Moving-hopping

Went movie hopping today. I truly love movie-hopping, even if it is slightly illegal (maybe). For me, it turns the movie-going experience into more of an active way to spend the day. Rather than just going to the theatre, sitting back, watching a movie, then going home, you have to plan out your route, pack a bag with vital supplies, sneak past guards to make it safely to your destination, etc, etc!
It makes going to the movies an adventure in and of itself!

Anyway, I am tired, so this will be short, but this is what we saw:

-The Departed: A cops vs. mob movie by Martin Scorsese based on a Hong Kong thriller that was huge hit over there a few years ago (who knew?). The film is basically about Matt Damon and Leonardo DeCaprio who are both undercover agents working for the opposing teams, and who sometimes look basically like the same person, though not on purpose. It's meaty film -- there is a lot going on all the time, and when it was finally over, I truly felt like I got my money's worth. Which is worth noting, since theatre hopping is all about trying to get MORE than your money's worth, but I would have walked out of the mutliplex quite satisfied with having just seen that one movie.
I also liked these things about it:
-They use cell phones like ALL the time, but in interesting and believable ways. Talking face-to-face is shown to be more secure than using technology.
-It's set very distinctly in Boston and is about Irish Catholics there. It a lot of ways this movie, especially at the beginning, just DRIPS with that sort of ethnic flavor. It made it feel like it was about a specific people in a particular place, which is kind of rare for a Hollywood movie.
-The acting is good all around, except that Jack Nicholson mostly plays his character EXACTLY how you would expect him to. Which isn't bad, it just felt like I had heard him say every line at least once before in another film.
-Inter-cutting was used quite splendidly. I will make no more film-geek statements like that.

After that we saw...

-Man of the Year: in which Robin Williams plays a comedian who is elected president! There is a good picture in that premise, but as soon as the credits revealed the director to be Barry Levinson, I kind of grimaced. This was actually because I had gotten him confused with Barry Sonnenfeld who had previously directed the rather awful Men in Black II and Big Trouble, and coincidentally, RV, this season's other Robin Williams vehicle (which I have not seen).
So, whatever.
The film was still not great, and not nearly as good as it could have been. There's not really much to recommend about it besides Williams' sporadic "stand-up" bits, which are thrown in just often enough to keep the film floating. On the flipside is a sub-plot which involves Laura Linney, an evil corporation, voter fraud, conspiracy theories and serious drug abuse, which is played almost entirely straight despite being grossly implausible and nearly sinks the movie. Linney is a great actor in my book, but she's given a thankless role of running around raving about corporate cover-ups and men trying to kill her in a movie in which neither of those things should be happening.
On top of that, there are ten zillion plot holes, which I'm willing to overlook in a comedy, but they make the film rather unbelievable and prevent it from ever addressing its main premise: what would happen if a comedian became president? We never really know, because the filmmakers seem like they'd rather be making three other movies.

We were going to see a third film after THAT, but we actually were all too tired to press on. Another day, my friends, another day.