Conservative Blog

Watching Lousy Movies with My Childrens' Trust Fund Money

My wife and I are movie fans, but we have hardly seen anything since the birth of my little tomboy who will turn 6 tomorrow. Lately, we decided we were going to start making a point of having more time together and renewing our movie watching. So far, we aren't having much luck at finding good movies, but we are flying through the money pretty quickly (I absolutely have to eat popcorn if I'm going to a movie. I just do.)

I think our biggest problem is that I always pick the movies. Seriously, I can sleep at home through Jennifer Anniston making life decisions, my wife sniffling in the bed next to me. I don't need the enormous screen, the theater sound and the drum of greasy popcorn--just a pillow and a blanket. When I'm at the theater, I want to see big, loud stuff.

Hey, I'm just being honest.

The Happening

So our first trip was to The Happening by M. Night Shyamalan. He's never quite recaptured the magic he had with The Sixth Sense, but I've always enjoyed, to a degree anyway, his other lightweight garbage. The Happening was something else altogether. The dialogue was absolutely painful. When the audience winces through an actor's lines, that's a problem.

Secondly, the movie seemed to be missing things. Apparently Marky Mark's wife wasn't committed to the marriage. At least, this seemed to be an essential theme to the movie. But it just seemed to come out of nowhere, a completely undeveloped line of thought just tossed into the pot as a plot thickener.

(spoiler) And of course, there was the environmental factor. The point of the movie is that plants feel endangered by humans and start letting off toxic chemicals that make humans kill themselves.

Whatever.

The Dark Knight

This was an awesome movie. That's all I'm going to say about it at this point. I'm busy complaining.

Mirrors

I wanted to see this because I suspected that a scary movie with Jack Baur would be good. I was terribly mistaken. My wife and I got into a Dynasty type fight in the parking lot over which movie was worse. I said The Happening. She said Mirrors.

"You just don't remember how bad The Happening was," I said as we tumbled into a water fountain, our hands around each other's throats.

The worst part about Mirrors for me was the boredom, which is nearly the opposite of scary. For my wife it was all the gore plus the boredom. She only almost threw up once during The Happening. It was a constant struggle during Mirrors.

And as with most horror flicks, there were really puzzling behaviors and issues of logic. If you are scared, you don't pay as much attention to these problems. If you are merely puzzled and bored, they are fatal flaws. Only a complete idiot or James Bond would have continued wandering through the giant burned out building that is the primary location for the movie. I don't even think Jack Baur or The Dark Knight would do it. And the insanity at the end of the movie, which I won't go into detail about, is so far beyond logical thought as to be bordering on DNC Convention type logic.

Just awful.

2 comments | Posted in » Mirrors, Movies, The Dark Knight, The Happening