So it started snowing yesterday about 3 in the afternoon.  It stopped...about an hour or so ago.   About 15 hours and and 19 inches on the ground later...it seems a really good weekend to chill out and watch some movies.  And lucky enough, I got Wanted and Mummy 3 from netflix.

Now, I don't get 'angry' at movies or tv shows.  I've always beleived- they make it, and I can either like it or not.  But getting 'angry' to me implies I have some sort of say or input into said creation.  Uh, no it doesn't work like that.  But having said that, I think I've come the very closest I've ever gotten to being 'angry' at a movie.  And it's SO bad, that I don't need to cut for spoilers because I don't know what happens, since I shut the movie off just when I learned THE PREMISE. 

Okay, so Mummy 3 starts out really well actually.  They open with the full setup narrative that explains the full backstory to Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh's characters.  (And O. M. G.  Michelle gets more and more breathtakingly gorgeous the older she gets.  Her in that ornamental red chinese dress....).   And IMO it's a very Hong-Kong style story, using many classic themes from that genre, and provides what I thought was a really clever explanation for the Terecotta Army statues.

Alright, so 10 minutes in, and suddenly I'm feeling pretty good.

And then- they re-introduce the main Mummy characters.

Now, I read lots of stories about them making this.  Especially concerning Rachel Weisz's roller coaster status.  First- she wasn't in it.  Then she was. Then she...wasn't.    Now I know that since she won the oscar, she can be wayy more particular about what roles she takes.  She doesn't NEED to do a lot of movies.    But, even though there were the usual 'disagreements over character and creative direction' explanations, my jadded brain just translated that to mean...they just didn't want to pay enough cash for Rachel to do it.

But now I get it.  It's the single DUMBEST premise for a returning character in a movie series EVER.   They simply take Eve O'Connel and replace her with someone who had their brains SUCKED OUT.  What was Eve's biggest  passiona, those  things that drove her her entire life- archeology, and history.  She had dedicated every second of her life to study and field work in her quest for knowledge.  Okay, so having said that,  it's been 10 years since Mummy 2.  So where would you expect Evelyn O'Connel's life would take her in that time.  Head Curator of the London Museum of Antiquities?  Maybe a professorship at Oxford in Anthropology or Archeology?  Perhaps she's decided to take it easy, and just relax and study all the amazing artifacts she found on her adventures with Rick? 

Buzz.  Wrong.  The brilliant anthropologist and archeologist Evelyn O'Connor now...writes pulp adventure novels based on her adventures.

Er....what?!  I mean, if I took ANYONE and showed them the first two movies, and esp the way Rachel presented the character, and asked them to tell me what she'd be doing 10 years later....NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD COME UP WITH THIS SHIT.

So yes, I apology to Rachel Weisz.  This had NOTHING to do with money.  This has everything to do with taking a established, strong character and evicerating her to the point that she's barely recognizable.  Rachel is a great actress, but even she could never take this crap and make it 'work'.  I mean, they show her trying to write, and she's blocked, and to 'inspire herself' she thinks of the 'grand adventures' and she jumps around the room with a sword.  Which then gets her horny to the point where she goes to find Rick and seduce him wearing a flimsy night gown.    Did ANY of the writers that came up with this actually WATCH the first 2 movies?  Evie didn't LIKE the adventure, and would just assume not have it.  She's the ACADEMIC.  She only became the fighter in Mummy 2 because A) her child was in danger and B) she had discovered it was part of her past reincarnated self's history.   But NO WHERE did she ever show any enthusiasm or desire to find more death-defying adventures.  It was always a side effect, and the fact that Rick did love the adventure, whereas all Evie wanted to do was build her knowledge and care for her family, made them the perfect opposites as a couple. 

(And I wont even go into how incredibly STUPID it looks to have casted a mid 20's something actor to be Rick's 'son', when they look like they could be BROTHERS. )

It was at that point that I disgustedly shut the movie off.  I'm very torn now, because I love Jet Li, and , OMG Michelle....but to put up with the pure crap writing and characterization to get far enough to care?  Oy.

I've never done this before, but I think, had I actually gone and paid money to see this dreck in the theater, I'm pretty sure I would have just walked out at the same point 15 minutes into it that I shut it off today. 

Okay, maybe not a plethora, but I like the word.  I recently signed up for netflix, since one of the really cool things about the latest xbox live update is you can stream the ‘instant watch’ movies from netflix right to your tv.  And also, I caught some things on cable recently that was things I had been meaning to see for a while.

Xmen 3: The Last Stand

Okay, surprising enough, this was not as horrible as I expected it to be, mostly based on the comments I saw people make when it came out.  It’s not a bad movie per say, but you do get the feeling that someone at Fox realized that this would be the last x-men movie, but zomg, they had 2 script treatments waiting to be done.  Because it just felt like this was two movies cut down and spliced together to make one.  There’s just so many things that they start, and don’t do anything with.   Of course Jean is one of the big things, but she more or less just disappears for a large chunk of the last half.  And while I didn’t have the visceral reaction to Rogue taking the ‘cure’ as other people did, they sure didn’t do much with it.  I mean I can see why she’d think about doing it, and then she leaves and…we never see her again till the end?  That was setup as a journey, to watch Rogue come to terms with a decision.  And, like Jean, she goes…poof.  It just felt like we were missing HUGE chunks of the actual STORY.  But it wasn’t terrible, and enjoyable none the less.

Hoax

A movie I have wanted to see for a long time.  This is the true story (mostly) of how a writer attempted one of the greatest con jobs of all time, writing a ‘fake’ autobiography of Howard Hughes.  Richard Gere plays Cliff Irving, the writer in question, along with Alfred Molina, who steals the show as fellow author Dick Suskind, who helped Irving pull this off.  The movie is best when it shows how Irving fooled all these people, from the Charirman of the board at McGraw Hill to handwriting experts, to the Editor in Chief at Time Magazine, and even a journlist who was ‘the last known reporter to interview Hughes’.  They totally bought into it, to the point where McGraw Hill gave Irving over 600 thousand in advances.  These scenes are really played more as comedic, given the absurdness of what they were doing.  The one real downfall of the movie occurs in the last third, when you realize that what the purpose of the story is, as it was written by Irving after getting out of prison, is to basically try to give this whole scam some higher meaning or importance, by attempting to prove that the Watergate break in was actually DUE to this book.  It’s self aggrandizement on a celestial scale, yet somehow it seems just the thing this guy would do.

Oh, and the best meta irony ever?  Irving had a affair with a woman who was a actress and wife to some rich guy, and helped blow Irving’s story when the whole thing came unraveled by admitting it to the press.  Oh yeah, and that real life woman was later in a movie called American Gigalo.  WIth Richard Gere.

Even though I think some of the conclusions they try to prove are complete bullshit, I highly recommend the movie.

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets

Wow, did I enjoy this.  This doesn’t fall into the trap I’ve seen a lot over the last few years, where the sequel of a movie tries to go out of its way NOT to be a sequel.  Here you have the same characters, and the same things that made them so darn fun to watch in the first movie are back in this one.  Tons of witty and sarcastic banter, word and logic puzzles woven into a crazy story based on even crazier history, combined with crazy heist and chase scenes, and wrapped up with some above average character romances.  It’s just the kind of thing that makes you smile a lot.  And I loved casting Hellen Mirren as Ben’s mom, and her and Jon Voight made the Best. Bickering. Couple. Ever.     The only weakness I found was that it felt like a lot of this was cut out, because Ed Harris’ role seemed to be bigger than it was in the end, and the motives for the initial plot events turned out to be really shallow and felt kinda cheap.  But those were minor faults, given how much fun the rest of the movie is.

Well I was feeling under the weather and V for Vendetta was on FX, and yes, I know I'm probably the last person in all of LJ land to see it. 

 

And, in the musical spirit, I ganked the following fromrandom_flores