2015-04-24

red 2

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821694

i guess they must have made enough money off of red that they felt comfortable taking a chance on red 2.  or possibly they had a coupon for some free bruce willis?  i know if i had a coupon for free bruce willis, i would be all like, hey, we should make a movie.  that is not really what i would like a free coupon for, though.  what i would like a free coupon for would be something more like could we all please chill out and make the world a better place.  not for our hypothetical children, who would probably be a bunch of ungrateful jerks about it anyway, but for us, right now.  put down your guns and bombs, and finally understand that we are all stuck here together so SHARE YOUR GODDAMN TOYS AND PLAY NICE.

once everybody is playing nicely together, i will really be able to take advantage of them.  and that will be very good for me and my hypothetical children.  i shall build a moon castle and fill it with hypothetical chocolate and whiskey, plus a non-hypothetical atmosphere.

red 2 gets one hypothetical superbomb.

2015-04-08

bounty killer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2369396

bounty killer lets you know right in the first ten seconds what you are up against.  spoiler: it is the wall.  the wall of shame.  the shame of a person who has watched.  watched something they knew better than to watch.

i will be honest with you.  i watched bounty killer because i was procrastinating on my taxes, which i should absolutely not have been doing.  but what do they expect, with such a painful process.  it is not as much about the big check i write them every year as it is about how complicated the forms are.  the AMT is my favorite example.  it takes a good idea ("everybody should have some minimum tax liability so we can eliminate freeloaders") and blows it by having as many loopholes as the regular tax worksheet.  also, they blow it by starting from the endpoint of the regular taxes and adding all the deductions back in instead of starting from the income and multiplying by...whatever the AMT tax rate is.  i was talking about this a while back with a guy and was surprised to discover that i was essentially advocating for a flat tax, or at least a graduated tax with no deductions.  good luck getting that to pass, though, since it would involve eliminating everybody's favorite deductions.  pfft.  people.  hate 'em.

so anyway, this is the backdrop against which we show a movie called bounty killer.  of course i hated it, it was crap.  but more than that, it was economically implausible crap.  "the corporations" do not want to make a post-apocalyptic world or to bring down government.  government and the wealth of other corporations are the ecosystem that sustains corporate entities!  duh.  take away the government and the corporate ecosystem, and you just have gangs.  real gangs understand this, of course, and they seek the equivalent of nation-state status via treaties with other gangs.  i am not going to back that up with any documentation because i just made it up, but it makes sense if you think about it.  fighting every day is a young person's game.  when you get old, like over 27 or so, you want to have a couple days off from fighting every week.  when you get to be really old, like 35 or so, fighting is that thing you do when you get fed up and want to teach the youngsters a lesson after they have been advocating a raid on your favorite neighboring gang for like a month straight.  nobody lives past 36 because eventually the youngsters sneak into your bedroom at night and off you in your sleep.

i made that up, too, but it also makes sense if you think about it.

bounty killer gets one yellow tie.  pro tip: if the thing which marks you as a target is that you are wearing a yellow tie, maybe take the tie off?  or switch to purple?  just a thought.  also, who the fuck made all those suits?