Stuff I Watched This Week

To keep from burdening people too much, I'm just doing this weekly now for however long I feel like it.  Here's stuff I watched this week:

Star Trek Beyond:  It's better than the two Abrams movies, but that's not a high bar.  It's mostly fun with less stupid shit than the last two movies.  I still have a hard time buying Chris Pine as Kirk or any of the others as more than high-paid impersonators in a fan film with a huge budget.  Really after seven years and two movies, shouldn't Kirk be less of a dumbass by now?  The movie starts with another diplomatic mission going south, which served to introduce the artifact that some aliens are after because it's part of a weapon that was split into pieces and shot into space, sort of like the Weather Dominator in GI JOE or the artifact in Tomb Raider or the stone of Zinthar or whatever in the episode of South Park where Barbara Streisand becomes MechaSteisand.  The Enterprise is destroyed but Kirk and company find an old starship on the planet and an alien friend who helps them save the crew and stop the bad guys.  The space station in the movie is pretty odd; I'm not sure how they got water there or how there's a sky, but I guess that made it look less drab than a boring old space station.  Anyway, a little overly long, but it feels closer to Star Trek at least. (2.5/5)

London Has Fallen:  Remember a couple years ago when there were two movies that were sort of like Air Force One only on the ground?  Well only one got a sequel, the one with Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart.  So now they're back and they're in London (actually Bulgaria) when terrorists attack and they have to evade.  If it were a Die Hard movie the terrorist attack would be revealed to be the front for a robbery, but this is far less subtle and thus there's no big twist really.  You know who's behind it from the prologue when a drone strike takes out a Hindu wedding, so it's all pretty simple.  Lots of mayhem ensuing but not all that interesting. I'd have probably cared more if I had more than a passing memory of the first movie.  (2/5) (Useless Fact:  I could not for the life of me remember who was the white guy in White House Down, the other president under siege movie a couple years ago.  I knew Jamie Foxx was the president but I couldn't remember who the other guy was.  Turns out it was Channing Tatum.  Now you know...)

Joy:  I saw a preview for this I think last year when I watched The Martian, but the preview gave me no idea what the movie was actually about.  There's Jennifer Lawrence and she's a mom...or something...and there's Bradley Cooper and Robert de Niro so it must be a David O. Russell movie...but anything beyond that I had no idea.  Finally it was on HBO and I watched most of it.  Basically it's the story of the woman who in the early 80s invented the Spin Mop or whatever it's called; it's a mop with a detachable cloth head and rolls up with a handle so you don't have to get your hands wet trying to wring it out.  She faces a lot of adversity trying to get her invention to the public.  Big Mop didn't want a mop that could be reused; they'd rather you buy a new one every year.  Finally she convinces Bradley Cooper to put it on QVC, but it doesn't sell until she goes on to demonstrate it herself.  But that's not the end of her troubles.  It's a decent drama about a subject you probably didn't know or really care about. It really just needed some better marketing.  (3/5)

The Trust:  This starts out as a decent heist movie.  Nic Cage and Elijah Wood are evidence technicians in Vegas who figure out where some bad guys are stashing a bunch of stuff in a vault disguised as a meat freezer.  They go to great lengths to plan the heist.  It's when they execute said heist that the movie starts unraveling with stupid twists until it becomes really lame.  Such a big waste of talent. (2/5)