Awesome, Li, Bad

Went to see The Expendables this morning. In a movie like that, one can easily graph the correlation between awesomeness and badness. The worse the movie, the more awesome it is. I had very low expectations. The problem is that while some parts were really bad and some parts were even more awesome, the movie was not quite as bad as I thought it would be. Stallone directed it and he does a pretty nice job of giving probably 90% of the lines to the only people that can really act: himself, Jason Statham, and Eric Roberts. Mickey Rourke, barely in it, has the one teary monologue. Steve Austin has maybe two lines the whole time, same for Randy Couture. The other action stars get to deliver the funny lines as they kill people, but that's pretty much it. The camera work is a little weird and the timing in some of the talking scenes (primarly the one with Schwarzenegger, Willis, and Stallone) is awful. Overall, though, not really that bad. The last thirty minutes or so are actually quite good as the team of five mercenaries fights an army of two hundred and does so quite awesomely. Maybe Jet Li is a little underused for most of the movie and maybe there aren't enough really good action movie-type lines, but it has its moments. Worth seeing on DVD, unless you have nothing better to do and you have the stomach to sit through the really bad parts to get to the really awesome ones.

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Not quite sure if I'll post much over the next couple of days, due to something or other going on in my life. I've always intended this blog to be about pop culture and humor, so let's say, I don't know, my wife was going to have a baby in the next forty-eight hours or so -- that kind of thing would be more for Facebook or Twitter. Unless I could find a reason to make it funny and work it in with like Knocked Up or the Steve Martin baby outtake during the credits of Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

And if, for instance, my wife were about to have a baby in the next forty-eight hours, it would most likely mean I'll miss Mad Men and Entourage tomorrow night. Sacrifice.