One nice thing about teaching at a school that starts weeks before other districts is that we have a couple of extra week-long breaks thrown in throughout the year, including our first annual "President's Day Break" this past week, in which I spent the entirety of my free time studying the accomplishments of Zachary Tyler and Martin Van Buren, visiting the James K. Polk Ancestral Home in Columbia, Tennessee and launching my conspiracy theory about the "pneumonia" related death of William Henry Harrison.
Yes, readers, I could have done all of those things. Instead, I went to a bachelor party for a dear friend in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Obviously we skied some slopes, took a dip in some hot springs and participated in some light partying/general revelry. But we were not behaving like your garden variety bros. It was classier than the image you're currently conjuring up in your head. In our rented lodge's kitchen, I played chef's assistant to my buddy as we cooked up steak, asparagus, full roasted chickens, garlic and rosemary red potatoes and broccoli for the eleven total dudes. We used words like "red wine reduction" and "shallot". On Saturday night we got super fancy and went to eat stuff like this:
It was excellent to catch up with folks I don't get to see too often, but I am happy to be back to home base.
Thus, back to the countdown!
MatM Power Rankings, Week 3:
#51 Aloha
#50 Entourage
#49 Terminator Genisys
#48 Pitch Perfect 2
#47 Dope
#46 Kingsman: Secret Service
#45 Ricki & The Flash
#44 Woman in Gold
#43 Paper Towns
#42 Truth
#41 Minions
#40 Jurassic World
#39 Vevé
#38 The Connection
#37 Trumbo
#36 The Avengers: Age of Ultron
#35 Far From the Madding Crowd
#34 Focus
#33 Sleeping with Other People
#32 He Named Me Malala
#31 Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (-1)
#30 Southpaw (-1)
#29 Everest (+2)
#28 The Wolfpack (-1)
From here it gets wonky: I had misinterpreted my notes that were with me in Colorado, and so the current 27-25 will all be moving up in lieu of a couple that I missed. So bear with me.
#27 Tomorrowland
Young Frank Walker is at the 1964 World's Fair turning in his jet pack into the invention convention. Main judge David Nix (Hugh Laurie) isn't impressed, but a young judge named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) thinks it's great. She gives him a pin and tells her to follow. While on the "its a small world" -esque boat ride, a laser hits the pin and he finds himself shooting like a bat out of hell out of a tunnel and onto a platform where he watches robots, flying cars and bright skyscrapers.
"Whoaaaa,” says young Frank Walker.
In the present, Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) and little brother Nate (Pierce Gagnon, the creepy telekinetic kid from Looper) are living with their NASA dad (Tim McGraw, there to prove that cm stars can indeed play rocket scientists). She is snooping around NASA and is arrested. When she is handed her worldlies after being bailed out, she ends up in possession of the same strange pin; when she touches it, she is transported to a field boasting the same future skyline in the background. In an attempt to figure out what the hell is going on, Casey and her brother find that a store called blast from the past will know what to do with the pin. In probably the best sequence in the film, the store clerks (Kathryn Hahn and Keegan Michael - Key) play dumb at first before attacking Casey, until Athena (still same age as in 1964...whaa?) intervenes and gets her out of there. She tells Casey that a) she is a robot, b) she gave her the pin, c) people and machines alike are after the pin, and d) they need to drive to upstate New York to see present-day Frank Walker (George Clooney).
From there, it's a wild ride back to track down Tomorrowland. Does it exist? Is it just in their conscious? Why are a who's-who of sci-fi baddies after them? It's a solid effort with fun action that at times gets convoluted and murked-up in self-seriousness. Tomorrowland was written by Damon Lindelof (LOST, The Leftovers) and Jeff "Doc" Jensen (a former "Entertainment Weekly" columnist who met Lindelof while churning out the LOST weekly recaps, always full of farfetched and highly comical theories), and directed by Pixar mainstay Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles). It fell way short of recouping its almost 200 million dollar budget, which is fitting--even though it was a good flick overall, it felt like the sum of its parts was actually greater than the whole.
#26 The Diary of a Teenage Girl (up two spots)
#25 Chappie
There are sophomore slumps, and then there are sophomore slumps. Robert Griffin III's second season as a Washington Redskin. The Beach Boys Smiley Smile, Brian Wilson and co.'s attempt to counterpunch the high-flying success of their biggest competition and their landmark Sgt. Pepper's album. And who can forget Too Legit to Quit and Mind Blowin', the albums that would go on to bankrupt MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, respectively?
(Side note: I thought about including Kriss Kross' follow-up to Totally Krossed Out, which was entitled Da Bomb, but thinking back I had it on cassette, and it was actually quite decent.)
Anyone who loved the exhilarating, genre-bending, sly social commentary District 9 as much as I did was sorely disappointed by Neil Blomkamp ' s second effort, Elysium. Clunky and at times even nonsensical, it was a dud. A couple years later comes Chappie; the previews for it looked awesome, and I was hoping it would represent a return to form. Turns out, it was somewhere in the middle--not nearly as well-done as D9 but much more together than Elysium.
Blomkamp returns to JoBurg with his muse Sharlto Copley voicing the titular robot, a police machine known as a "scout", programmed and developed by Deon (Slumdog Millionaire 's Dev Patel). Crime is down a ton and the police continue to order more of the scouts. Despite this, Deon is constantly being antagonized by the psychopathic Vincent Moore (Hugh Jackman), who has developed what he believes to be the best weapon against the Johannesburg riffraff, a human-controlled war machine called the Moose.
During a drug raid, Ninja and Yo-Landi (of South African rap duo Die Antwoord, playing themselves) escape as a scout robot gets hit by a rocket launcher in the line of duty. They are fascinated by the thought of securing their own robots to assist them in various illegal activity. Meanwhile, the scout robot is put in the scrap pile back at the police office. Deon has been working on a consciousness program for robots, and he asks his boss (Sigourney Weaver) if he can test it out on the fried robot, but she denies his request. Deon steals it from the lab anyhow, and on his way back home is kidnapped by Ninja and Yo-Landi and their gang of ne'er do wells. With a gun (literally) to his head, Deon installs the consciousness program and turns the robot back on. They name the frightened robot Chappie with Yo-Landi acting as mother. They take him under their wing and teach it to talk and behave like a thug, even instructing him in the ways of the ever-popular sideways gangsta grip. They need his skills to help them pull off the heist that will pay back the dealer who is looking to extinguish them, but training is slow-going. In maybe the most upsetting scene of any movie I saw this year, they drop him off in the worst recesses of the JoBurg ghettos to toughen him up, and he proceeds to get assaulted with fists and feet and rocks, all while calling out for "mommy" and yelling to his attackers that he wants to go home.
So now we have Ant-Man and Trainwreck, previously ranked as #26 and #25, bumped up to:
#24 Ant-Man
#23 Trainwreck
Back with another post either tonight or tomorrow!
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