It's Just So Sad!

Several of my friends adored Josh Hartnett when we were teenagers. I'm not sure who I was giddy for at the time, but I wasn't a fan. I just didn't get it. Where was the pizzazz, the personality?

Eh, I'm not that excited.

I liked Ben Affleck a little more at the time, so I was willing to check out Pearl Harbor when the posse got together one summer afternoon to head to the movies.

Oh, that Affleck.

I didn't really care for the movie. I had the same problem with Pearl Harbor that I did with Titanic. I was ultimately more interested in what was going on around the main characters than the characters themselves.

However, the silly love triangle between Affleck, Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale resulted in the most incredible overreaction I've ever seen in my life.

To refresh your memory, Kate Beckinsale dates Ben Affleck before the events of Pearl Harbor. She thinks he dies during the attack and seeks solace in the arms of his best friend, Josh Hartnett, and gets pregnant with his baby. Somehow, Affleck comes back, everything is more or less forgiven, they go off on the Doolittle raids in Japan with Alec Baldwin, where Josh Hartnett dies. Affleck returns to Beckinsale with the bad news, and they raise Josh Hartnett's son together as their own.



Right around the 2:30 mark is when my friend completely lost it. She started crying really hard as the image flowed and the credits rolled. (Apologies if the audio is too low, that's how the link came. Plus, do you really want to hear the malarkey that Michael Bay wrote?)

With a huge sob and a sniffle, she exclaimed, "He looks....just....like him!!" We started to leave the theater, but the tears were a-flowing like you wouldn't believe.

We talked her down and she was able to laugh it off, admitting that she probably overreacted. But never before or since have I seen someone burst into tears that badly during a movie (except that time I watched Selena at a slumber party, but that's a whole 'nother post).

Button Mash!

I've never been a very good video game person. I like playing them, but I'm really quite terrible at them. Whenever I played Golden Eye on Nintendo 64 with my neighbors, I would be routinely killed in multi-player because I just couldn't master the whole camera movement vs person movement aspect. I couldn't even beat levels in Zelda and the Ocarina of Time without major assists from a step by step guidebook telling me exactly how to do certain things, and even then I got frustrated and just quit. Maybe the buttons on the controller and I just don't connect.

And, like most kids born in the 80s, I played Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo (my house) and Super Nintendo (my neighbor's house). And like most kids, I came across the Super Mario Brothers movie at some point in my life.

Super Mario Bros is not a good movie. Even Bob Hoskins, respected actor and star of the movie, came out and said it is hands down the worst thing he's ever done.

I'm not sure exactly when I saw this movie, but I know I saw it on cable. Ah, the perks of being a kid with cable and lax parents. You can watch just about anything (Tank Girl anyone?).

I remember being a little confused and a little bored by the whole thing. And also a little scared by Dennis Hopper. He was super creepy in the film, with the weird white-blond sort of corn rows, not to mention the lizard tongue they gave him.

I think, the better question might be, when is Dennis Hopper not creepy and/or scary?

The other thing I remember, and probably the weirdest part, was not the lack of cohesion in the movie, or how terrible it was as a video game adaptation, but the fact that I had a little crush on John Leguizamo.

Yes, this guy.

Now, allow me to explain myself. In the movie, he was young, cute, and he seemed so nice and genuinely concerned about rescuing the girl. To my seven year old brain, I was thinking "Wow, what a nice guy. I really like him. He's so nice!"

He saved the princess!

Overall though, it's still a terrible movie, John Leguizamo crush or no. There is so much weirdness running through the whole movie, from lizard people led by Dennis Hopper to something about fungus taking over the city, that even as a kid, I remember thinking "There's no fungus in the video game, what is this?" It was not, as so many other movies in my childhood were, one that ended up with a lot of repeat viewings.

I think the look on his face here kind of sums up the viewing experience as a whole.