Category: Movies

Die Hard on A Sunday

After a hearty buffet lunch at Cabalen, my wife and I headed for Festival Mall’s cinema ticket both and picked movies to watch. Out of the nine cinemas there were only three others not showing the latest Harry Potter. Since I’ve never been a Harry Potter fan (though my wife is), we only had three more movies to choose from and those were Transformers, Die Hard 4.0 and a pinoy film, Tiyanak.

Transformers. We’ve watched it already on its second day. We like it a lot that we viewed it twice in a row. The last movie we watched several times in the cinema was Saving Private Ryan.

Tiyanak. I avoided it at first glance. I knew CGI’s would rule this movie. And I have a thing about pinoy CGI’s especially if done on horror films–it sucks. I can count the pinoy thriller’s I’ve watched with my one hand.

So Die Hard was it.

More often than not, I’d get sleepy on the first quarter of most movies especially when viewed right after lunch. I even joked about it with my wife that I would rate movies depending on how long I stayed awake during the whole film.

At first I was trying to convince myself that despite being shown in a movie house with stiff and short seats, the story will make up for it. And it appears like so. Just right after the start, the explosion and fireballs so typical of Die Hard series reverberate in the theater when some geek was blown out of his house as a super penetrating virus made its way into its PC. Not bad. Good concept. This could be interesting. I was beaming with anticipation. More explosions please!

However, as the movie progresses the story turned ridiculous. I was starting to see the faces of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savages of Discovery’s Mythbuster as if debunking the stunts every time one is shown. It started when John Mclane threw a fire extinguisher at the bad guys and guess what? I was right. He shot it and a far bigger explosion happened that threw the villains into kingdom come. Damn. That one ruined my day.

After that one bit, I started seeing the movie as a quilt made from past movies. I saw Matrix in the highway interchange scenes. I saw Crouching Tiger in the fight scenes. I saw Rambo superimposed in John Mclane’s face. Before I dozed off, I knew I even saw Mr. Bean. I saw utter stupidity in the bad guys too. And the last few scenes remind me of typical pinoy movies that when the police come in the end credits would soon follow. It was that bad. It’s a pity because I knew the stars could have done better roles. Mclane’s daughter was hot. The Asian bad chick was foxy. Even Bruce Willis could have even made a better come back without having to appear in this poor Die Hard film. So I now wonder who’s to blame for this messy movie experience? The producer? The director? The scriptwriter? Or the Mythbusters? Definitely not the ginataang kuhol I had for lunch. This movie should have been titled “Sleep Hard.” Such a waste.

Blue Skies

Image from the web.

Yesterday I watched the film Always on DVD. I was assuming then that it would be something as romantic as “The Notebook” which we watched just a couple of weeks ago. To my surprise it wasn’t just that. The famous Steven Spielberg directed the film and as expected it was a good one (except for some goofy scenes at the start of the film which made me wonder if it’s a comedy or a musical).

What makes this movie appealing is the plot that rolls around the love story of two airplane pilots Pete (Richard Dreyfus) and Dorinda (Holly Hunter) who were stationed on an airstrip that supports the forest fire fighters. The setting was some time in 1940 and the fire fighting planes used was said to be restored WWII models.

 I was so fascinated by the flight scenes that a couple of hours after it I downloaded an MS Flight Simulator X game. It was as if my mind was craving for more of the sensation of being in flight, not to mention being the pilot which in this case, of a flight sim cockpit.

It’s funny that somehow it was from this love story that I got more interested in flying more than from the movie “Top Gun” (of course, this remains to be one of my favorites). It may be because that the planes in Always are old and it looks so easy to fly versus the sound-breaking F14‘s of Tom Cruise’s movie.

Well I’ve flown the ultralights in the demo and I’ve crashed a Jumbo jet already. Thanks to flight sims, I live to tell about it. I got the hang of it after a couple of hours of playtime (and some weird stares from my wife) and just using the mouse as a yoke – old flight simmers will scoff at me for doing that. I think it’s about time to save for some decent flight controllers. Paging my wife…please approach the cashier.