Telling you what to watch…The American

We at State Controlled Media were feeling nostalgic and decided to watch the ubiquities 80’s movie Romancing the Stone.

It seems every time you turned on the TV it was playing.  It was so quintessential 80’s; bad hair, bad clothes and bad music. So, we settled down with a snack and started in on a journey to Cartagena Columbia. Wow, the movie was pure Cheese. At one point we were sure that if a plate of corn tortilla chips were place in front of the official State Controlled Media TV it would turn into a righteous plate of nachos. About a 1/3 of the way through we had seen this movie enough (also we got really bummed that the main characters were younger in the movie than we are right now.) So I looked through the HBO Queue and found The American.

It stars George Clooney as an aging hit man trying to pull off one last job in Italy. This type of description makes us think of only one type of movie:

 The Italian Job. The American did not disappoint. First a warning, we will be discussing the movie in great detail and giving away plot points even though it was released in 2010, you may not have seen it and you can stop reading right now (although you may thank us if you keep reading). In the first few minutes George is nearly taken out by a hit man while he and his girlfriend take a stroll on what appears to be a frozen lake. Clooney daftly found cover for him and his paramour. Then, with the skill of a finely honed assassin kills the hit man. Meanwhile the girlfriend is clearly not aware of a reason why someone would want Mr. Clooney dead. He tells her to call the police and when she runs toward their cabin Clooney guns her down! Holy SPIT! Holy SPIT! Holy SPIT! Holy SPIT!

Off to a roaring start! Only ten minutes in and we were on the edge of our seats. Clooney finds the next hit man and takes him out. Then he goes on the run to save his life, as you just saw he will do anything to stay alive. He calls someone (maybe his boss/handler it was never really established) he was given a place to stay and a new assignment. We could not wait to see where it went! Clooney gets to the town and then…. 

Nothing.

It’s funny that The Never Ending Story came to mind, because that is what this movie felt like. It clocks in at 106 minutes (that’s 1hour 46 minutes for those of you using Math Investigations). It felt longer. I had to check the clock and the movie runtime just to be sure. Sure there was Clooney’s relationship with an Italian hooker which led to gratuitous nudity, which usually enhances any movie. However, I don’t think we needed to see old man butt Clooney. He had workout scenes to show he was in shape but he looked just gaunt. Oh then he died at the end. Everyone was unhappy or dead.

So there you have it. The American… Unhappy or Dead.

Anti-Joke with PSBE

Words of wisdom...

Telling you what to watch…

Looper

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We will be discussing the plot of the movie and the ending. If you do not want to know that the main character killed himself at the end then you should have not read this far, we did give you fair warning that the little boy has super powers and grows up to be a super criminal.


Looper, starring Bruce Willis And that guy from 3rd Rock from the Sun with the long hair:

Um, no this guy:

So he plays a hit man who kills people sent from the future. The gangsters of the future send people back to be killed. You see time travel is so illegal in the future they us it constantly to  cover up murder. The hit-man kill people who are sent back and then dispose of the bodies in the past. At some point their “loop gets closed where their future self is sent back to be killed by themselves. I see what you are thinking, why not send them back to be killed by a different hit-man as during the movie it is shown that when it comes time to kill themselves mishaps happen and trouble often follows suit? Well…there wouldn’t be a movie if there wasn’t any screw ups now would there? Wait…would there?

Back to that in a minute. So long hair has to kill his future self (Bruce Willis) who is hell bent on killing the future crime boss who sent him back to be executed while he is still a child. It turns out that his attempt to kill the child would result in the kid becoming the crime boss which would lead to him sending Bruce Willis back in time to die which would lead Bruce Willis to want to kill the kid which would lead to the kid becoming the crime boss…you get the point.

Long haired guy sees this loop as well and decides to stop his future self by killing his present self. He shoots himself and Bruce Willis disappears. The end, right?


Well, let us ask you this. If the kid never turned into a crime boss then Bruce Willis was never sent back necessitating that the long haired guy kill himself to stop him, so none of the things we just watched would happen…so we didn’t really just watch a movie?

Couldn’t the long haired guy just say to himself “Don’t kill the kid in the future” and achieve the same thing? Anyone who watched Bill & Ted knows this can be done. 

We would say watch the movie but we are not sure there is a movie to watch…

We are not sure if we agree with this Binary...

01001001 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101110 01110101 01100100 01101001 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101100 01101111 01101110 01111001 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100

Supernatural Awareness Month…

The Mole People:

The Mole people are humanoid mutants who live deep underground. They stand in the Six foot range or taller and have long, thick claws.

  The Mole People can burrow through the earth with surprising speed and are capable of easily dispatching a man who is caught unaware.

They often travel in packs and attack in the same manner.

WE at State Controlled Media did an informal survey (we asked a few people we know), do you know about the Mole People? When pressed for details most confessed they did not, some gave us information we found disturbing…more on that later; it is related.


We first learned of the mole people by watching this documentary:

It was hosted by Dr. Francis Condie Baxter of University of Southern California (USC). 

He is a graduate of Cambridge University and is an expert on inner Earth theories. Like most documentaries it was boring and there was not enough death.  But it did give us our first in-depth look at Mole People.

The evil, hideous, killing machines were…enslaved by humans…to HUNT…mushrooms??? Yes, once again human beings are proved to be the real monsters.

So instead of fearing the Mole People we should start a campaign to preserve there natural habitat. And unlike “saving the whales” and “saving the flys” Mole People are peopleish so it should be easy to drum up support!

Finally, there seems to be a subset of people who live underground in large cities who have formed there own communities and the residents of those cities call them mole people:

Humans underground doing whatever humans do frightens us more than we care to admit. We have seen enough movies to know what kind of evil twisted characters you find underground:

One last thing so called mole people:

And Then There Is This Guy....

We were on one of the many sojourns this summer that kept the State Controlled Laptop at home and kept us from posting. While driving home from our destination, we can get a little bored. Same cars over and over, old building trees and bad signs. BOOOOOOORRRRRRRRIIIIIINNNNNNGGGGG. And then we happened upon THIS GUY.

At first all we noticed was a boat on the highway, nothing unusual; people tow boats all the time then we saw what was doing the towing, a 1968 Plymouth Belvedere:

(Note: It didn't look this nice-lots more rust, and smoke)

Possibly one of the worst cars in history as for as MPG. Pulling a boat. We know a lot of you may not understand a lot about automotives; so lets just say towing anything causes you to use more gas. He wasn’t towing this:

He wasn’t towing this:

He was towing this:

We couldn’t wait to see who was driving this set up. We had to speed to get close to the driver because we knew it would not be long before he had to stop for gas. And then there he was; wearing a Hawaiian shirt, aviator sunglasses smoking a big ass Cigar:

All we could think was that dude might as well have a bumper sticker that says FU ENVIRONMENT.

Well Played sir, well played.