Joely Sue Burkhart

That Man wanted to watch movies this weekend.  Nevermind that I bought 300 and still haven’t seen it yet…  Not to mention Pan’s Labyrinth.  Neither are his cup of tea. Don’t even ask about the Firefly episodes I still haven’t seen.

He selected Shooter with Mark Wahlberg first.  It starts out with Wahlberg as Bobby Lee Swagger and his buddy on a sniper mission.  The buddy looks at a picture of his wife.  And I turned to That Man and said, oops, he’s going to die.  And soon.  Sure enough, the next scene, the guy gets killed.  Could the sympathy factor have been a little more subtle, please?  So then we jump ahead 3 years and the same government who left him to die on his last mission comes calling spewing duty and patriotism.  Fool that he is, Swagger goes.  And of course, is double crossed yet again.

The movie wasn’t bad, per se, just pretty standard.  I was supposed to believe this guy was super smart–and I have to admit, I loved the way he got the FBI agent Memphis as his spotter–but he was stupid enough to leave the buddy’s girlfriend unprotected after she helped him recover from the double cross.  Of course, the bad guys found her, tortured her, and used her against him.  Duh. 

The most powerful moment of the film was at the very end.  Swagger has won–but lost.  The bad guys are high-up politicians who escape unscathed.  They’re sitting around bullshitting how smart and rich they are, how everyone else is stupid for you know, following the law and being moral.  They’re drinking, smoking cigars, laughing belligerently.  Again, an un-subtle effort to make them despicable, so when Swagger kills them in cold blood, we’ll be sympathetic.  That we’ll consider him the hero.

Not an easy thing to pull off, is it?  I mean, the hero kills these guys in cold blood.  Stands over a weeping, begging man and shoots him in the head.  Calmly.  Deliberately.  And then he walks out, gets in the car with the girlfriend, and they drive off to the mountains.  I have to ask:  what kind of life will they have?  What kind of man can just walk away from something like that?

And a story idea was born.    Most of you know that my favorite character I’ve created to-date is an assassin, so I’m fascinated with characters like Swagger.  I jotted some notes and filed them away for later.

The other movie That Man picked out was Wild Hogs.  Let me just say that middle-aged-male-locker-room humor is not my cup of tea.  The only thing that made the movie mildly amusing for me was the gay cop played by John McGinley.  When he followed them to the water hole and wanted to play Marco Polo, I laughed out loud.  At the end, when the Wild Hog idiots are standing against 40+ “real” bikers and getting the shit kicked out of them, a mysterious rider shows up.  I ROARED OUT LOUD, thinking it was the gay cop.  Imagine my disappointment when it was some new phantom guy (played by Peter Fonda) who was the dad of the lead bad biker.  Meh.  It would have been much funnier if the gay cop came to their rescue!

So overall, I wasn’t impressed by either movie.  But I got a story idea out of one, so it wasn’t a total waste.