

To say SF got wrecked was an understatement. Man they torched the place. 

What was the point of that movie, was it to scare the people of San Francisco/ California into wanting to be extremely prepared for the next earthquake? Maybe the point was to make people appreciate their current living conditions a little more and quit having so much beef with the little things in life. For example it might be bad that your vegan wine was poured a little too thin and the wi-fi access is not working, and that someone on linked-in did not just endorse you for your skills, and that your local free range chicken seller is actually using chickens that get penned up for a short period of time, or your kid found out about Santa Claus a bit too early, or that windsurfing on Saturday got pushed back, or that craft beer was a little too hoppy.  At least your entire town did not first get hit by two major earthquakes, then completely pushed under by an after-shock Tsunami. But enough with humanity, what San Andreas taught us more than anything is that it really pays to have emergency training. Plus we learned that A-holes will get wiped out, no matter how rich they are.  Finally, most importantly, marriages can be saved, but sometimes reconciling a marriage takes the worst earthquake to ever hit the world. 

Regarding special effects, well, it was pretty stunning. Although it seemed like a similar format was repeated throughout the movie where something would be breaking…..ground cracking, buildings falling, and there would be this split second where a herculean effort on the part of the major characters would save themselves and usually an innocent women or child bystander. Nice touch, that is Hollywood, this is clearly not French cinema. 

Gosh, that would be a macabre tale. If this were a French movie the heroin Dwayne Johnson would basically work so hard to locate and save his daughter amid the chaos in SF, only to then have his daughter die, very ironically, drowning, just like his first daughter. Probably all else would have stayed the same in a French version, except Dwayne's wife would really enforce those divorce papers. 

At least the bad guy, mom’s new boyfriend, got crushed.  What a loser….his "child" is a building, and he decides to just save himself instead of his new lady friend's kid, and he seems like an uptight prick. Where did all those hours working overtime get you buddy? It got you crushed under a container ship when a Tsunami hit SF, just after two major earthquakes, that is where it got you. Plus, your annoying sister….she is totally done too. Good people win, bad people fall afoul of natural disasters. The last shot in the movie was an American flag, yeah, that’s right, America!

Pacific Rim

And so 130 minutes was spent. It was spent by myself viewing the movie, by the editing crew making the movie that long, and then multiples of hours were spent conjuring this anti-masterpiece. What a creation. The nomenclature "Kaiju" "Jaeger" "Neural"... something and of course "The Drift" will linger on in all viewers hearts and minds.  So psychological, so penetrating. So scary. Its hard to fathom the day when aliens land in the Pacific Ocean and begin conquering the coastal territories adjacent. Now viewers know what this feels like and its not pretty.  However, its somewhat harder to fathom that when humans create defensive robotic machines called "Jaegers" to fight the aliens , they failed to make them more automated. These Jaegers (btw, Jaegermeister must have sponsored this movie, how else would they ever come up with this name?) must operate by a highly complicated system.  Two people that share common hopes and dreams must unite via some kind of really high tech futuristic brain sharing mechanism to collaborate on moving an enormous robotic nuclear powered machine around. Another quick logistical point; if these Jaeger robots are so hard to maneuver why F-around against the aliens in the middle of the sea all the time, keep them on ground.  Altogether there was lively, yet fairly difficult to comprehend or follow action scenes, a colourful sketchy merchant of alien parts based in a shadowy part of Hong Kong and one of the guys from Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia playing a role that is far above his IQ on the sitcom.    

Purge 2: Anarchy

Purge One focused on a home invasion and was a little weak regarding depicting the horror of street violence ensuing across America on one very special night each year. Writer and director James DeMonaco definitely understood that feedback and ran with it for Purge 2.  Its been over 48 hours since I viewed Purge 2 and I still have nightmares, and day terrors.  I walk down the street wondering if a tractor trailer is going to lift up its back door and a guy smoking a cigar, wearing a clear plastic raincoat, baseball hat and sunglasses will spray me down with bullets using a military level stand-up machine gun.  I sit in a cafe by an open window wondering whether a hoodlum wearing a geisha mask is going to wave a machete at me then hop back in his bakery truck. The subway tunnel guys with flame throwers were epic. At one point a ping of nostalgia swept across myself and movie-going friend that we wished we were watching Running Man, the original, since it’s a better movie.  Social commentary was afoot in Purge 2. The manner in which the wealthy purged was completely perverse. Another observation; the couple who were ready to get a divorce but wound up stranded on a mean downtown LA street running for their lives were really annoying, especially the wife. It is a shame that eventually the husband gets mowed down in crossfire towards the end of the movie (spoiler alert!). The thought was early on that the wife was all set to be purged, since its ok to kill family and friends on purge night, anything goes!  The real question is whether the current civil structure in America is better than the Purge? Probably not, since in The Purge criminals have much cooler costumes.  Stay Safe! Have a good cleanse!