ARMAGEDDON (1998)

A massive asteroid, named Dottie, is headed directly for Earth and our only hope is that two super Space Shuttles can take a group of oil drilling badasses up into space, slingshot them around the moon and land on Dottie's ass so they can give her a nuclear enema that'll blow that bitch out of the sky. Yasujiro Ozu it's not.

Nope, it's Michael Bay. So check your brain at the door and get ready for some cheesy, goofy bullshit filled with helicopters flying in front of sunsets, explosions, slow motion overdose, frantic editing, rugged saintly-like tough guys, product placement, camera spin, Aerosmith power ballad overdose and some of the worse dialogue ever written. "Miss Stamper? Colonel Willie Sharp, United States Air Force, ma'am. Requesting permission to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I've ever met." Ooowwwch! That line just gave me instant terminal butt cancer. Better go watch DEADLY PREY.

For a 90's disaster movie, ARMAGEDDON is about as big and dumb as it gets.  It's awesome! The disaster is "a global killer", the characters are bigger than life and the director has no shame. One of the biggest guilty pleasure movies of the 90's.

Little known (untrue) fact: In the unproduced ARMAGEDDON 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, literally 1 second after everybody finished hugging each other that the end of the first film, everybody on Earth immediately went back to hating the living fuck out of each other for totally unimportant reasons like skin colour, money, genitals and imaginary creators.

HANNA (2011)

[Update 03/09/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Raised in the deep, deep woods by her father, 16-year-old Hanna is a highly-trained assassin that can do all kinds of crazy hand-to-hand combat shit and is an expert in small arms combat. The reason for all of these years worth of hardcore training is a mystery to the viewer. All we know is the father is pissed as shit at a CIA agent named Marissa Wiegler (played by Cate Blanchett) and he has a tracking device that once activated will alert Marissa of their location.

At the appointed time the switch is flipped, Hanna is taken into custody and when she comes face-to-face with who she thinks is Marissa Wiegler she snaps her fucking neck like a goddamn twig, kills some guards and escapes. This is where the real story begins and it's entertaining, but not as brutal or original as I had hope and it's nowhere near as stylish as it thinks it is.

Neck snapping, face punching, distracting techo soundtrack, skinheads, gun shooting, reindeer murdering, snow, headbutting, leg stabbing, hardcore teeth brushing, vacant amusement park, hippies. Good for a rent, but that's about it because the story is too goddamn mysterious and in the end I had more questions than I did answers. If they end up making this a series, then that's cool, but if this is a one off film then that's just lazy writing. Saoirse Ronan was really good though. If they do make a sequel I hope she's involved and they have a different director. Luc Besson would be interesting with this story.

HESHER (2010)

[Update 03/23/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Like an Americanized version of Pasolini's TEOREMA (or maybe Miike's VISITOR Q), HESHER is the story of a mysterious stranger who briefly enters the lives of a family and leaves just as quickly, but not before changing their lives forever.

Young T.J. is having a shitty life. His mother recently died in a car wreck and the grief has sent his father so deep into his shell that he rarely even gets off the sofa. Then, at school this dork-looking bully beats the crap out of him all the time. Added to that, every time he gets on his bike he seems to wreck. After one gnarly wreck he gets mad at a nearby half-constructed house and breaks out the main window, unknowing that the house is the squat pad for the long-haired, greasy looking rocker named Hesher. After this encounter, Hesher begins following T.J. and eventually starts squatting in his garage. But Hesher isn't a guardian angel sent from Heaven, if anything he make T.J.'s family's life even shittier. But yet, somehow Hesher teaches them how to man up and push through their misery...or something. I don't know, I was too busy setting my house on fire to pay attention.

I liked this movie. It's nothing original or groundbreaking, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great, so is Natalie Portman, Piper Laurie, Rainn Wilson, Devin Brochu and honestly everybody in the movie. The story is entertaining, but the acting is what really pushes the film to a higher level. Also, the filmmakers had the good taste to use mostly Cliff Burton-era Metallica songs instead of that satan-awful butt rock they've been shoving down our ears for the last few decades. Definitely worth a rent.