Movies

Watched a bunch of movies this last week:

The Simpsons - Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa & Maggie Wednesday
The Contract - Morgan Freeman & John Cusack Friday
Shooter - Mark Wahlberg & Danny Glover Saturday
The Bourne Identity - Matt Damon Sunday
The Bourne Supremacy - Matt Damon Monday
Cadavers & Chaos Tuesday
Blind something Tuesday
Miami Vice Tuesday
The Bourne Ultimatum - Matt Damon Wednesday

The Simpsons Movie was just fine, typical Simpson zaniness on the big screen.

The Contract - Morgan Freeman & John Cusack Friday
Shooter - Mark Wahlberg & Danny Glover Saturday
These two were both assassin movies with a black man playing the bad guy. "The Shooter" was the better movie, though a complex double cross left some of us wondering what the heck was going on.
In "The Contract" stars Morgan Freeman as paid assassin and John Cusack as widowed ex-cop and father. All in all, not too great. Had some good bits. Vicious hit-and-run murder, good technique for assassination, makes it look like an accident.

After the first "accident", Morgan has a second accident. At first I thought this was part of his plan, but he bungled it by wrecking his own vehicle. Turns out it was a real accident. The other party wasn't even a target. Bad luck, he dies, Morgan goes to the hospital, where the police figure out who he is and call the Police with a capital P.

Three marshals come to pick up bad guy Morgan from a small town. They are driving back when the road is blocked by a semi-tractor with a flat tire. To us sophisticated urban movie goers, it is an obvious ambush, especially when the black van pulls up behind them, but the cops just don't get it and they pay for their poor evil sensing abilities: bang, bang, bang. Two dead and one severely wounded.

Whole gang of professional, vicious, cold-blooded killers taken out by an ex-cop, a kid, and a woman. Right. Woman's annoying boyfriend is the first one our hiking group to get it, and boy are we glad, he was really annoying.

Ex-cop and Mr. Annoying spend precious seconds, minutes even, knocking down a rickety bridge. Removing the bridge is going to slow down their pursuers by a minute, maybe two. It doesn't really look like it was worth the effort. The bridge was a simple catwalk over a boulder field. It was interesting to see that someone thought it was worth the effort to build it in the first place. Or maybe they just built it for the movie.

Ex-cop expends two entire magazines from a sub-machine gun shooting at the back end of a helicopter and does not manage to kill anyone or disable the aircraft. He does damage the aircraft and it eventually crashes, however, it does not explode, which is a change from most helicopter movie crashes. So we have a non-exploding helicopter crash. You have to give them credit for that, even though it was not the most realistic. The tail boom snaps off in the middle, the Plexiglas windows appear to be very flimsy. The rotor blades coming off and flying toward the audience was a good effect.

The Bourne Identity - Matt Damon Sunday
The Bourne Supremacy - Matt Damon Monday
Anne wanted to see these to refresh her memory in preparation for watching the new Bourne movie at the theater. Had to reserve the first one at the rental store in order to watch. Seems like everyone else had the same idea. Ended up buying the second one ($10 at Freddies) . Great stuff. The fights are brutal. The car chases are a little long and a little confusing. The scenes change so fast I cannot keep track of exactly what is going on where, not that it really matters, I think all they are aiming for is the visceral impact of cars getting hammered.

Land of the Blind - Ralph Fiennes & Donald Sutherland. It started out looking like it might be good, but it went over the top real quick and we lost interest. So we tried:

Cadavers & Chaos, a British comedy done by people who had done some other stuff that I thought was funny, but nothing tickled our funny bone in the first fifteen minutes, so we ended up watching an episode from:

Miami Vice - Season Two. The episode was "French Twist" with Lisa Eichhorn, who starred in "Yanks". I don't remember the movie but my wife did, and she remembered Lisa having a part in it. Watching these old Miami Vice episodes is kind of painful now, but when they were new Anne and I used to watch them all the time. The scenes and scenery are still good. The clothes and hair are always interesting, some are good, some are just wacky. It's an interesting place to visit.

The Bourne Ultimatum - Matt Damon Wednesday
Saw this one at the theater this evening. Nicki shows up again and I was worried that she would get killed, after all, everyone else in this movie dies. Looks like the perpetrators of this evil black ops organization are going to get their comeuppance. And they leave it open for another sequel.