Tag Archives: Jon Voight

Pearl Harbor (2001)

Full daylight? In a Michael Bay establishing shot? Revolutionary!
Full daylight? In a Michael Bay establishing shot? Revolutionary!

I’ve been dreading this. Re-examining Armageddon all but killed me, though that’s partially my own fault. I was the one playing that drinking game. Incidentally, Googling “Michael Bay Drinking Game” yields up some dangerous results. But while individual drinking games exist for individual films, apparently no drunk has the courage to construct a game applicable to Bay’s entire oeuvre. As that great old drunk Stephen Hopkins (my favorite character from 1776) once said, “So it’s up to me, eh?” That’s what you get for falling down on the job, fellow rummies.

Since Pearl Harbor bored me so damn much, my mind savored any distraction. I spent a good thirty minutes contemplating how hard I’d need to throw this movie off my balcony in order to ensure its disc would land at the optimum place in the street where it was sure to be run over by as many cars as possible. After I filled half a page with geometric calculations, constructing the Ultimate Michael Bay Drinking Game seemed a much more utilitarian distraction. I figured it would do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Throwing Pearl Harbor at passing cars would only annoy their drivers…who’d go on to annoy the cops…who’d go on to annoy me. Continue reading Pearl Harbor (2001)

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

Lara keeps a look out for falling plot contrivances.

As Tomb Raider opens, we find Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie, of course) hanging suspended from a rope. Not even her intricately woven braid stirs. Then, in what will quickly become a matter of course for this film, she runs-jumps-flips-climbs her way through an ancient looking cave of faux ruins and blows the holy hell out of the ultra-advanced robot assassin that serves as her “sparing partner.” All in a flash-bang opening action sequence designed to drive home a singular point: that Lara Croft is a Badass. Needless to say, the sequence accomplishes its goal…so, I asked myself, what the hell is the rest of the movie supposed to do?

Spiral ever downward, apparently. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Angelina Jolie is Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider, only child to “legendary” archeologist Lord Croft (Jon—Anaconda—Voight). So when she’s not destroying her own robots or lounging about the eighty-plus rooms of her ancestral home Lara likes to gallivant around the globe and engage in a spot of grave robbing, stealing priceless artifacts and…doing…something…with them. If you don’t live under a rock, you probably already knew this, or could figure it out from the incredibly-obvious title. {More}