Really? That's the best I could come up with? Yep. Yeppy yep yep yep.
You know how sometimes you just get a craving for something specific? Like something, if you close your eyes and expend an iota of concentration on, you can practically taste it? For me, those cravings are often chocolate, olives, brie cheese, tzatziki sauce and cinematic instances of Angelina Jolie kicking ass like it's never been kicked before.
So... last night, experiencing a jones-ing for the latter, I took in the latest action-packed Angelina Jolie vehicle, "Wanted". And what a roller coaster ride it was...
Warning: if you don't want to soak in blatant, unabashed spoilers, avert your gaze/gays NOW...
The first thing that struck me is how specific the previews are for movies. In that, the previews for the last movie I saw - Sex & The City: The Movie - were for absolute estro-swill like He's Just Not That Into You and Sisterhood of Travelling Pants 2: The Womanhood of the Venturing Schpants/Jorts... the previews for Wanted were for all for skid-mark sporting dudes - shit starring Shia LaBeouf like Power Guns 2: The Wreckoning or GUNCARS! or something that I would have 0.0 interest in seeing...
Anyballs... we start off at an office party celebrating the bosses' birthday - she's a rotund lady named Janice, very reminiscent of 'Mimi' from Drew Carey. We're treated to an expository voice over by the character of Wesley, played by star-on-the-rise James McAvoy. He talks about how similar his day-to-day existence is and how miserable that makes him.
Apparently he suffers from anxiety attacks - where his heart starts to race, his face gets all red-like, and he processes climactic moments in slow motion.
Cut to: a drugstore, Wesley's getting his prescription meds filled alongside his best friend (who just so happens to be fucking his girlfriend, a fact that he's all too aware of, but meh, what's down-on-his-luck Wesley gonna do about it?) Enter Angelina "Fox" Jolie - who, throughout the entire film, looks exactly like the photo to the left. I'm not kidding - THIS JOLIE WOMAN DOES NOT HAVE AN OFF SWITCH.
She barely speaks in this movie, and when she does, that's the only time she's not perched statuesquely, pouting ominously-yet-seductively. It was amazing to see how many scenes she'd just be looming in the background, observing the scene yet not contributing anything whatsoever other than a static, ominous pout. SHE IS ALWAYS ON. It's amazing.
Even when she fought, she'd still retain her pout. It would turn into 'ass-kicking-pout-face', as per evidenced below:
Yeah. Anyballs. Angelina pops up beside him at the pharmacy counter and tells him that his father, one of the world's greatest assassins, was killed today and the man who killed him - Mr. X - is coming after him. Said Mr. X happens to be right around the corner down the feminine hygiene aisle, and just like that - a good-old-fashioned gun-fight ensues. The Jole-ster manages to finagle Wesley out of there with her into her sexy red car, and a good-old-fashioned car chase ensues.
Blah blah blah blah blah guns guns guns cars cars cars, chase-y chase-y, shoot-y shoot-y, car flip-y into bus, bus crush-y police blockade, the dust settles and Angie and Wesley are still alive, the end. Wesley wakes up in a warehouse where he's surrounded by a cast of colourful characters, and receives the information that he's the son of one of the greatest assassins in the world and destined to follow in his footsteps. Wesleys' all "my father left my mother and I when I was 7 years old" and starts to have an anxiety attack - when the ringleader of these colourful characters, played by Morgan Freeman in what must be his 1,000,000th wise, reverent black man role, tells him that his anxiety attacks are misdirected adrenaline that, when harnessed correctly, would make him a superhuman killer.
Morgan then explains the back story - they're this covenant of assassins carrying out fate's work called "The Fraternity" and up until recently, his father was one of them - the best, until he was killed by a rebel "Fraternity" member who is picking them off, one by one. The only one who can avenge his father's death is him and this is his destiny, blah blah blah. Wesley's still not sold - he goes back to his day job, realizes that his father's substantial assets had been transferred to him (to the tune of 3 hundred million dollars) and starts to acquire his taste for life in the fast lane. This comes to a crescendo when his boss Janice has one particularly zesty confrontation over an expense report and he goes ape shit on her, tell her to shut the fuck up, exits the building, and bashes his philandering best friend/co-worker's skull in with his ergoboard (whatever happened to those things? I used to have one and really liked it... whatever...)
He marches out of the building and who should be waiting for him in her sexy, stealth black car? Why none other than a pleasingly pouty GeGe JoJo, ready to whisk him back to Fraternity headquarters.
All is not so sexy and glamorous, however - turns out Assassin central is really a textile factory. What's that? "A TEXTILE FACTORY? Now I've seen everything" - I know. Then Wesley is introduced to potentially the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen... Morgan Freeman explains to Wesley that the Fraternity is carrying out orders dictated to them by, *ahem*, the loom of fate. YES. THE LOOM OF FATE. An enormous loom that spells out names of people numerically and they must die in order for thousands to be saved or some shit.
After this, Wesley is put through a prolonged period of 'training' - he basically gets the fuck beaten out of him repeatedly and is nursed back to health by way of some sort of wax-bath that stimulated white blood cells... during one of which, the audience is treated to the ample, tattooed backside of Angelina Jolie (I'll be she hated that scene...)
Anyballs, after a montage of many a bloody trials and errors, The Jole-ster and Morgan Freeman come to the conclusion that Wesley is ready for his first job. The Jole-ster accompanies him, and when push comes to shove, he can't do it. He doesn't know why he's supposed to kill someone not knowing if they've done anything wrong... The Jole-ster then explains to him that years ago, there was a little girl whose father was a judge - he was assigned to a case where the accused wanted a judge who wouldn't be so stringent, so a hit was put out on him. This particular assassin - named Phillip Frisk or something - came to the judges house, tied up the judge, poured gasoline on him, burned him, and made the little girl watch as it happened. Then, he took a red hot coat hanger and branded her... Well, THAT GIRL WAS ANGELINA. A fact made BEYOND obvious by the lips on the bitch they got to play 7-year-old Angie... for reals... it was a dead ringer...
Anyballs, Angie says that shortly after she joined the assassins, she found that Phillip Frisk's name had been called by the "loom of fate" some two weeks before her father had been murdered, and whichever Fraternity member had been assigned to kill him chickened out - so that's why Angie always follows through, no questions asked.
Time passes, he finally gets some balls and starts offing people, and decides he's ready to finally take out Mr. X. During a previous confrontation with Mr. X, they find one of the custom made bullets he uses, and somehow traces it to Arabia. Yes, Arabia. So he goes to Arabia in search of Mr. X, accompanied by - unbeknownst to him - one Ms. Angelina Jolie-Pitt, because, y'see, it turns out that Wesley's name was picked by the "loom of fate" and he's her next job. D-RRR-AMA!!!!
Blah blah blah they go to Arabia, and Wesley stalks the dude who made the bullets - played by Terrence Stamp, who some of you may recognize from a slew of action-adventure movies, among them: Phantom Menace, Elektra and most recently Get Smart; but I recognize him as the tranny queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - and, after sufficiently threatened at gunpoint, he clues them in on the whereabouts of Mr. X.
I can't really remember the specifics of how this unfolds, but there's this crazy chase scene on a train that goes through the mountains, Angelina [sexily] crashes a car into the train to grant herself entrance to it and someone pulls the emergency brake as it's going over a bridge high above a truly cavernous ravine. The train cars start to wobble off - this is the part where I shit myself. SHIT MYSELF. I live at Broadview & Danforth, and the subway always needs to go over the Don River on this suspension bridge, and it's basically my worst nightmare that the cars go off the track. Basically - ANYBALLS... Eventually Mr. X and Wesley come face to face, with Wesley dangling off the car, about to fall to his death, when - GASP - Mr. X reaches a hand out to save Wesley. Wesley, having none of it, shoots the poor fucker in the heart... ah well, too little too late, because the next thing that happens is the train car that they were dangling on plummets below. Wesley's alive, Mr. X barely is. Wesley gets up in his face, about to do him in. With his last breath, Mr. X tells him that he, in fact, is Wesley's father and he had been trying to protect him all along - which makes stunning sense really, as Mr. X never shot at Wesley, just the other assassins. Then he dies.
Then, out of nowhere because she's magical, appears Angelina Jolie. Yeah... somehow she stowed away on this particular car that just plummeted 18 miles down a ravine. He asks her if this is true, and she says "yeah... but whatever. His name came up bitch. And so did yours-" and as she goes to shoot him, he shoots the window that him and his apparent father were atop of, and rides his dead apparent father like a boogie board to the river below.
Cut to him waking up in yet ANOTHER wax bath, this time, at a different locale. He's greeted by Terrance "Bernadette" Stamp, giving him the low-down - "your father wanted you to have a different/better life than that of an assassin, he was always protecting you, [Morgan Freeman] is bad news, he takes out corporate hits for people and claims it comes from the loom of fate"-I KNOW! HOW DARE HE BESMIRCH THE LOOM OF FATE?!?!?-"blah blah blah..." Wesley hatches a plan for revanche.
He fills 10,000 rats up with a deadly concoction of peanut butter and gasoline - don't fucking ask me why - puts synchronized bombs on their backs and drives a garbage truck full of them into the textile factory. After the rate bombs explode, he bursts in, guns blazing, shooting everyone in sight - really, the next sequence plays out like a video game... one mounting obstacle after the other, until finally he finds himself in Morgan Freemans' library, surrounded by the core group of the Fraternity, all aiming guns at him.
He then spills the beans that Morgan Freeman has been lying to them and using them for his own financial game and that, in fact, Morgan Freeman's name came up on the "loom of fate" a long time ago and he has the shred of cloth to prove it or something. Then Morgan Freeman is all like "yeah. So? Fuck you! Get a load of this - ALL of your names have come up on the 'loom of fate'..." and he hands them all the proof. Then he's all "Come with me brothers and sisters, and let's all share the feast! Oh... and kill this Wesley bitch before you do... peace out".
Anyballs - everyone thinks his goose is cooked, when all of a sudden Angelina Jolie fires this crazy circular bullet shot that pierces through every single persons skull before throwing Wesley the gun and taking the final blow of the bullet herself. And yes, you can rest assured, she was pouting suggestively until the very, very end.
Anyballs... he can't find Morgan Freeman. He ambles home. Finds that his former father's vast fortune that was transferred to him is no more and he's just all 'fuck it'. The last scene implies that he goes back to his accounting job, same old, same old. Then Morgan Freeman appears behind him with a gun all "some things never change". He spins the dude around, realizes it's not Wesley but instead a decoy, Morgan Freeman swears and gets a bullet through his head.
Sha-la-la-la.
And that's that.
Anyballs... it was fun... go see it... if ONLY for the unstoppable sensuality of Angelina Jolie...
That's it for me for today. It looks like it's going to rain. Hmmm.
--- Aj
You know how sometimes you just get a craving for something specific? Like something, if you close your eyes and expend an iota of concentration on, you can practically taste it? For me, those cravings are often chocolate, olives, brie cheese, tzatziki sauce and cinematic instances of Angelina Jolie kicking ass like it's never been kicked before.
So... last night, experiencing a jones-ing for the latter, I took in the latest action-packed Angelina Jolie vehicle, "Wanted". And what a roller coaster ride it was...
Warning: if you don't want to soak in blatant, unabashed spoilers, avert your gaze/gays NOW...
The first thing that struck me is how specific the previews are for movies. In that, the previews for the last movie I saw - Sex & The City: The Movie - were for absolute estro-swill like He's Just Not That Into You and Sisterhood of Travelling Pants 2: The Womanhood of the Venturing Schpants/Jorts... the previews for Wanted were for all for skid-mark sporting dudes - shit starring Shia LaBeouf like Power Guns 2: The Wreckoning or GUNCARS! or something that I would have 0.0 interest in seeing...
Anyballs... we start off at an office party celebrating the bosses' birthday - she's a rotund lady named Janice, very reminiscent of 'Mimi' from Drew Carey. We're treated to an expository voice over by the character of Wesley, played by star-on-the-rise James McAvoy. He talks about how similar his day-to-day existence is and how miserable that makes him.
Apparently he suffers from anxiety attacks - where his heart starts to race, his face gets all red-like, and he processes climactic moments in slow motion.Cut to: a drugstore, Wesley's getting his prescription meds filled alongside his best friend (who just so happens to be fucking his girlfriend, a fact that he's all too aware of, but meh, what's down-on-his-luck Wesley gonna do about it?) Enter Angelina "Fox" Jolie - who, throughout the entire film, looks exactly like the photo to the left. I'm not kidding - THIS JOLIE WOMAN DOES NOT HAVE AN OFF SWITCH.
She barely speaks in this movie, and when she does, that's the only time she's not perched statuesquely, pouting ominously-yet-seductively. It was amazing to see how many scenes she'd just be looming in the background, observing the scene yet not contributing anything whatsoever other than a static, ominous pout. SHE IS ALWAYS ON. It's amazing.
Even when she fought, she'd still retain her pout. It would turn into 'ass-kicking-pout-face', as per evidenced below:
Yeah. Anyballs. Angelina pops up beside him at the pharmacy counter and tells him that his father, one of the world's greatest assassins, was killed today and the man who killed him - Mr. X - is coming after him. Said Mr. X happens to be right around the corner down the feminine hygiene aisle, and just like that - a good-old-fashioned gun-fight ensues. The Jole-ster manages to finagle Wesley out of there with her into her sexy red car, and a good-old-fashioned car chase ensues.Blah blah blah blah blah guns guns guns cars cars cars, chase-y chase-y, shoot-y shoot-y, car flip-y into bus, bus crush-y police blockade, the dust settles and Angie and Wesley are still alive, the end. Wesley wakes up in a warehouse where he's surrounded by a cast of colourful characters, and receives the information that he's the son of one of the greatest assassins in the world and destined to follow in his footsteps. Wesleys' all "my father left my mother and I when I was 7 years old" and starts to have an anxiety attack - when the ringleader of these colourful characters, played by Morgan Freeman in what must be his 1,000,000th wise, reverent black man role, tells him that his anxiety attacks are misdirected adrenaline that, when harnessed correctly, would make him a superhuman killer.
Morgan then explains the back story - they're this covenant of assassins carrying out fate's work called "The Fraternity" and up until recently, his father was one of them - the best, until he was killed by a rebel "Fraternity" member who is picking them off, one by one. The only one who can avenge his father's death is him and this is his destiny, blah blah blah. Wesley's still not sold - he goes back to his day job, realizes that his father's substantial assets had been transferred to him (to the tune of 3 hundred million dollars) and starts to acquire his taste for life in the fast lane. This comes to a crescendo when his boss Janice has one particularly zesty confrontation over an expense report and he goes ape shit on her, tell her to shut the fuck up, exits the building, and bashes his philandering best friend/co-worker's skull in with his ergoboard (whatever happened to those things? I used to have one and really liked it... whatever...)
He marches out of the building and who should be waiting for him in her sexy, stealth black car? Why none other than a pleasingly pouty GeGe JoJo, ready to whisk him back to Fraternity headquarters.
All is not so sexy and glamorous, however - turns out Assassin central is really a textile factory. What's that? "A TEXTILE FACTORY? Now I've seen everything" - I know. Then Wesley is introduced to potentially the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen... Morgan Freeman explains to Wesley that the Fraternity is carrying out orders dictated to them by, *ahem*, the loom of fate. YES. THE LOOM OF FATE. An enormous loom that spells out names of people numerically and they must die in order for thousands to be saved or some shit.
After this, Wesley is put through a prolonged period of 'training' - he basically gets the fuck beaten out of him repeatedly and is nursed back to health by way of some sort of wax-bath that stimulated white blood cells... during one of which, the audience is treated to the ample, tattooed backside of Angelina Jolie (I'll be she hated that scene...)Anyballs, after a montage of many a bloody trials and errors, The Jole-ster and Morgan Freeman come to the conclusion that Wesley is ready for his first job. The Jole-ster accompanies him, and when push comes to shove, he can't do it. He doesn't know why he's supposed to kill someone not knowing if they've done anything wrong... The Jole-ster then explains to him that years ago, there was a little girl whose father was a judge - he was assigned to a case where the accused wanted a judge who wouldn't be so stringent, so a hit was put out on him. This particular assassin - named Phillip Frisk or something - came to the judges house, tied up the judge, poured gasoline on him, burned him, and made the little girl watch as it happened. Then, he took a red hot coat hanger and branded her... Well, THAT GIRL WAS ANGELINA. A fact made BEYOND obvious by the lips on the bitch they got to play 7-year-old Angie... for reals... it was a dead ringer...
Anyballs, Angie says that shortly after she joined the assassins, she found that Phillip Frisk's name had been called by the "loom of fate" some two weeks before her father had been murdered, and whichever Fraternity member had been assigned to kill him chickened out - so that's why Angie always follows through, no questions asked.
Time passes, he finally gets some balls and starts offing people, and decides he's ready to finally take out Mr. X. During a previous confrontation with Mr. X, they find one of the custom made bullets he uses, and somehow traces it to Arabia. Yes, Arabia. So he goes to Arabia in search of Mr. X, accompanied by - unbeknownst to him - one Ms. Angelina Jolie-Pitt, because, y'see, it turns out that Wesley's name was picked by the "loom of fate" and he's her next job. D-RRR-AMA!!!!
Blah blah blah they go to Arabia, and Wesley stalks the dude who made the bullets - played by Terrence Stamp, who some of you may recognize from a slew of action-adventure movies, among them: Phantom Menace, Elektra and most recently Get Smart; but I recognize him as the tranny queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - and, after sufficiently threatened at gunpoint, he clues them in on the whereabouts of Mr. X.
I can't really remember the specifics of how this unfolds, but there's this crazy chase scene on a train that goes through the mountains, Angelina [sexily] crashes a car into the train to grant herself entrance to it and someone pulls the emergency brake as it's going over a bridge high above a truly cavernous ravine. The train cars start to wobble off - this is the part where I shit myself. SHIT MYSELF. I live at Broadview & Danforth, and the subway always needs to go over the Don River on this suspension bridge, and it's basically my worst nightmare that the cars go off the track. Basically - ANYBALLS... Eventually Mr. X and Wesley come face to face, with Wesley dangling off the car, about to fall to his death, when - GASP - Mr. X reaches a hand out to save Wesley. Wesley, having none of it, shoots the poor fucker in the heart... ah well, too little too late, because the next thing that happens is the train car that they were dangling on plummets below. Wesley's alive, Mr. X barely is. Wesley gets up in his face, about to do him in. With his last breath, Mr. X tells him that he, in fact, is Wesley's father and he had been trying to protect him all along - which makes stunning sense really, as Mr. X never shot at Wesley, just the other assassins. Then he dies.
Then, out of nowhere because she's magical, appears Angelina Jolie. Yeah... somehow she stowed away on this particular car that just plummeted 18 miles down a ravine. He asks her if this is true, and she says "yeah... but whatever. His name came up bitch. And so did yours-" and as she goes to shoot him, he shoots the window that him and his apparent father were atop of, and rides his dead apparent father like a boogie board to the river below.
Cut to him waking up in yet ANOTHER wax bath, this time, at a different locale. He's greeted by Terrance "Bernadette" Stamp, giving him the low-down - "your father wanted you to have a different/better life than that of an assassin, he was always protecting you, [Morgan Freeman] is bad news, he takes out corporate hits for people and claims it comes from the loom of fate"-I KNOW! HOW DARE HE BESMIRCH THE LOOM OF FATE?!?!?-"blah blah blah..." Wesley hatches a plan for revanche.
He fills 10,000 rats up with a deadly concoction of peanut butter and gasoline - don't fucking ask me why - puts synchronized bombs on their backs and drives a garbage truck full of them into the textile factory. After the rate bombs explode, he bursts in, guns blazing, shooting everyone in sight - really, the next sequence plays out like a video game... one mounting obstacle after the other, until finally he finds himself in Morgan Freemans' library, surrounded by the core group of the Fraternity, all aiming guns at him.
He then spills the beans that Morgan Freeman has been lying to them and using them for his own financial game and that, in fact, Morgan Freeman's name came up on the "loom of fate" a long time ago and he has the shred of cloth to prove it or something. Then Morgan Freeman is all like "yeah. So? Fuck you! Get a load of this - ALL of your names have come up on the 'loom of fate'..." and he hands them all the proof. Then he's all "Come with me brothers and sisters, and let's all share the feast! Oh... and kill this Wesley bitch before you do... peace out".
Anyballs - everyone thinks his goose is cooked, when all of a sudden Angelina Jolie fires this crazy circular bullet shot that pierces through every single persons skull before throwing Wesley the gun and taking the final blow of the bullet herself. And yes, you can rest assured, she was pouting suggestively until the very, very end.
Anyballs... he can't find Morgan Freeman. He ambles home. Finds that his former father's vast fortune that was transferred to him is no more and he's just all 'fuck it'. The last scene implies that he goes back to his accounting job, same old, same old. Then Morgan Freeman appears behind him with a gun all "some things never change". He spins the dude around, realizes it's not Wesley but instead a decoy, Morgan Freeman swears and gets a bullet through his head.
Sha-la-la-la.
And that's that.
Anyballs... it was fun... go see it... if ONLY for the unstoppable sensuality of Angelina Jolie...
That's it for me for today. It looks like it's going to rain. Hmmm.
--- Aj
