I haven’t seen these movies. I might do it, but it’s more likely I’ll watch Fletch or Zoolander.


The Hurt Locker
This movie was so moving. It was really serious and I liked that about it. It also made me think about the war and other current events. I feel better having seen it. It was one of those movies that I had to kind of force myself to see, but I’m so glad that I did. Serious. Moving.

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
This movie really dealt with some serious issues. Like poverty and also believing in yourself and being loved and also bad people who do bad things, things that are super gross and bad and you’re like “you’re a monster,” but really, are they monsters or are they just humans who need love and kindness sometimes?

This was the kind of movie that I really had to force myself to watch, but I’m so glad I did because now I know what it’s like to live in Harlem. Not where I live, which used to be considered Spanish Harlem, but is now definitely not, because I have a Gourmet Garage under my building. That is a fancy grocery store that sells like rare lemons and ramps and stuff and plays this one Sirius station called the Coffee House that makes me so upset, because it’s like “I’m already in here Gourmet Garage, you’ve won, you don’t have to rub it in with some gentle acoustic covers of ‘Across the Universe’ by Jack Johnson and the guy from the Counting Crows.” Wow, I really went off the rails here.

You get what I mean though, about Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire.

The Blind Side
This movie really dealt with some serious issues. Like poverty and also believing in yourself and being loved and how sometimes your mom isn’t really that great and if you’re awesome at a sport you can get a new mom, the kind of mom who starred in Speed 2: Cruise Control and The Net, but curiously not The Net 2.0. And that mom will love you, and sometimes she will be tough with you and your old, rag-tag friends but behind her stern, religious veneer is love. Like if you’re waiting in a line, trying to break through some bureaucratic red tape, your Speed 2 mom will sass everyone and get what she wants. She loves you.

Originally posted on MightyAmy.com

• Mighty Movie Review (iss.4): Overboard
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.3): Tokyo Drift
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.2): 3 Harrison Ford Movies

Note: The title for Overboard in spanish speaking countries translates to “A Sea
of Trouble.”

My interest in Overboard was re-kindled during a Kurt-Russel-Movie-Knowing Contest that I was having against a co-worker in my company’s North Carolina office. I lost the contest at the point when the guy said “I should get back to work.” That is also a moment when I felt very embarrassed about who I am in society.

Speaking of society, I believe today’s would not tolerate a RomCom whose premise is really the common-law felony of false imprisonment paired with a hearty helping of Stockholm Syndrome. But I could be wrong. We are a society that tolerated the movie Old Dogs.

I wonder if I am the only person ever to rent Overboard from Netflix. If I am not, I believe the other people are grad students studying the mise-en-scène of people falling off ships in contemporary cinema. The course also includes compulsory viewings of The Poseidon Adventure and Speed 2: Cruise Control.

Overboard is a movie about love, and how sometimes the best kind of love is born out of the creepiest kind of deceptions. Like, say, if you are a debutant and you fall overboard on your yacht and a guy that used to work for you exploits your neurological condition by enslaving you under the false pretense that you are his wife and the mother of his numerous children. What the hell, 1986?

I was alive then, but maybe I missed a moment in time when jupiter eclipsed the sun and
Hollywood invited a villainous feudal lord from the middle ages to write and submit a script for a comedic romp. If Overboard were released today it would be one of those weird mid-winter horror movies with Peter Sarsgaard or Ryan Reynolds in it but, might include original
dialogue from the movie like this (spoken by Goldie Hawn’s character Joanna Stayton):

“I don’t belong here, I feel it, don’t you think I feel it.
I can’t do any of these vile things and I wouldn’t WANT to.
Oh, my life is like death.
My children are the spawn of hell, and you’re the devil. Oh God.”

One day, when our earth has been destroyed and the aliens are combing through the detritus of our civilization they will come across the original movie poster for Overboard and one alien will read the poster aloud and say “My goodness, this looks like a fucked up sea of trouble.”

I give it one shark mauled remains of a surf board, which roughly translates to a C-.

• Mighty Movie Review (iss.5): Reviews for 3 Movies I Haven’t Seen
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.3): Tokyo Drift
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.2): 3 Harrison Ford Movies

The first Fast and the Furious brought us Vin Diesel as the king of an underground high jacking street-racer gang. That sounds good right? Hijacking Ferraris?! Hijacking Japanese import cars? Hijacking gold? Russian whores?!

This gang was hijacking DVD players, which were widely available in Walgreens for reasonable prices in 2001, the year the movie came out. DVD players aside, the movie was full of cars and nitrous oxide systems (NOS!). Even the most crappy, non-existant acting can’t ruin lines like: “I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.”

The second movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious was way crappier than the first. It seems as though Paul Walker is allowed to self-identify as an actor because he has a face. Ludacris also has a face, so they let him be in the movie too. In fact, they blew the whole budget on Luda’s face and had to substitute Nintendo 64 quality CGI graphics instead of cars. This was a terrible movie. My eyes are embarassed for having watched it.

[Pounce's the Cat's] friend Justin suggested the title 3 Fast 3 Furious for the most recent movie, but instead it’s Tokyo Drift. Tokyo Drift doesn’t start out in Tokyo. It starts out in a high school… no wait a college… ah no, a prison… no a high school? Then the camera focuses on the main character, Sean Boswell, and you think… oh prison. Because he looks like he’s 47 years old. Then the camera focuses on Zachary Ty Bryant and you think…”oh my god, did I accidentally rent Home Improvement: The College Years!” And then you realize that this is supposed to be high school because the cop who arrests Shaun for wrecking a new Toll Brothers development with his super awesome american muscle car says something like “And you’re not even 18!” This is the part of the movie when you stop watching for a while because you just can’t understand how hard it is to cast someone who looks 18.

Director: We need some one. We need a male. He’s going to need to be able to pretend to drive cars. Who can we get?

Maybe it really is that hard. Or maybe Lucas Black is not in the union or something and will work for free hits of NOS(!). Either way he looks very old. Then Shaun moves to Japan because that’s where his army dad lives. Shaun learns Japanese in one minute. Then he hooks up with some tangentially-Yakuza-affiliated young men who teach him how to drift. (Tokyo drift). This movie is better than 2F2F in that it uses real cars, or at least models of real cars instead of airbrushed pictures of cars made with MSPaint. This movie is worse than 2F2F because sometimes when they’re racing you just want to punch the TV right in the buttons and yell “Hey, you could win this race if you would stop that drifting and just drive really fast you jerks!”

Review (Relative to other movies about cars): B+

[reprinted with permission from mightyamy.com]

• Mighty Movie Review (iss.5): Reviews for 3 Movies I Haven’t Seen
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.4): Overboard
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.2): 3 Harrison Ford Movies

The following is a review of three Harrison Ford movies in the order that I saw them.

1.The Fugitive: Have you seen this movie? Do you have a television set? I bet The Fugitive is on right now! In this movie, Harrison plays Dr. Richard Kimball, who is awesome and gets framed for the murder of his wife. He then escapes from a prision bus, saves one of the other prisoner’s lives, saves a guard’s life, and runs through the forest like a lynx. Tommy Lee Jones trys to stop Harrison Ford, because he’s the law, and the law hates fugitives. They meet face to face at the top of a super scary dam, but Harrison jumps into the dam because he knows that his innocence will protect him like a waterproof life jacket/parachute. Harrison starts to sovle the mystery of the death of his wife. Tommy Lee Jones is hot on his trail. This movie helps us all realize that people with one arm can commit all kinds of mischeif. And pharmaceutical companies will kill your wife if you don’t like their drugs. This movie is great.

Score (Relative to HF movies): A

2.Firewall: Have you seen this one? Please don’t. This is a terrible movie. Harrison Ford plays a growley growlbear father in Seattle. He just growls all the time at his nice but annoying wife and kids. His wife is an architect and the movie wants to think this is an important plot point, but it’s not. Don’t bother looking at her stupid blueprints. Harrison works at a bank as the chief of bank security. His job functions include growling about security and growling about the beauracary that threatens the security of the bank. An evil and dashing British man wants to rob this bank. At this point in the movie, you might get excited and think that it’s going to be like Hackers or The Net starring Sandra Bullock, but it’s not. The robber, instead of robbing the bank the hi-tech way you would think in a movie called Firewall, just kidnapps growley and his stupid family and tries to make old growljowls teach him how to rob the bank in a high tech fashion. There is actually no firewall in the movie. No hacking scenes. Just crap. In the end there’s a big shoot out at an abandoned house. Does Harrison ford have an agent? I would like to speak with him. Agent? Harrison Ford is not Nicholas Cage. He doesn’t have to take every single movie deal. Even if the poster looks cool, with binary code and Harrison’s angry glower, you don’t have to do the movie. You can just live off of cable companies replaying The Fugitive. Harrison Ford, stop being in crap.

Score (Relative to HF movies): F

3.Presumed Innocent: This is a HF movie based on a book by Scott Turrow. I hate Scott Turrow because I read the book One L a week before law school and it made me realize that I’d made a huge mistake – not only did law school sound crappy, but I certainly didn’t want to hang out with people that sound like Scott Turrow, all taking about the law all the time and implications and stuff. Anyway. I don’t know if you noticed but I’m calling Harrison “HF” now. Anyway, in this movie HF is a prosecutor who gets blamed for the murder of another prosecutor who was also his hot hot love mistress. There is some classic HF growling and frowning in this movie. We watched some clips from this movie in Evidence class, so I guess it has some educational value. Don’t worry about that though. The best part of the movie is Raul Julia. He gets it done with class as HF’s criminal defense attorney. He’s very dashing and polite and full of legal tricks. I love Raul Julia. I liked Presumed Innocent but it wasn’t as suspensful and awesome as The Fugitive. Also, it takes place in Chicago but Chicago seems better in The Fugitive. All in all this movie is creepy and scared Matt Perkins [ed: Amy's husband] a little bit.

Score (Relative to HF movies): B+

[reprinted with permission from mightyamy.com]

• Mighty Movie Review (iss.5): Reviews for 3 Movies I Haven’t Seen
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.4): Overboard
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.3): Tokyo Drift

“I know I’m human. And if you were all these things, then you’d just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It’ll fight if it has to, but it’s vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it’s won.” - RJ MacReady

First of all, Kurt Russel has beautiful hair and beard. That can’t be disputed. This movie is about a group of scientists who work on a station in Antarctica. They’re not nerd scientists, with glasses and lab coats and clip boards, they’re rough looking scientists who like to drink all day long and play ping pong and wear flannel. Also at the station is Kurt Russel, who is not a scientist but a helicopter pilot named MacReady. Kurt Russel has the best movie names like “Snake Plissken.” What the hell kind of name is that? Amazing.

Anyway, a group of Norwegian scientists fly their copter over to the US station and are trying to shoot up everyone in sight, especially one husky dog. The US crew blows up the Norwegian’s helicopter to keep them from acting all crazy. Then, MacReady and one of the burly doctors from the US station go over to the Norwegian’s camp only to find that those marzipan loving weirdos had discovered an alien life form, buried deep in the snow. They take the alien body back to the lab to do some tests on it. I call this major error in scientific methods number one: I am no scientist, but if I find something weird, like a withered but still smoking alien life form, I do not touch it with my bare hands. I do not think, “hey! I wish I had this thing in my kitchen so I could run some crude tests!” I think, instead, “I am going to fly away very fast in my helicopter and take one of those showers that washes off toxic stuff.” But those scientists play by their own rules and soon their all standing around the alien body, taking no precautions, wearing no masks or gloves just staring at it. Hanging out. Letting its alien spores get all up in their systems. Well, it turns out that the alien gets all up in your business and can emulate any cells. It can become a fluffy husky dog or a burly science man named Curtis. It doesn’t matter.

The movie is very suspenseful because you don’t know who has the alien in them and who doesn’t. Everyone gets very suspicious of each other and there are many tense moments. There are equal parts tense moments and flame thrower moments.

[reprinted with permission from mightyamy.com]

• Mighty Movie Review (iss.5): Reviews for 3 Movies I Haven’t Seen
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.4): Overboard
• Mighty Movie Review (iss.3): Tokyo Drift