Collateral Damage

I was watching Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's failed attempt to regain his standing at the top of the summer blockbuster hill, the other night and in between the wacky hi-jinks and intricately choreographed gun-play, a thought occurred to me. Even though Tom Cruise is our movie's hero (he's TOM CRUISE, could he be anything than our wise-cracking hero), the people he is killing, maiming, and generally laying waste to with a broad Tom Cruise smile on his face are actually good guys.  The plot of the movie hinges on a betrayal by Tom Cruise's CIA partner.  The always theatrically evil Peter Sarsgaard decides to go rogue and frame our good man Tom Cruise for his crime.  This sends Tom Cruise on the lamb as a gaggle of law enforcement and federal agents attempt to bring him to justice.  The problem is the evil conspiracy does not seem to extend beyond the always evil Sarsgaard.  So when Cruise takes out several agents, he is taking out good men just doing their job in defense of God and country.  Essentially, the subtext of this movie is that it is OK to be a mass murderer of our nation's law enforcers and espionage agents if you believe you have been treated unfairly by "the system".  Can't imagine that is what the film makers where going for but it is there none the less.  Not that this a completely novel element to the modern action movie.  James Bond commonly lays waste to random security guards and soldiers that just happen to have the bad luck of being assigned to work the night shift when Bond breaks in to steal the secret science project from the penthouse office of an evil mastermind.  A secret science project that no minimum wage security guard just trying to get a few bucks into his 401K would have any knowledge of.  They are just trying to see why the alarm is going off on the 16th floor and a man with a license to kill puts a bullet in their head.  Again, not much different from The Matrix that shed no tears for the mindless drones put out of their misery because they couldn't accept "the reality" that select few unplugged knew.  The heroes are not so heroic if thought of from another angle.

This whole diatribe does bring to mind one of my favorite scenes from Clerks (embedded below) where they discuss the morality of killing the contractors that were likely hard at work on the Death Star when the rebels blew it up for the second time.  I still argue that the Knight and Day federal agent isn't in the same category plumber on the Death Star or the roofer working for the mobster.  But it probably does work for the employees of the Rupert Murdock-analog in Tomorrow Never Dies and his Fox News-like organization.

This blog post is sponsored by Cybus Industries.

Happy Fathers Day

Any father that is willing to go to this length to deliver a stuffed animal to his daughter deserves to be honored on this day.

Why didn't he just put the bunny back in the box?



This blog post is sponsored by M&M Enterprises, Fine Fruits and Produce.

Don't Let the Door Hit You on the.......

All I can say is it is about time. The town of Green Bay can finally celebrate their freedom from the tyranny of one Brett Favre. The man that single-handedly robbed the nation of the Superbowl matchup everyone wanted to witness has mercifully decided to hang it up. Sure, there is going to be a portion of the Cheeshead nation that will miss his errant lame duck bombs every Sunday but the Packer organization can finally have a game plan that doesn't involve the quarterback running around like a chicken with his head cut off before closing his eyes and throwing the ball up for grabs. Now, I recognize that the man was one of the best quarterbacks for a 3 to 5 year period but since then he has been little more than a juiced up Don "Magic Man" Majkowski riding on the good will of a single Super Bowl victory (same number as the immortal Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson). During that time he has built up numerous reasons to forget that period of above average-ness and come to see him as overrated and object of scorn. Here are my personal top 6 list of reasons I never want to see him mentioned as one of the game's best.

6. The last play of his career perfectly summarized his career.
5. John Madden's Man Crush
4. Making a mockery of Micheal Strahan's sack record by giving him a fake sack.
3. Addicted to drugs and an alcoholic but noone seems to care
2. His joke of a consecutive games streak record where he would sometimes play a single play and then come out (also hopped up on pain pills).
1. All-time leader in career interceptions just above luminaries like John Hadl and Vinny Testaverde

Update : The fine minds at ESPN see the truth about the overrated career of Brett Farve. At least those people at ESPN that weren't hosting a three hour retrospective/deification of the man.

The one good thing about Brett Favre...best wooden acting by an overrated Quarterback in a comedy classic. (The embedded video appears to be non-functional, so go here to view it)

RU-DY! RU-DY!

What can I say, I am a sentimental fool. I get misty eyed at the end of It's a Wonderful Life and don't even get me started on the end of Charlotte's Web (when all those horridly ungrateful baby spiders start leaving Wilber). Add a sports theme to the mix and you had me at hello. Come on, a boy and his dad connecting from beyond the grave over a game of catch. What stone visage could stand up to that? So, when Samwise Gamgee finally overcomes long odds and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to realize his lifelong dream of playing for Pope-worshiping Golden Domers to the chant of "RU-DY! RU-DY!", I became an instant fan of the movie. And believe it or not, this moment of lilliputian triumph actually happened. Below is the actual, real-life Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger footage and the Hollywood dressing up of that same action.

Accurate Vision of the Future

Idiocracy was an uneven comedy that no one saw. It wasn't great but it deserved a bigger audience than the two people got lost on the way to their screening of Crank. But, buried within the obvious physical and crude jokes was an especially shrewd observation. Everything about the opening scene of the movie hits me as one hundred percent true. The retarded will inherit the earth. At least until the movie studio's copyright lawyer forces YouTube to take this clip down.