why the title 'Armageddon Blows'

As Brian mentioned in his original blog. He and I will be using this little site of ours to discuss movies both good and bad, giving our two cents into the already bloated world of movie reviews... but what the hell.

Brian gave me the task of coming up with a title and the best I could come up with was Armageddon blows. Why? No other movie illustrated clearly to me the vast difference in opinion I had with the majority of my peers. (Although Armageddon does in FACT blow, it is not just an opinion.) I heard discussions about how it was so good, and some girls even said they cried 'especially when Ben played with the animal crackers on Liv's stomach' etc. etc. So I watched it, with an expectation of it being a good movie ( I was much more naive back in those days.) And I found it revoltingly bad. It had every movie cliche' you could think of, and not only had them, but presented them poorly. The story was absolutely preposterous, NASA recruited some random oil-rig crew to be trained and sent into outer space, land on an asteroid moving at a rediculous speed, then navigate NASA designed machinery over the unknown surface to the prime location and drill a hole in an asteroid to detinate a nuclear bomb in the heart of the rock! Wouldn't it instead have made much more sence to just train the highly skilled and intellegent astronauts how to drill a hole?! And the one thing you might think could save a movie like this, the special effects, were suprisingly bad. The asteroid looked nothing like a rock. It had huge jagged, I don't know, icecles? jutting out everywhere. And the visuals were almost indistinguishable, cloudy and blurry. Beyond that, the camera kept quickly cutting from one close up to another so that even if it had good special effects (which it didn't) we hardly had any time to contemplate the effects we were seeing. Take the special effects of 2001 Space Oddyssy by comparrison, made some 30 years earlier in the late '60s. These were extremely effective, you could see what was happening, contemplate what you were seeing, and agree that for the most part they made physical sense and were somewhat realistic. I won't even get into the dialogue, or acting (by some good to respectable actors : Bruce Willis, Owen Wilson, Liv Tyler ; and even a couple of great actors : Steve Buschemi, and Billy Bob Thorton), because I don't want to bore you with my ranting any longer.

And I know some people can counter that I'm taking a movie like that too seriously and it is made just for the fun of the action... but my response is that a fun action packed movie that is not made to be a serious film can still be made with respectability... some good movies along these lines are: Die Hard, the original Star Wars movies (and I'd also include the Revenge of the Sith as well), Batman and Batman begins, Superman, X-Men 2, both Spider Mans, Aliens, and many others as well. Whereas Armageddon was a complete failure on all levels, (except at the box office, but popularity has almost no correlation to quality: look at the most recent top 10 music charts for evidence) and is one of the worst movies of all time, especially when considering the glowing recommendations I recieved to see it.

So now that I got the explanation of the title out of the way. I will just quickly explain this blog of ours. My accomplice Brian and I will be periodically posting different topics about movies. Maybe lists of our favorites, straight reviews of individual movies, comments on actors, which movies we think will win awards, lists of favorites or woste of all time of different catagories. Most anything having to do with movies.

Why movies? We both enjoy them and have strong opinions on them. And while we could have included other topics, we didn't want this blog to become some open discussion board where people could just place random thoughts about anything... we wanted focus to make it more valuable. And other topics especially politics are just too serious, we wanted to keep this a bit lighter...and fun. So movies made the most sense to accomplish these ends. Feel free to comment on any of our posts, in fact we want to get feedback... to hear people tell us were idiots or geniuses, or whatever you might want to say.

So talk to you next time.