Tank Hard

brenden, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

That "tippity tappity tippity tappity" noise you heard yesterday was me doing a happy dance. We sold our private airplane (\o/) to the business. The money is going on the mortgage. I also am happy (\o/ \o/ \o/) because Battlestar Galactica starts season 4 this Friday.

What I'm Watching plus a bonus rant:

Live Free or Die Hard: It's interesting to note how much Bruce Willis has changed over the years - how much he's matured as an actor and aged as a man. This movie is okay but it's further proof that the 80's are over. Action movies are in a low-point on the cycle - a cycle that James Cameron ushered in with his 2 Terminator movies and Aliens, then John McTiernan imitated with Predator, the original Die Hard and Hunt for Red October (which in all fairness is more of a political thriller and his least James Cameron-like movie). McTiernan's career seemed to have imploded with The 13th Warrior (which is a GREAT MOVIE BTW - it's got VIKINGS!) and the remake of ROllerball (which sucked the proverbial ass).

Then Renny Harlin, who is a pale imitation of John McTiernan who is a pale imitation of James Cameron, did Die Hard II and Cliffhanger. He suffered from hubris and made the godawful pirate movie Cutthroat Island and was last seen directing dogs like Manhunters and The Covenant.

Then we won't go into Micheal Bay, who seems to be in a category all by himself in terms of directing hubris but he still wishes he were James Cameron (Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon etc etc etc). He's got enough smarts at least to try to reinvent himself and Transformers was a pretty good kid's movie that also appealed to people who grew up with those toys.

One thing that James Cameron understands that his imitators didn't really get was he knows that action movies tend to exclude women. They either exist to prove that the hero is heterosexual or to be rescued by the hero (in many movies they are both at the same time). In Cameron's movies the woman tends to be the hero. (True Lies is the exception but Jamie Lee Curtis had more to to than your average woman in an Arnold Swarzenegger movie). Cameron understands that in a date situation 80% of the time it's the woman that chooses the movie so he made it a point to try to have something that appealed to them. People can slam Titanic and hate it all they want - that movie appealed to girls and women, especially young girls and they represent an ungodly amount of purchasing power.

So anyways most straight-forward action movies these days are either direct-to-video or they have a strong appeal to women. The Bourne franchise is the only one I can think of that has been kicking box office butt and it has strong women characters and a tortured hero you just want to hug. The other action movies that have succeeded in the late 90's to present day have strong fantasy elements (The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spider-Man) that succeed with women because the actors appeal to younger women and / or there's an aspect of the story that appeals to them (love beyond the perfunctory heterosexual creds, tortured cute heros you want to hug - actually I don't get the appeal of the gay pirate thing as much but still - there are pirates which are almost as cool as Vikings).

So to get back to what we were discussing, the last Die Hard movie (directed by Len Wiseman who perpetrated the Underworld movies on us) tanked hard but it wasn't really that bad of a movie. It wasn't great, but I bet in the late 80's - mid 90's it would have been box office gold. As I watched it, it just felt kind of flat. Been there, done that, blah. Plus there was just nothing there to appeal to me as a woman. Nothing!

I also watched the first episode of the Showtime show Dexter, about a serial killer who stalks and kills serial killers. Cool premise, but I am beginning to completely hate voice-overs. There's nothing that Dexter said in V.O. that I couldn't have inferred by what was happening on the screen.