It's Like The Same Thing Just Keeps Happening

Hot weather means more movies! Yes, movies, because...moving around is dangerous.

After seeing the commericals for it quite a bit, we rented Vantage Point, which is not about tennis. No. I won't blow any of the plot because it has got suspense and mystery in it, but I will say Mum was glad 1159 didn't come out in the numbers the next day. Also, my joke about the story as seen by the ice cream cone ACTUALLY HAPPENS. Sorta.

Before we started the movie there was a Abraham Lincoln 77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777biopic77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 with Walter Huston in it on PBS, and I had no idea that Lincoln wore lipstick and got into bar fights. Wow. This entry brought to you in part by The Slinky One of my cats.

I'd taped the remake of The Andromeda Strain a while back, and we finally decided to watch it in one sitting. I rank it with Robin Cook's Invasion and Atomic Train. Did I ever do an entire post about Atomic Train? Probably not, so instead I'll stick to the movie we saw. Things that will stick with me from this new Andromeda Strain include: If a character is introduced and he starts flipping out over an ambulance almost giving him a migraine, he won't be the only one having a bad time by the end of the movie when the alert flashers are going off. The food chain of the Utah desert is so dangerous that somehow a bunny being eaten by a snake who is then nibbled on by a rat who gets picked up by an eagle takes out a group of soldiers.

I have to go back and try to stress how much I was laughing when the scientist with the migraines had a frikkin' seizure from the self-destruct warning lights. He somehow manages to pull himself together and throw a thumb to save the day. I'm...not going to say whose thumb because that would be a spoiler, but the entire stopping of the self-destruct sequence in the movie was worth the three hours of sitting there watching things (people, rats, monkeys, birds, fighter jets, the story) die horribly. If you ever get a chance, just watch the last twenty minutes. Priceless.

One night, while I was writing and Nan was writing, Nan found Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and the discovery I made is that I'm so old and tired that smoke no longer musters the strength to come out of my ears when the presumably diseased rats hop off the ship and the cross goes up at La Navidad. Benicio Del Toro and Catherine Zeta-Jones are in this movie, as a crazy man and a hottie. WHAT A STRETCH!

We finally watched Shoot 'Em Up. I say finally because I'd been playing the "But it's got Clive Owen!" card every week since the movie came out and well, Nan and Mum loved it. So there. It's up there with the Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez movies I've seen, so if you don't mind fake blood in action scenes, and you like carrots, holy crap this is a fabulous movie.

Nan had found the end of Blades of Glory one night, and well...you know us for the figure skating, so I taped it and we watched it again from the beginning, which is always a good place to start a movie. I enjoyed it, it made me laugh and it also made me gag at one point but that's...it was a needed transformational plot point, I saw on the second viewing.

For some reason we'd also put off seeing The Kite Runner way too long. I think it was, "OMG, subtitles!" which I don't get because we turn the captions on for the all-English movies anyway. The story is amazing, though, and I keep thinking about how good the movie was. Look at the movies I saw this week. This was the best. I think it was one of the best of the year. One of the things that stuck with me from this was that the character of the father was one of the best movie fathers ever. Nice to see a break from the usual do what I say/you just don't understand me jive. Even though his kid didn't get that at first...but I don't want to give away the plot if you haven't read it already. See The Kite Runner. Read The Kite Runner, even.

It's Like The Same Thing Just Keeps Happening