Year: 2002

I happened to catch just a part of this movie on one of the cable channels a month or so ago and my wife and I decided to rent it. George Clooney for her, Nicole Kidman for me. That’s right, The Peacemaker and as it turns out we saw the best 10 minutes on TV. (The part where our main characters are introduced to each other.) I stopped believing when they start passing around pictures of the train wreck taken from a satellite. If we have pictures being taken of every square inch of the country of Russia to be able to pick out this particular bit of train track, why don’t we have pictures of the robbery train and work back from there to track the truck with the nukes? George and Nicole outrun, not just one, but two explosions. We are treated to the usual red LED countdown clock as they try to disarm the bomb. The only action movie clich? we missed was the Fruit Cart. Then again, that might have been in there while they were tearing up downtown Vienna and I had glazed over and missed it. Oh, and I fell sorry for the citizens of Vienna as it appears they have no police force at all.

The only movie left on the coffee table to watch now is Purple Noon. 1960 French film based on The Talented Mr. Ripley books. I actually liked the Matt Damon – Jude Law flick based on these characters, so we’ll see.

Today’s featured film in the cinema that is the Bogardus living room, Bandits.

In what is now almost cliched movie making, the story is told with a non-linear timeline. It starts with our “heroes” surrounded in an LA bank and arguing about how thing would have not turned out so badly if it wasn’t for the girl. Not long into it we realize that this is the end of the movie, as we are whisked back a couple months to the spur of the moment prison escape of Joe Blake (Bruce Willis) and Terry Collins (Billy Bob Thorton.)

Bruce and Billy are good together in this movie, sort of like the Oscar Madison & Felix Unger of the criminal set. The bank robberies were done using an interesting M.O. and with the combination of the 2 character’s personalities and how they reacted to each unique situation would made for a good movie, if they had just stuck to that. But the woman who brings about the demise of our bank robbers also brings about the demise of the movie. Don’t get me wrong, Cate Blanchard is good in her part but the subplot of the love triangle is so strong that it detracts from the movie’s “real” plot.

The only reason this gang of “Sleepover Bandits elude the Oregon cops for so long is that they seem to be operating with an ineptitude normally reserved for the law enforcement professionals from back woods Alabama. Right off the bat they can’t hit the broad side of a full-size cement truck as it drives through the gates of the prison and then lose it trail in minutes as they drive right by where the truck plowed through a small fence into a field.

The ending was way too Hollywood happy ending. I was actually disappointed to learn that he upcoming shoot out was going to part of the trick ending. I would have been to have these two idiots actually kill each other.

One thing I really liked about this movie was the soundtrack, not the part where Cate & Bruce sing a duet of Total Eclipse of the Heart, but the general background tunes, which included my favorite late 80’s tune, Tanita Tikaram’s Twist In My Sobriety.

6 month dentist cleaning and check-up today. I’ve got another cavity on #5. Had one last time on the same tooth. Delores the hygienist said that I have a line of decalcification and as that happens the enamel gets soft and cavities form. Oh goodie. The dentist came in and started poking around, while he had his hands in my my mouth he was giving the hygienist comment to write in my file. He was using words like buckle and margin, was he talking about teeth?

This is a rant on them as well as myself. I tooted my own horn yesterday about how I learned my The T-Shirt Shoppe lesson, well I hope I have learned my WebSticker.com lesson. I went to them to produce the Barndoor Fan Club sticker a few month’s back for the price. Their quote was 15% less than my ol’ faithful in town. I went with it. It took like a week and a half of emails correcting proofs until I thought we had it right. When I got the stickers the logo was smaller than the proof and it was slightly off center. I called and complained and it turns out the designer forgot to mention that an 1/8″ of unprintable are was required all around. The off center was slight and I was told “it was within acceptable industry standards.” They knocked a 1/3 off the price, so I kept them. It took over 2 weeks of email to get the right proof this time and I even sent them the Adobe Illustrator file of the logo! We’ll see what happens when I get them.