Stuff I Watched 12/2/16

Thanks to Thanksgiving/Black Friday I got myself some movies for belated birthday/XMas.  Someone on Mashable wrote about overrated Black Friday deals and said basically, "Why does anyone need DVDs?  Everyone has streaming Internet."   Um, yeah, but you can't really access "the cloud" everywhere you go.  Like when I was living in motel rooms for six months, most places had Internet portals that wouldn't let my Roku work.  Maybe I could have used my Kindle Fire or laptop, but watching movies on a tiny screen is annoying.  So a portable DVD player and DVDs definitely came in handy.  The same applies to CDs and MP3 players too.  Sometimes the old ways work best.

Anyway, here are movies I bought myself:

• X-Men Apocalypse
• Kingsman: The Secret Service
• Ocean's Eleven (for $2.50 from Big Lots, what the hell)
• Terminator 3 (for $2.50 from Big Lots, what the hell)
• Deadpool
• The Martian
• Gravity
• Looper
• Fantastic Four (2015)
• Maggie

Those cost me a grand total of $10 thanks to a gift card credit on Amazon for selling some shit.  Plus I got a new Blu-Ray player to play them on because my old one on some movies it would bring up all this static in what I called "static storms" because they would come and go at random.  It wasn't the discs because it was multiple discs and it did it on the player's menu too.  It is a couple years old and spent months in an unheated storage unit so it might be wearing out and Black Friday (actually Thanksgiving) is a good time to get those for cheap.

Anyway, here are some other movies I watched:

Mechanic: Resurrection:  I never watched the original Mechanic with Jason Statham, though I did watch some of the old Charles Bronson version.  Short version of that was old assassin takes on an apprentice who then tries to kill him.  Anyway, after supposedly dying in the last one, Jason Statham meets Jessica Alba (remember her?) who is promptly taken hostage by a bad guy.  To save her, Jason Statham has to kill three top arms dealers and make it seem like an accident.  This is the kind of movie that provides exactly what you expect--Jason Statham kicking, punching, shooting, stabbing, and blowing up lots of people--and nothing more than that.  I don't really fault it for that.  They could have used some better green screen effects that weren't so obvious. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Besides Statham and Alba, Tommy Lee Jones cashes a paycheck as one of the targets with a bad soul patch.)

Memoirs of an Invisible Man:  In 1992 came this bizarre combination of director John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing) and Chevy Chase (Vacation, Fletch, Three Amigos) in a thriller about a man who is caught in a lab accident that makes him invisible.  He's then hunted by government agents while really exploiting almost no benefits of being invisible.  Not a terrible movie but not great either.  As you'd expect from this Carpenter/Chase team-up the tone wavers between serious and comedic.  The original Invisible Man or Hollow Man are better--or the Syfy series Invisible Man. (2/5)