Government Holiday Movie Review

Hello, I'm filling in for Jedboy while he continues to "work." Things have been quiet around here lately. I suspect Jedboy is either busy working with some kind of totally exciting budgetary crisis, or he's totally mailed in his work and is philandering with the stars at Sundance.

In order to fill the void that Jedboy's absence has left in your hearts, I present to you a new feature to Jedboy -- the "Government Holiday Movie Review." The premise of the Review is that every government holiday, I will dive in to at least one, possibly more, movies and review them for Jedboy.

"Why the Government Holiday?" you might ask. Seeing as how I am now a private citizen working in a private industry, I work roughly 266 days a year. That's five days a week, excluding Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Hamburglar's Birthday, and America Day.

However, my wife and her family happened to be employed with government agencies, which means they work roughly 112 days a year. Thus, whenever a holiday like Martin Luther King Jr. Day rolls around, they pack up and head off to Las Vegas for some days. It's especially awesome when they take the "Use it or Lose It" vacation and are gone for like three weeks. Although I still have to work, I'm in essence on a vacation -- a vacation away from some of the day-to-day responsibilities of marriage, such as shaving, helping with the dishes, and wearing pants around the house.

For instance, this last Government Holiday, I ate four meals directly from the paper sack the meals were delivered to me in. No dishes there. And, I ate all of those meals on the comforts of my sweet recliner, sans pants, with the sauces of the meats I ordered dangling to my beard. That's living!!!

Anyway, these Government Mandated Vacations also give me an especial chance to restore the balance of masculinity in the ASmith household. You see, there is a very real balance of man and woman in every established home. The homes collectively make up the balance of man/woman in the universe. Thus, whenever one house tips to far left or right, the entire fabric of the universe is in jeopardy of being rent asunder. (I made a few chaos theory style calculations. My home becoming too feminine essentially tips the scales just enough to set the rest of the world into commotion).

To paraphrase Liam Neeson in Batman Begins, whenever a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is natural and ineviatble. Justice is balance. For every time my wife regales me with how that fascinating Twilight vampire soft-core novel is, I get to buy tickets to a monster truck rally. For every Kiera Knightly movie period film, I get to watch a period piece about Vietnam.

The Government Holiday give me a chance to restore the balance to our home, thereby restoring the male-to-female balance ratio back to its proper 1:1 setting, and thereby saving the very universe.

On to the first review:

Shoot 'Em Up scored a victory by the title alone. This testosterone movie lets you know right off the bat what this thing is about, just from the poster. Clive Owen will shoot stuff, mainly people, while being accompanied by Monica Belucci. They both are being chased by Paul Giamatti who will, as implied in the title, be shooting things up.

For the record, Clive Owen is awesome. This is not an opinion. My Geometry 1320 professor proved that Clive Owen was awesome through a modified Euclidean postulate. No disputing Euclid's equations, no disputing Clive Owen. I could watch Clive Owen eat and be excited by his raw, almost primeval, presence of man. In fact, this movie features several scenes of Owen inexplicably eating carrots. Yep. Carrots. He even uses these carrots to murder several people.

The plot (I use that term loosely for a film titled Shoot 'Em Up) starts right at action time. In addition, Monica Belucci is in it. I can't understand a word she says. She was probably saying some pointless jibberish, like a grocery list, and her stunning emotion had me captivated.

Overall, this movie followed the exact Man Formula -- hard and gritty, yet handsome, lead male character, beautfiul female character, high body count, plus a few memorable verbal quips and barbs. A man movie features at least one "zoom in real close, the dude's about to say something --- OH SNAP!!!" scene. This movie featured three such scenes. However, due to said language of the lines in those scenes, and that Jedboy is a family friendly website, I will abstain from those quips.

Man Scale: 9.2 of 10. Mitigating Factors: Paul Giamatti's character being too scattered -- is he a genius, or is he a family man, is he evil? What's his deal? A true man flick doesn't have such character nuances.