Martin's Musings

It takes almost exactly a half hour for the first explosion to go off in White House Down.

And from there, none of us are safe.

Washington, D.C., is under attack — the White House, to be exact — and it’s up to a down-on-his-luck wannabe Secret Service agent in a tank top to save the day and restore order to the People’s House.

Wait a second, didn’t we just see this movie? Indeed we did. March’s Olympus Has Fallen told a similar story. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and great minds think alike, right?

Eh. Continue reading →

In 2007, Emma Thompson — bless her heart — thought she’d found a cure for cancer.

(Or, at least, the character she was playing in I Am Legend did.)

It didn’t work. Instead, it turned most of the world’s population into rabid zombies — the kind that only come out at night and are out for blood. Will Smith did everything he could to survive.

Brad Pitt’s dealing with a similar problem in his new movie, World War Z. He plays United Nations employee Gerry Lane, who is brought out of retirement to help save the world from a fast-moving zombie pandemic. (Because apparently, there’s no one else in the world on active duty who can do this. Not even members of the World Health Organization.)

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Paris Hilton has a lot of stuff.

From all those designer dresses and shoes, to her perfumes, to the sparkly jewelry, to multiple pieces of artwork and accessories created with her likeness, to bags, to dogs, to a ton of money, Ms. Hilton lives a life of fabulous excess.

We know this because, of course, Paris has never tried to hide her wealth. And we know it because between October 2008 and August 2009, a group of California teenagers broke into her house and took a bunch of it. Actually, they did it multiple times.

And it wasn’t just Paris. Other actors, actresses, and socialites — including Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Audrina Patridge, Lindsay Lohan, and Megan Fox — were robbery victims too.

The story of this crime spree was documented in a March 2010 Vanity Fair magazine article and a book. And now it’s the basis of a new film written and directed by Sofia Coppola called The Bling Ring.

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There’s no reason why This Is the End should be as good as it is.

The film is a goof on end-of-the-world disaster movies, made by and starring the guys from such films as Pineapple Express, Superbad, Knocked Up, and nearly every other Judd Apatow–produced comedy of the past decade.

All the guys play themselves — that is, they play over-the-top, exaggerated versions of themselves — and the film is filled with enough filthy trash talk and bad behavior to fill an entire season’s worth of dumb comedies.

And yet … God bless whatever studio executive green-lighted this movie — he must have been high at the time — because This Is the End turns out to be one of the smartest inside-joke riffs and one of the funniest movies in recent years. Continue reading →

In 1995, writer/director Richard Linklater made a small film called Before Sunrise, which told the story of Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), an American man and French woman, who meet on a train, disembark in Vienna, and wander the city all night long, getting to know each other.

Nine years later, in Before Sunset, the action shifted to Paris, where the now married Jesse is promoting a book he’d written inspired by his one night with Celine. As the two wander the city all day and catch up, it’s clear the spark lit all those years earlier is still very much alive.

Fast forward another nine years, and the three have reunited once again to check in with Jesse and Celine. In Before Midnight, we find the pair — now living together and with twin daughters of their own — in Greece, where they’ve spent the summer. But unlike in the past, when love for these two was an ideal, a dream, a possibility, now it’s reality, and it’s not so dreamy. Before Midnight tackles that shift head-on.

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