Massive Mindless Movie Mega Marathon

With some careful planning and luck with scheduling, I set off for the movie theatre on Saturday at about a quarter after 11 in the morning with two bottles of Boost (My eating habits are ... peculiar). $65, 13 hours, and one headache later, I returned home, having completed the rarely seen quintuple-header. I managed to pack in The Lone Ranger, R.I.P.D., Red 2, Pacific Rim, and This is the End. I thought I would share some quick thoughts on each of them, if I can separate them all out from the jumble of memories they seem to have conglomerated into.

Trailers were often repeated. I saw ones for The Wolverine, Kick Ass 2, and Thor: The Dark World multiple times, and remember at least one showing of Insidious: Chapter 2 and Saving Mr. Banks (I think that's the title. It's the story of how Walt Disney got the rights to Mary Poppins).

The Lone Ranger

The movie opens with a slightly different Jerry Bruckheimer title screen. Usually it zooms along a highway until the lightning hits the tree; this time it zooms along railroad tracks. Then it actually starts with a fair in San Francisco, which uses an Old West exhibit as a framing device for the story. It's also one of the reasons the movie takes two and a half hours. Framing devices add time, okay guys?

Anyway, Dan Reid (Armie Hammer) starts off the movie as an idealistic prosecutor, believing in Due Process of Law, and not believing in guns. By the end of the movie, he doesn't believe in Due Process of Law, and does believe in guns. Because this is America, Dammit, and guns can solve what the law can't! Or something like that. As an aside, four of the five movies I went to depicted violence as solving the main problem. Mind you, it could be that four of the five movies I went to were action movies, and action movies generally contain violence. Otherwise they'd just be labelled dramas, or romantic comedies, or real life (ugh, who wants that?)

In this version, Tonto is played by Johnny Depp, who tries to bring some of the off-kilterness of Jack Sparrow to the role, but also tries to treat Native Americans with respect. It doesn't really work that well, but the action and humour are enough to keep the movie going.

And the music too. The climax takes place aboard trains (duh) with Hans Zimmer writing a score based off the Lone Ranger theme (and as I have been informed by the internet, also the William Tell Overture. I thought that was something else), then spiraling off in all directions before coming back, then going off again. It's a tremendous sequence with tremendous music. Almost worth the price of admission (particularly a matinee admission), but not quite. Still the rest of the movie has just enough to be a theatre movie by my odd and increasingly pointless ratings system. Also, I like Armie Hammer. And his hat.

R.I.P.D.

If you've read anything about this movie, you've probably heard that it's terrible. And I can certainly see where that's coming from. I didn't think so, but then, I have a hard time thinking any movie is terrible (The Last Airbender and Star Wars: The Clone Wars aside).

It starts off with a ridiculously hot French woman making out with Ryan Reynolds (because that is that natural order of things, and you do not mess with the natural order of things). Soon, he's called onto a drug bust, where a shootout results in his death. Whoops. He wanders outside while everything is frozen, and then is sucked up into the sky. He's pulled into small office, where he's pretty much coerced into joining the R.I.P.D., whose job it is to make sure the dead don't go on living on Earth covertly (as they are wont to do).

Things take a turn for the worse when a plot to bring back all the dead people is revealed. Also, Reynolds' ex gets pulled into it, because love crosses over life boundaries and such. Now you're getting the picture of why so many people call it terrible. Plus, Jeff Bridges isn't great. I know he can do whatever he feels like post-Dude, but his shtick wears a bit thin here. Still, there are some good laughs, and some good action. Not quite enough to make it a theatre movie, but solidly in the Blu-Ray books.

RED 2

Oh look, it's Mary-Louise Parker again! She was in R.I.P.D. as well. This time she’s the love interest to an old guy ... wait, that was in R.I.P.D. as well (she and Jeff Bridges’ character used to have a thing, but he's a bit of an asshat, so it didn't go well). Anyway, in this installment of Red, Frank and his team are targets because of an operation from the 80's and ... wait, that was the same as the original Red as well. Man, things tend to repeat, don't they? Anyway, this version of Red sidegrades from Morgan Freeman to Anthony Hopkins (I respect Sir Anthony Hopkins a lot, but Freeman, played God and Visa).

So Frank and his team go on the lam, globetrotting around most of Europe this time while government agents from various countries try to kill them. Don't worry though. Frank is played by Bruce Willis, and it's commonly known that he can only die by nuclear explosion while in space (cool fact: Die Hard was a documentary). And John Malkovich plays a lovably paranoid lunatic, so he's pretty much safe (he'll be able to see everything cover). Neil McDonough takes over from Karl Urban as the government agent sent to track down the Frankettes, except this time he lacks the morals that Urban's agent had. So we get to see him kill a lot of government people. The American government: Adept at killing other members of the American Government!

Anyhow, we follow various shenanigans and plot twists, and get introduced to Catherine Zeta-Jones and her bangs. She's supposedly Frank's Kryptonite, which causes the romantic friction that is contractually obligated to happen in sequels to movies with love stories. Still it's quite funny (see: Malkovich, John) and the action is pretty good. It's always nice to see Helen Mirren holding massive weaponry, but I don't think it's enough to push it into theatre territory. I might need a second opinion, but I'm deeming it a Blu-Ray movie for now.

Pacific Rim

Giant Robots. Fighting. Giant Monsters. Aw. Yeah!

So this movie was about giant robots fighting giant monsters. There are more things I could say, like there's a love story that's implied, but never stated (we get a headbutt of love, but that's it). Or why they don't use bunker busters on the monsters (bunker busters are bombs meant to penetrate several yards of dirt before exploding, hopefully in the underground bunker of your enemy, and not in some civilian populated area that could cause massive collateral damage). Instead they designed giant robots to fight them, because apparently our governments are run by 13-year old boys. Not that I'm complaining. That's several orders of magnitude more mature than I would be if I ever found myself running a country ("five-day weekends! And free beer!").

But I will state the music is tremendous. Listen to that and tell me you wouldn't want to strap on 250-foot armor and go beat down giant aliens. It's by Ramin Djawadi, and if you don't recognize the name, don't worry - I didn't either. Then I looked at his wikipedia page and found out he also did the equally fantastic music for Person of Interest. Suffice it to say, I will be checking out more of his music.

Definitely a theatre movie. It does a great job of making everything seem huge, and putting us in the middle of the fights, staring up at these titanic creations and mutations duking it out in different locales, including the Technicolor battlefield that is Hong Kong at night. It. Was. Awesome!

This is the End

Appropriately titled for the last movie I saw in theatres that Saturday, it's the story of how celebrities deal with bad stuff. How do they deal with it? Not well. Not well at all. Mind you, since they tend to deal with good news by doing cocaine, it's not a stretch to imagine how poorly they'd do in the apocalypse (since there's a rapidly depleting supply of drugs). To be honest, that's actually not how all the celebrities dealt with the crises in the movie. Most of them died violently. The rest freaked out.

Anyway, while this movie is about dealing with incredibly bad times, it's also about friendship, and probably a little about the truth of being a celebrity (selling out, moving on from friends and making new ones), and strangely enough, it's actually about sacrifice. Who knew? There's also an incredibly large number of dirty jokes, filthy language, and disturbing spiritual imagery. So be warned before you go see it. I'm not sure how many people I know who would actually want to go see it, but I’m aware of enough of pop culture that I wanted to see most of it spoofed. And I did. And then the second half of the movie started. Not quite as funny as the first half, but with an actual, good (if misunderstood) message. So there's that. All in all, I think it's a Blu-Ray movie, but that might just be because that's when the headache started.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mom!