Day 5 (Wednesday, July 30)

(6:08PM)

It started out raining today. I didn’t even go get a paper like I usually do (perhaps because I have no raincoat, or perhaps because I am just that lazy). I just sat around and watched stand up comics on Comedy Central while waiting for my parents to get back from their daily walk down the beach. When my dad gets back he mentions something about movies (since I’ve been talking about how I wanted to see something, all week long) and I show him the movie times that I just happened to have there with me. He noticed that Seabiscuit (which he wanted to see) was playing in about 15 minutes, so without really thinking this through at all, we jumped in the car to the local theater.

Now, as you all probably are already thinking, going to the theater during a rainy day at the beach is not like going to the theater any other time. Since most people here are on vacation and living in either hotels or rented houses, all of these people who don’t have to go to work during the week and can’t go to the beach need to go somewhere, and most of them end up at the movie theater. Not only did we get there five minutes late (my dad had to take the slowest way there, with plenty of left turns where you can only turn on a green arrow, didn’t speed, nor did he pass anyone) but the line to the box office was already to the door. Uh, no dad. Let’s try again at three, but this time, let’s leave early.

So this time we go home, do a little reading, and then get there about fifteen minutes early. But already, since everyone and their mothers are at the movies today, the 3:05 showing of Seabiscuit is sold out.

What to do now? We could wait until tomorrow to go, but I’ve already gotten myself so pumped up for a movie that I don’t want to leave for a second time in one day. So I get my dad to take me to see Tomb Raider. Not really something I really wanted to see (as anyone who knows how much I hated the first one probably knows) but still, I love going to the movies, and I’ll see just about anything. So after walking around for a while waiting for our showing, and then sitting in the theater listening to local radio (for god knows what reason), and then having to watch like twenty commercials before we could even get to the trailers (Ebert pointed out that, “Ads before movies are suppose to be there to keep the cost of ticket prices down. If anyone has been to a theater where the price of a ticket has actually gone down because of ads, please let me know about it, because I’ve never heard of it happening.”) and then having to watch old trailers (Master and Commander is coming out this June 30th, you say?) we finally got to the movie, which I will review for you here:

——Laura Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life——

[Man this movie has a long title]

My dad and I just got back from seeing this steaming pile of dog crap. I have to ask all of the reviewers who gave this “film” (I use the term loosely) a good review what the hell they were thinking. A lot of people have said that this film is better than the first one (which in the most recent trailers, that is the singular point that the movie studio is trying to drill into your brain), and really that is a matter of what annoys you less: a movie in which everyone seems to be having a really good time except for the viewer (the first film), or a movie that is completely inept in all ways but at least you can get into it, even though it sucks (the second film).

Everything about this movie screams bad. Interesting enough, the acting actually seems to be the best part about it. It’s about the only thing in there that can distract your from the paper thin plot filled with clichéd lines stolen from other bad action movies, or from the train-wreck-bad direction. I’ve never seen so many slow-mo shots that looked so god-awful. All they did was take normal footage and then slowed it down (over and over, wherever it wasn’t needed) which looked worse than any herky-jerky hand cranked silent film that I’ve ever seen. Does it really take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you want nice looking slow-mo that you have to shoot the film faster? God, anyone with a Matrix DVD could figure that one out.

The plot is moronic. The dialog is lazy at best, pointless at worst. Every “plot twist” in the movie you’ve already predicted before the movie even starts. This movie contains numerous examples of one of my biggest pet-peeves of the bad action movie—the action sequence that is there only to have more action. For example, Laura meets up with her boat off of the coast of Greece by riding a jetski to it and doing all sorts of crazy stunts as if she were thumbing her nose to the crew before actually getting on the boat. Why do we need this? Can’t she just appear on the boat? The stunts aren’t that amazing and it is just wasting time and confusing the audience. There is another scene, which you’ve probably seen in the trailers, where Laura is racing her ex-boyfriend turned traitor (so many ughs here) near the Great Wall of China. Do they need to race there? Not really. Are they being chased by anyone? No. Why the hell is this in the movie then? Because the filmmakers are too afraid to have someone talking for more than two minutes at a time? Most probably. They’ve read the script.

I was so bored watching this drivel that I felt like walking out; it was that bad. The stuff about Pandora’s Box makes less and less sense when you start to think about it. (When someone talks about the traditional story about how Pandora opened the box and let misery upon the world, Laura responds “Well, that’s the Sunday school version.” [In what Sunday school do they talk about Greek mythology, and why couldn’t I go to that one?] Then she proceeds to make up a completely bogus story about Pandora’s Box that makes little sense. Then she ties that story to Alexander the Great [with no historical precedence] and says that he [or someone in his court] was able to make a ball that when random notes play [that no actual lute player or otherwise could create] a series of 3D images project out of the ball [something no Greek scientist could ever design, or a modern one for that matter] that show not the ancient Greek location of Pandora’s Box, but [Yes!] the modern location of the box. I mean, Jebus, even the mystical parts of the Indiana Jones movies were based on some historical fact.)

I know Laura is rich, but really how much money can this woman actually have? I mean, she has the money to make all of her cool inventions and she has a manor. And not only that but she afford to design a new kind of aircraft, but also can afford to just crash that aircraft into a mountain after using it for five seconds, plus she owns her own NUCLEAR SUBMARINE! Who, other than a government, owns a fucking nuclear sub?

The sound in the theater I went to was amazing. You would hear something behind you really loud and wonder what the hell it was when you would suddenly understand that it IS the movie. However, the sound system did not deserve the awful soundtrack, which was about as cheap and poorly done as it could possibly be. There were loud random noises at scary parts. The heart Thump-THUMP noise. And worst of all at one point a shark comes on screen out of the blue, mouth open as if to roar, but what sound comes out? The thing shrieked like a fucking raptor. It was the most random noise I have ever heard. A shark, shrieked? What the hell?

My favorite part of the movie, and ironically the part that makes the least amount of sense, are the shadow monsters in the cradle of life. Man, they look bitchin’ and they are just all around cool. Too bad their presence in this movie MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE! They would be really cool in a sci-fi/fantasy movie, but here I have no clue what they are doing. Indiana Jones never fought any fucking shadow monsters. What were they thinking?

Again, to reiterate, this movie blows. I would chop off my left nut before watching this again. The one joy of this film is the fact that Angelina Jolie is so fucking hot, but even that isn’t enough to save this mess from total crappiness. I give this a big fat D.