A Little Bit of This

Work the other night was slow.  We were running long movies (hoorah!) and everything was nearly dropping in sync.  So I spent a good portion of the night in Master Control, which is the department consisting of two people per shift who control the banks in my department.  It's complicated.

Anyhow, the people in Master Control get sound with their movies, so everytime I finished my work (about an hour per drop), I would run on over to Master Control and watch a movie.  I should probably also mention that Master Control has access to the movie vault, which means they can choose any movie we've ever made on VHS and watch it.  That's any 20th Century Fox movie and several Warner Brothers movies, MGM, aaaaaaand . . . whoever it is that makes the Lord of the Rings Trilogy . . . some of their stuff too.  I know we make all the Lord of the Rings movies.  So Robert, when you're stocking movies at Wal-Mart, and you stock any of those . . . they came from my plant.  'Cause we have the monopoly on Fox.  ;)

So, long story short, I saw Fantastic Four and Mr. & Mrs. Smith the other night.

Batman is good.  Spiderman is good.  X-Men is good.  Daredevil is good.  But what were they thinking when they made The Hulk and Fantastic Four?  Fantastic Four is better than Hulk, but still, are they out of their everloving minds?  You can't bring back a legend and hack it to bits.  You just don't do it.  The characters had cheesy lines, the story was slow-moving, the lighting was bad.  And since when do they bring in a bunch of no-name actors and actresses to do Marvel films?  They had Jessica Alba and that one guy who plays Phoebe's evil boyfriend from Charmed.  That's it.  I'd never heard of anyone else.

Despite the fact that the characters they chose for this film were older than the ones they generally choose for other Marvel movies, this movie seems as though it's more for children than for the adults who read these comics when they were kids.

Now, I really enjoyed Mr. & Mrs. Smith.  I know J tends to hate the Hollywood formula films and the Hollywood happy endings, but I've always liked that, and I really liked this movie!  Though I do remember that J said he liked this particular movie.  I'm not a big fan of Jolie as an actress, but even I could dig her in this film.  The storyline was arresting and humorous with romantic undertones and moral dilemmas.  Though definitely movie-choreographed, the action was fun to watch, if a little difficult to believe.

Most of all, I like the way the story was different.  Everywhere you go it's boy-meets-girl, boy-saves-girl, the end, happily ever after.  This was more reminiscent of Shall We Dance, where the bond of marriage is made stronger in the end.

Now that I'm thinking about it, why is it that in a movie where the woman is the heroine of the story, she never gets the guy in the end?  She saves the world, but never gets bitten by the love bug like the hero does.  Or she falls in love, but it's "better" for her to leave him behind and keep on with what she does.  Strange that.

So, Nic has arrived with The Ammityville Horror, and I'm going to watch that now.  I'll be sure to tell you how I liked that later.

-Ave