Testosterone, Affleck, Ice Skating and a Cleaver.

I’ve watched a lot of movies lately. There are various reasons for this, the main one being my parents went nuts on purchasing a stack of $7 tickets for Village that expired today.

Onto the films!

Battle: Los Angeles

Remember when Aaron Eckhart was in good movies? Well, ok, he was in ‘The Dark Knight’ and ‘Thank You For Smoking’. But I’m sure there have been some other films he has done worth taking notice of. ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ is not one of them for a number of reasons.

I’m having trouble starting to describe just how bad this film is. So I will start with two quotes. Quote number one was from my Dad, “That’s a film I would recommend to someone I hate.” And quote number two was from Lucas, “At no point did I feel like I was watching a good movie.”

I imagine the producers of this film were sitting around a room discussing the amount of testosterone required for this film.
“This film needs at least 200,000 testosterone!”  “No, no. 200,000,000,000 testosterone!” And then they bickered and watched slow-motion replays of the scene in ‘Predator’ where Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers meet and lock arms. That one scene made men feel inadequate everywhere in the world at exactly the same time when it screened for the first time. True story.

Who wrote the film, you ask? A pair of testicles.

What’s the film about? America being invaded by aliens who want to steal our most valuable resource, water. A group of marines are sent on a suicide mission to save some civilians holed up in a police station.

Why should anyone care about this? Because the first 15 minutes are spent yelling at the audience about how we should care about all the different marines and all their reasons for us to give half a crap about them when they end up as alien food 45 minutes later. Every cliche you can think of was slapped into that 15 minute block.

Product placement? Check. Dodge Chrysler cars seemed to be ok after the invasion, just a little dusty. Billboards for Killzone 3 and other Sony-related products. A large, clearly visible poster saying ‘Support Our Troops’. You get it.

Camera work? Well, somebody taped a camera to their hands and just went bananas. And whenever they decided that you really needed to understand a really important point a character was making, they redefined the term ‘close-up’ and gave you ‘extreme inflamed nostril hair omg we’re so seriously serious right now close-up’. This happened often.

This film also contained one of the creepiest pedo alarm lines in recent history when Aaron Eckhart says to a young, latino boy…
“I need you to be my little marine.”

Basically, the film was another piece of nationalistic propaganda for a country that doesn’t know when to call it a day and focus on rebuilding.

The Company Men

Ben Affleck loses his job and eventually stops acting like a petulant child long enough to take up a job with his obvious lesser, Kevin Costner playing a labourer and learn a greater ‘life’ lesson. Have you started yawning yet? No? Watch this film and you will be.

You know, this film might have been a bit more relevant had it been made in 2008, when the GFC actually hit and these kinds of stories were happening. Also, it didn’t even have a running time of two hours and it felt like I was sitting there for at least 2.5 hours. That’s one of my indicators for a bad film.

On top of that, you have guys that have earned somewhere in the vicinity of millions of dollars acting in various films playing corporate employees who lose their jobs and fall on tough times. How believable is that? Not very, thank you. Try again, Ben Affleck, to try and make me feel sympathy for you after the trainwreck that was ‘Daredevil’. I shall give you props for ‘The Town’, though.

Major yawnfest. Avoid unless you like to be bored out of your wits and want to relive a terrible financial crisis that didn’t really affect us all that much over here, even though some companies would like to have you believe that was the case just so they could drive profits up.

Tommy Lee Jones was good in it, though, I guess.

The Butcher, The Chef and The Swordsman

Easily the most entertaining of the films I watched. This film has quite a chaotic energy about it, but kind of overdid it in the style department. It involves, at three different points – a rap song, a 3D animated reenactment of an event (like a  traffic accident) and a video-game themed versus fight. This is worth noting because the setting of the film is ancient China.

The film is also completely in Mandarin with English subtitles. The woman that checked our tickets asked whether we knew the film was in Chinese… I almost corrected her on the spot. That is my level of elite snobbery now that I’m a know-it-all student.

Basically, there’s a magic cleaver that’s been passed around for generations and you get three stories revolving around the creation and the people involved. The idea and story-telling method was great, but some of the camera work was just downright annoying.

The best thing about this film was it never took itself too seriously. You could just sit back and enjoy the ride, stupidity and all. Odd, but enjoyable!

Enough about movies.

Sunday night I went ice skating for the first time. Work had been an incredibly stressful day, so what better way to reward myself by throwing myself into an ice rink with sharp-bladed skates to stress myself out even further?

I’m not the most graceful of individuals. I will be the first to admit this. If any of you need any further convincing, you just needed to witness the eye-searing schmozzle that was me on ice skates. Torville and Scream, anyone?

I didn’t have expectations that I would just sort of pick it up in 5 mins and be pirouetting with the best. But by the end of the 2-hour session, I had improved tenfold over my starting point. Then again, when your level of skill can be measured on a negative scale, breaking even is an achievement in itself.

I had conflicting sensations of irrational fear (what with the ice and the skates and the sharpness of the blades) and giddy excitement for attempting something new, especially when you take into account my surgically repaired knee.

I got through the session without falling once, but a number of very, very close calls. Something that could best be described as follows…

Attempting to skate. Realising said attempt isn’t going so well. Clutching for siderails. Intense stare ‘o panic. Crisis over. Attempting to skate again.

Put that on repeat for about two hours. Thankfully, I had some very patient and kind tutelage along the way, which I am very grateful for. If it hadn’t been for that tutelage, I think the entire time would have been spent redefining, optimising and innovating the falling method known as ‘faceplanting’.

Two entries done! Huzzah!