Movie Muhwednesday: The Expendables - 7-out-of-10 T's

Lets play a game: I'll name a restaurant, and you'll say what you'd get if you went there.

Fazoli's

You'll probably say something like "the lasagna", or "chicken fetuccini". You're less likely to order the steak.

Texas Roadhouse

Flipping that situation, you'd maybe say "a t-bone" or "the sirloin". Probably not the lasagna.

That thinking is why I'm flabbergasted when I see that The Expendables has a 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.

What the crap, guys?

When I go to a restaurant, I get what that restaurant is good at. When I go to a movie, I want to see what the filmmakers are good at. If I don't want lasagna, I won't go to Fazoli's; if I don't want to see Dolph Lundren blow a pirate in half in the first five minutes of a movie, I'm not going to go see The Expendables.

But I did want to see that, and I was not disappointed.

The Expendables could have been better, yes, but it was hardly a disappointment because I knew what I was in for. What I wanted was crazy, mind bending explosions and fist fights between the action heroes of my childhood and adolescence. What I wanted was Terry Crews wielding a tommy gun-shotgun that fired exploding rounds and blew up bad guys.

Delivered

What I wanted was to see Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren on screen together again for the first time in 25 years.

Delivered

I wanted to see Jet Li shoot people in the face while being all short and Asian and kung-fooey.

Delivered

And I wanted to see Jason Statham throw knives through people.

Frikkin' delivered

We were never promised anything but that. This movie was not supposed to be Bourne Identity-complicated, or full of Rocky 1-and-2 character development. This was supposed to be a movie full of good guys, bad guys, a beautiful woman or two, and punching.

Lots and lots of punching.

This movie was fun. I have a little problem with SPOILER IN INVISO-TEXT!!! the name because none of the guys actually die, bringing their actual expendability in to question END SPOILER!!!, but that's really minor. I paid to see it twice, and I'm going to buy this movie when it's BluRayified.

Misadventures with my new phone

(This is my latest column, cut'n'pasted right here. Have some of you already read it? Probably, but it's content and I can easily convince myself that it counts. Woot.)

In one of my more pitiful moments of succumbing to peer pressure, I got myself a new phone, and in an effort to avoid sounding like I’m being paid by a particular company to write this glowing review, we shall call it… a Lloyd. A Fotorola Lloyd.

Just go with it.

I walk into my other job last week and one of my underlings shows me his new phone, which he bought out of necessity, predicated by him washing his hands… while still holding his old phone. He’s a silly lad.

Anyway, he shows me his Lloyd. I see the apps [little things you can download that do stuff as pointless as, say, pretending to be an Etch-a-Sketch or making Star-Warsian lightsaber noises, and can be as useful as acting as a Global Positioning System to give you directions or telling you where to find Mars in the night sky (one of my favorites)], and upon viewing everything the little guy can do, I immediately go out and purchase one. It’s only an extra 30 bucks a month to get unlimited Internet and everything else this fella can do, and with my various available upgrades for being a loyal customer, Shmerizon (my service provider) only charged me $50 of the original $250 to get the actual phone.

I’m on Cloud 9. I’ve got Internet radio that plays songs I actually like, the previously mentioned unlimited Interwebs so I can look up stuff on the fly, it acts as a portable modem that I can plug in to my laptop for when I want to use an actual computer-shaped-computer instead of a Lloyd-shaped one, it has a level (for making things level!), a compass, email, weather updates, a button I can press that gives out a quick “badump-tish!” whenever I tell a joke, a flashlight, a small zen garden, a camera, and it shows me how to tie the best Half-Windsor I’ve ever had the pleasure of looping around my neck. It is also, wonder of wonders, a phone.

It’s a Swiss Army knife that I can upgrade to my heart’s content… only not, because it doesn’t actually have a knifey part, or the bottle opener, or screw drivers. But that’s why I carry a multi-tool. Apples and oranges, that comparison was.

But you get the point.

The only problem I’ve had with it, and here we finally get to the reason I’m writing this thing, is that I can’t figure out the dad-blamed, flag-nabbited, thrice-darned alarm clock.

I know, right? The alarm clock is something we’ve pretty much had mastered for well over a century. My phone can do everything in the world except wake me up when I want it to.

WHAT THE BALLS, LLOYD?

It started out promising enough. It comes with an alarm clock that actually did it’s job, but… ugh. The offered noises it makes do exactly what they’re supposed to: they wake you up, but sound like those really annoying not-quite-digital alarms from the 70’s and 80’s with flip down numbers that sound like someone’s beating the crap out of a cricket-filled-rooster. Not the most pleasant thing to awaken too. Then I saw that it had an actual rooster-crowing noise. That’s kinda cool. I’ll try that.

WHY? WHAT WAS I THINKING?!

Yeah, it woke me up. And then I couldn’t turn the stupid thing off. So I’ve got this crowing phone that won’t shut up at 8 a.m. and it’s incredibly loud. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t complain. Here’s me, pounding the button that says “Alarm Off” but it’s NOT TURNING OFF and it’s still crowing!

It was here that I determined an actual rooster would be better to have for this purpose, for two reasons: one, in the movies, the rooster turns off by itself after a single crow. No buttons that refuse to deactivate it, it just gets the crow out of it’s system, wakes everyone up, then saunters off ‘til tomorrow. Two, you can smother a rooster by stuffing it under a pillow. Where a rooster would run out of breath, my phone has no such weakness.

So here’s me, crowing phone stuffed under a pillow, slowly working the cotton candy out of my brain, and I decide to risk taking it out to try and figure out how to shut the thing off. Then I see a little message: “Awake? Prove it:” and it has a number and a little key pad.

I HAVE TO ENTER A COMBINATION TO TURN OFF MY ALARM.

I enter the combo, shut the rooster up, and delete that alarm with more haste than I thought I was capable of at 8:05 a.m. I look for a new one in the app store, an alarm sans-combo lock, and find one. I’ll try that out.

It wakes me up at midnight, then refuses to wake me up in the morning. What the crap?

I’m currently on my 5th alarm app. I’ve found one that doesn’t suck, and actually does what it’s supposed to without making me jump through hoops to turn it off. And it sounds nice. I’ll keep you informed.

On a completely different note, why did Tony cross the road? I don’t actually care, I just wanted to do this with my new phone: *badump-tish!*

COMING SOON TO VITAMIN T!

• Reviews for SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and THE EXPENDABLES!

• The Greatest Movie Trilogy of All Time!

• Raised by TV, Episode 2: Cartoons!

Stay tuned for these updates and more, since Tony will soon have free time!

The Other Guys - 8-out-of-10 T's

I laughed... very hard at this movie. I don't really know what else to say other than that it has moments in it where I was laughing so hard I was glad that the only people in the theater with me were my employees and and their friends/family, and if they say anything about me laughing too hard I could immediately terminate them with Extreme Prejudice (the name of my whiffle bat).

Ain't she perty?

Just... watch this movie. It isn't as funny as it's predecessors (Anchor Man, Talladega Nights), but those films are kind of like... they're like Mom's meatloaf. We've had them for so long that they've entered into what we consider to be the perfect example of the genre (in one case "The Funny Movie" and in the other "the Bestest Meatloaf Ever"). So my point is that with time it will mature, enter the public consciousness, and join it's brothers in the realm of Classic Comedy. It still isn't as good as Anchorman, but that's like saying my porterhouse isn't as good as that filet mignon: it's still a freaking steak, and this movie is still hilarious.

Highly recommended.

Soooo close they can taste it

These things can never be easy, can they?

The results of last night's special election instill me with a glimmer of hope for our fair burg: the vote for the school bond issue, while not the landslide "YES!" I was hoping for, was also not the landslide "NO!" of the previous times the bond was on the ballot.

Instead of a 14-or-so percent margin, it's a margin of about 1.5 percent. It's still a margin saying "no", but it's also not the final word on the subject as not all the votes are in.

There are 136 provisional votes on their way in. The yea's and nay's are so close that these provisional votes can tip the scale back to the yea-side. Here's some math:

2698 votes for (49.27 percent)

2778 votes against (50.73 percent)

Of the available 136 votes left, the yea side needs to get 109 (if my figgerin' is correct) of those votes to win by a whopping margin of 1 vote.

If that happens, or heck, even if it doesn't, there will be a recount, which is standard procedure when a vote comes down to a margin of half a percent.

I give you that math to drive my point home: 50 percent (rounding up) of the voting people in Greenville recognize the need for this school and are willing to do something about it. That's so much better than the last two times we tried. I just hope that when these final votes come in, it's 51 percent who care... because that's all that really matters.

Here's hoping.

Mah schedule

Soooo I'm busy. Like, seriously, I'm a busy guy. You have no idea. What did you do today?

Really? Awesome.

Me? Oh, I saved a kitten from a tree...

This one.

... then I delivered a baby in an elevator...

Not this one, but they're babies and they all look the same so you get the idea.

... and invented the Flux Capacitor, which makes time travel possible.

1.21 JIGGAWATTS!

And that's why I haven't been blogging.

Recently found out that once the Great Darke County Fair rolls around, one of my jobs is closed (the theater) and the other can survive without me for a few days, so I'm going on vacation.

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS FTW!!!

There will be hiking and rafting and ziplining and bear-wrestling and I'mma bring a bobcat named Charlie home with me and we'll be friends forever. That's my plan.

All of this means: come September, I will be refreshed and reacquainted with my old friend "free time", so I'll be refilling the ol' culture tank so these blogs happen more than once every two weeks. Like, you know, I said wouldn't happen a few blogs ago.

Whoops.

Stay classy, Earth.