…according to the movies, anyway.  Not one but two well-known movie franchises have plots revolving around adventure-seeking archaeologists, Indiana Jones and The Mummy.  I couldn’t resist the hype of the new Indiana Jones movie and made that my first experience with Indiana Jones earlier this year.  It was entertaining, though I still don’t really get what all the fuss is about, although I’m told the latest (and last, supposedly) Indiana Jones movie is not the best one by far.  So for date night last week, we decided to give the latest Mummy movie, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor a try, and again, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I did like it better than Hellboy 2, but I really think that has more to do with how sick I was when I saw Hellboy 2 because I just wanted to leave the theater.  My husband liked Hellboy 2 better.  I’m comparing the two because they are somewhat similiar movies; both action-fantasies involving the raising of ancient asian things.  But anyway, back to the latest Mummy movie…  Archaeology is dangerous in the movies!

Brendan Fraser plays an archaeologist who is hired to guard a precious artifact as it makes its journey to become a gift.  There’s a guy who is trying to raise this emperor from the dead; it has something to do with a curse.  So the emperor is raised, and that’s what I really liked about the movie.  The emperor was made out of what looked like metal and fire, and I really enjoyed these special effects.  When they were coupled with the emperor’s voice, it made for a nice scary villian – I hope you appreciate the oxymoron of nice scary villian 😉  The one thing I didn’t understand about the movie is why they threw in the random yetis.  You’ll have to see it to know what I’m talking about, I guess, but let’s just say that there were some yetis all of a sudden and they didn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the plot.  As far as the plot goes, it wasn’t really my kind of movie, but it was a $3 matinee, buy one get one free, so for that price, I was thoroughly entertained.  Three random notes I have are:  1.  I didn’t realize the Mummy movies take place in the past, in the 1940’s.  2.  Is it a requirement for sequels to have extremely cheesy references to the original movie?  This movie is no exception.  3.  Anyone visiting Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida should definitely try the Mummy ride.  It is a thrill ride with special effects; a haunted house roller coaster, and it’s unlike any other roller coaster I’ve ever experienced – totally awesome!

We managed to fit in some movie watching this week while the kids are with Grandma, and I was attempting to put them all together in a clever blog post title, but it wasn’t to be.  Probably my lack of sleep with the new baby and my recovery process has inhibited my creativity.  I hope to be back in full swing soon, but it will probably take a few months, especially because once I’m feeling better, I have lots of stuff around the house I need to catch up on and as much as I would like blog posting to come first, it doesn’t.  As people keep reminding me oh so helpfully, a c-section is major surgery 🙂  Don’t I know it. 

So the 3 movies we saw this week are Hellboy 2, American Psycho, and Fortress.

I did not like Hellboy 2.  I actually would have left the theater, but I never got around to asking my husband if he wanted to and that was a good thing because he liked the movie.  It gave me a good laugh when we were walking out of the theater and he told me he liked it because we always have the same taste in movies and I really didn’t like this one.  That also means I don’t have much to say about it except that the Abe fish-like character reminds me of C3PO from Star Wars, and I can’t believe the actor who plays Hellboy, Ron Perlman, was also Vincent the Beast in the old Beauty and the Beast tv show from the 80’s with Linda Hamilton.  I thought he was going to be some Andre the Giant huge guy wrestler type, but it turns out, he is just a regular actor.  I suppose my impatience with this movie had to do with the fact that my infection flared up and I was raging with fever yet again in the movie theater.  So even though I felt crappy and wanted to leave, I could not pass up a night out with hubby while the kids were away.  Even if it was to see Hellboy 2…  I’m just glad one of us enjoyed the movie.

Next up is a movie from the early 90’s called Fortress.  It’s set in the future – and it’s always fun to see what people thought the future would be like when the movie was made over a decade ago – and revolves around a corporate owned underground prison (think Walmart does Alcatraz).  The main characters are sent there when they break the “one child per couple” rule.  They had lost their first child, and now they’ve been caught trying to have another, so they are both sent to prison, even though she is pregnant.  This is a fun action-packed movie.  When I looked it up on imdb.com after we watched it, I learned that it is actually a kind of cult classic movie and there are actually multiple endings.  Our version was the less happy of the endings, but I still liked the movie.  It’s kind of violent for early 90’s, and if you look it up on imdb.com, don’t let the keywords fool you.  Let’s put it this way, if I had seen the keywords first, I wouldn’t have watched this movie, but in retrospect, I don’t think there was really much adult stuff in it – just violence and gore, but they didn’t overdo it like they do in some movies nowadays, like the Saw movies for instance.  American Psycho on the other hand…

I will start by saying that Christian Bale was excellent in this movie.  I wasn’t so impressed by him when he was Batman in The Dark Knight, but he definitely shows versatility and depth in this movie.  He plays a Wall Street executive who is just about as big a jerk as one can be.  Also, he has blood lust and likes to kill people in his spare time.  The movie is very strange for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  For one, I was confused about what the movie was trying to be.  I guess it’s just a story about this man, an American Psycho.  But at times throughout the movie, the music was strange, and it just didn’t play like a normal movie.  And then there were the constant 80’s references.  I guess it was supposed to take place in the 1980’s, given the characters’ huge cordless phones and constant talk of musical artists such as Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston.  Why they would change the time period of the movie, I don’t know, but they did a good job because if Reese Witherspoon (who is about my age and would have been a kid in the ’80’s) wasn’t in it, I would have been convinced the movie was actually filmed in the ’80’s.  And I have to say the end confused me a lot.  I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil anything, but if anyone who reads this has seen this movie, maybe you can answer a question I have.  I don’t think I’d recommend this movie since there are many disturbing scenes and it didn’t seem worth it to me to sit thru them for what you get from the rest of the movie.  I don’t think I’m going to put it on my list of baddies however, but then again, Hellboy 2 isn’t going on there either.  Just 2 movies I didn’t really like and wouldn’t see again, but I don’t feel like I wasted my time watching either of them, and that’s always a good thing.