SO beck and I headed back from the airport and called Ben-Ali on the way back. They were up for a movie and some dinner - yahoo! We met them at their place and headed over to the Blackstone for...
Breach (2007): 35
One of the worst I've seen in a while - it was not helped by the fact that the theater projector broke down about halfway through and we had to wait fifteen minutes for the film to resume. And then after the intermission the framing of the film was completely screwed up, so you could see boom mics dipping down into the shot - we looked on the internet to see if this was some inexplicable editing mishap, but a miscellaneous poster on metacritic said this was a feature of the theater and not the film itself. Those things aside - I get that the director was going for a subtle slowed down take, a sly subversion of the usual tense insanity that goes on in spy movies. And I suppose he pulled this off. But the effect of doing a movie like this based on a real life event that's not even five years old - and on top of that opening the film with the press conference where Ashcroft is describing the arrest that ends the movie - kills a lot of the suspense from the get go. The movie's strength was Cooper who played the main American agent selling secrets to the Russians - he nicely pulled off a genius jaded with the bureaucracy and pathetic political games played by others in the FBI. Unfortunately, he almost played it too well - he dwarfed Ryan Phillippe badly, which was part of the point, but more served to make Phillippe look like a stilted goof for much of the movie. He also played it too well in that he spent the first fifteen minute of the film being an uber-badass that one, it is ridiculous that he would have fallen for Phillippe's crap (given that it was acted as poorly as it was). All great men have Achilles' heels (in this case his religious devotion), but they generally don't turn off 100% of their strengths en route to exposing them. SO given the background buzz that someone this amazing in spy technique would be idiotic enough to let someone get close to them - it just rang untrue. Which is hilarious, because the story IS true. So I think in all the effort to put forth a straight forward, gritty and low light filmed rendition of an amazing and true spy story, they still screwed up in portraying the main guy as unrealistically god-like: whatever real and unlikely slips he made were just too preposterous for this blown up hollywood version of him. Couple with this with the terrible acting that peppered the backdrop of the film - the wet blanket girlfriend, the daft head of the FBI unit - and you have a craptastic movie. That apparently has grabbed some decent reviews, which I don't understand - for such a self-consciously un-cliched movie, this thing carried a lot of horrendous scenes which, true or not, were dumb in having been made movie.
So after that stupid movie experience and stupid movie contained therein, we called up Christophe and Sarah and met them at Bauhinia (sp?) for an awesome Chinese / Japanese food dinner. For wahtever reason - sleep deprivation for Beck and me? - the Mad Six were on fire with hilarious jokes, laughs and great times. Much love!!!
And so, FTR, we have another entry in the pantheon weekend set. There was a weekend my sophomore year of high school when Friday night I went to a party with my BFF Marisa Silvas that was as awesome as sophomore year parties can be without involving sex and/or illicit substances, Saturday night I saw Smashing Pumpkins at the Sunken Gardens, and Sunday night I saw Pink Floyd at the Alamodome. That was pretty sweet. There have been other ones that escape memory in this very moment, but that's the kind of action packed greatness that this president's day weekend contained - bowling, hanging with D n' X, bachelor party, hanging with BeckarunDMC in Boston, hanging with them PLUS GrinGOAT in Grafton, then the above-mentioned good times on Monday. Sweet goody goodness.
AND, lest we forget, playing in the background of the bachelor mayhem was the 2007 NBA All-star Skills Competition. Was a fat Bill Lambeer at my bachelor party? Heck yeah? But more importantly, there was some dunking going on:
And if you missed it, Shaq can dance:
All in all, some very good times. I owe the people a review of Moneyball which I just finished. It's coming. until then...
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