Movie Muhwednesday 2: Book of Eli - 2.5-out-of-5 T's

Okay, this movie was... decent. I love Denzel Washington, so I'll watch him in anything and be glad for it. He does a great job here. Everyone does a great job here, talent-wise. Denzel as Eli, Mila Kunis as his... we'll call her a disciple, Gary Oldman as the bad guy (ugh, I love Oldman too; This is him going back to his early 90's roles of awesome, off the wall bad-guys that make your skin crawl while you can't take your eyes away), and Ray Stevenson as Oldman's henchman. The cast knocked this one out of the park, believe me.
On the downside, film itself, the script, is hobbled by its twist. And oh, is there a twist. It renders the rest of the film unbelievable in retrospect. There isn't a lot I can say about it, because it ruins the movie, but still... gah.
I don't think you'll regret watching it. With the slew of terrible films out there right now, this one is by no means awful. It has a strong beginning, great characters and actors, a feel-good end where the good guy wins and the bad guy falls just short of his evil plan, and hope for the future in this dystopian wasteland.
The twist kills it for me, though. As long as you don't go in expecting the "Road Warrior", or the kind of acceptance/dawning realization you get with the twist at the end of "Sixth Sense", you should be fine. The actors make this movie watchable, and they're the only thing keeping this from being a 1 on the T-scale.
Rent it. It's worth that.

Partycrashing the White House

Have you heard of these morons? The husband has very successfully run his family's winery into the ground, and the wife is a "self-proclaimed" model. (What the crap does that even mean? I'll tell you what it means: she's a liar. She sent pictures of herself to a magazine and claimed to be a former "Miss USA". Then she went and signed up for an alumni function for former Washington Redskins Cheerleaders, even though she wasn't one, and performed at a game. Go big or go home, right?)
In 2009, these guys crashed a party... at the White House. But it wasn't their first one, oooooh no. They crashed President Obama's inauguration with a forged car pass, they crashed a dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus (African-American's in Congress in a club that doesn't allow white members to join) before being asked to leave. They're also terrible tippers and don't pay their bills, preferring to spa-n-dash.
They're apparently on a quest to become famous. Well, it's working, but not the way I think they hoped: they've been brought before Congress to answer a few questions, most prominent being "How the crap did you get past security?" They are Pleading the Fifth all the way across the board.
I was unsure how to react to these two... people. On one hand, they disgust me. Read a little bit about their history, and you'll start to pick up on why. On the other hand... you'd need a forklift to pick up the cajones on this couple.
It's like they think they're on Candid Camera 24/7. "Let's see how these people react to us just showing up at THE WHITE HOUSE!" "Whelp, we've just bought a $6,000 wedding dress, let's not pay and see what happens!" "Oh, I was only supposed to shake hands with Prince Charles instead of ambushing him with a bottle of my company's wine? Whooops!"
Seriously. If they weren't such all around failures at... I dunno, life? Yeah, we'll go with "failures at life", then their story would kind of read like "Forrest Gump". They've been everywhere, done everything, and you don't even know it until they're sucking you in to some new lie.
I'll let the politicians be mad. Well, them, and the Secret Service, and the foreign dignitaries at the White House party, and the people they aren't paying for goods and services rendered.
Me? I'm just gonna sit back and enjoy the show.

Did you know we launch about one rocket a week?

That's how far we've come. 49 years ago, Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut, became the first human to enter outer space. A mere eight years later, we put a man on the Moon. EIGHT YEARS. And my cell phone is smarter than most of the equipment they used to achieve that (plus, it plays Tetris).
Sometimes, I worry about us. "Us" being humanity. When I read about genocides and murders and suicides and rapists, I just want to shake these people and yell at them, "HEY! What are you doing? We've been to the Moon, and you're killing this guy because he's the wrong color? You care so little about your fellow man that you'd rape this person just because you can? You want to end your life when we're capable of such amazing feats as launching someone to a rock 238 thousand miles away, and then bring them back? Look what we can do! Look what you can be a part of, if you'd just look past yourself." And I'm simultaneously discouraged and overjoyed.
We are capable of so much, good and bad.
And you're a part of it. So am I. I'm all about tooting our own horn here, because sometimes, we deserve it. Go someplace that was impossible to travel to only 50 years ago about once a week now. Think about what we'll do in the next 50.
I get the shivers just thinking about it.

Movie Mondays 1: Daybreakers - 4-out-of-5 T's

For the last few years, one of the few film franchises guaranteed to act as a money-printer is the Twilight Saga. As a fan of folklore, the sheer lack of anything remotely resembling a vampire in these films has hurt my brain in more ways then I care to think about. So, when Daybreakers was being advertised, two emotions occurred: 1. exhaustion (crap, another vampire movie) and 2. a faint glimmer of hope that maybe it wouldn't suck (like Twilight).
It didn't suck.
It's a new way to look at the Vampire-mythos: aside from the fact that they're, y'know, immortal blood drinkers that can't get a tan, they're just regular people. Most of humanity has been "turned", and the humans that are left are sucked dry in factories.
What I liked about this film, what I really liked, is that it posits the theory that, even though we've been turned immortal and burst into flame when exposed to sunlight, we still destroy what we depend on.
The great thing about this film is that they didn't really change anything: in the Blade movies, vampirism is a disease that can be scientifically quantified. In the Vampire's Apprentice, one can become a "half-vampire" and they even have something called a "vampanese" (no idea). In *shudder* Twilight, they sparkle in the sunlight. These guys didn't try to change the idea of vampires to fit into their stories, they sat down and took a look at what would probably actually happen if all of humanity became immortal and dependent on human blood.
They even offer a cure that is completely new, and absolutely brilliant and obvious. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it's really a great idea.
And there's plenty of explosions; not the dynamite or C-4 kind, but the "this-guy-just-got-staked-and-rapidly-combusted" kind. There are some great scenes of that.
All around, I thought this was a great film, and totally worth admission price. My only problem with it is that it was only like an hour-and-a-half. I want to see more of this world. Though, I'd rather have watched a movie I loved that was too short than a movie I hated that was too long. These guys packed a lot of awesome into 90 minutes.
Daybreakers. Check it out.

And thus began his legend...

So, title aside, I really don't have that inflated an opinion of myself. What I do have are opinions about other stuff, and sometimes I want to talk about stuff that has nothing to do with the Daily Advocate or Darke County news... and sometimes I do, but it's an opinion I can't express on our website.
So there's this. Here I'll talk about movies, or comics, or things I find funny. There isn't a mission here, other than to be entertaining. So drop me a comment, let me know what your think about what I think, and hopefully, I can make you smile.
Thanks, and God Bless.
-Tony MacKenzie
"Your source for Vitamin T"