Tag Archives: Kevin Dillon

The Throw Aways

A notorious hacker is captured by the CIA and forced to work for them. They were dumb enough to let the key to a very important cyber program get away and now they’re vulnerable to attack. It was pretty fucking stupid. So now they’ve threatened this hacker with prison unless he agrees to fix the problem for them and he agrees, at least outwardly. Secretly, he assembles his team using the lousiest CIA agents his algorithm can find. They’re a pretty lousy bunch. Boy is this going to be fun!

Last week we were happily lying on a beach in Mexico, reading between trips to the bar. My beach reads tend to be non-traditional at best – the first couple graphic novels in a series, the follow-up to The Paris Wife which is not called but could be called The Kenyan On-Again-Off-Again Wife, and a piece of nonfiction about cyber attacks perpetrated by and anticipated by the American government. It was good enough that I passed it to Sean as soon as I was done, even though I’d already recounted most of the exciting bits to him while bobbing up and down in various bodies of water.

Anyway, that’ s the problem with books. They get you all riled up about a subject suddenly you’re watching crappy movies just to keep the high going (inspired by the same book we also watched The Interview – you may remember that the movie’s very existence got North Korea so mad that they hacked Sony and released a bunch of embarrassing emails, including one in which Angelina Jolie is called “a minimally talented spoiled brat,” one where Kevin Hart is called a “whore,” and one in which Leonardo DiCaprio (or LDC, as Brad Pitt called him at the Golden Globes on Sunday) is called “despicable.” It is still a very bad movie.)

Don’t watch this movie. Do read The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger if you have a modicum of interest. Bathing suit optional.

Poseidon

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Although we’ve very much enjoyed the cruises we’ve taken (once, in the Caribbean, around the Bahamas, the other one around the Hawaiian islands), we were happy last night to be celebrating at a resort on land because when we got back to our room, Sean chose Poseidon for its New Year’s Eve setting but this movie might have made us think twice before getting on a boat.

The unsuspecting guests on that boat had just rung in the new year, with Fergie leading them in a countdown to midnight (the Shakira of the sea, we renamed her, since Shakira had played at our sister resort). But then a rogue wave hits, flipping the boat upside down. Of the 5000 or so passengers who must have been on board, most die instantly (and not on film). Mostly just the hundred or so survivors of the ballroom are given any airtime: Fergie of course, and the ship’s captain, Capt. Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher, again!), a degenerate gambler named Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon, also again!), a suicidal man named Richard (Richard Dreyfuss), Robert, the former mayor of New York (Kurt Russell) and his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), newly and secretly engaged to Christian (Mike Vogel), a mother and young son, a stowaway, and of course the fearless leader Dylan (Josh Lucas), whose dimples will surely keep them afloat for hours. The ship’s captain is trying to keep everyone calm and contained within the airtight ballroom until help can arrive, but squirrely Dylan is not content to stay put. He leads a small handful of the survivors “up” (which in this case means travelling down into the ship’s bowels since it’s currently bobbing upside down in the ocean). They’re battling flash fires, rising waters, and of course gravity to get out in time.

Like most movies of its ilk, Poseidon (this is the 2006 remake of a 1972 classic) is big on the epic disaster set pieces and meager on story and character. It’s not going to make any logical sense, so leave that in life raft for later. You’re not going to know or really care about the people either. Remove your humanity, wrap it in a personal flotation device, and move on. The movie delivers a bloated sense of claustrophobia and a bad case of Murphy’s law, which impressively follows them right down to the bottom of the ocean. The camera dwells on the dead bodies as we swim by them so if you’re hoping for some campy fun, think again. There are corpses everywhere, and not all of them float. Not unlike this movie, which sinks under its own self-importance.

Hotel For Dogs

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Social worker Bernie (Don Cheadle) has placed sibling orhpans, 11 year old Bruce (Jake T. Austin) and 16 year old Andi (Emma Roberts) in more foster homes than he can count. Current foster mom Lois (Lisa Kudrow) and foster dad Carl (Kevin Dillon) are more interested in becoming rockstars than nurturing children, and they’re really only providing the basic, state-mandated necessities. They’re definitely not providing for Bruce and Andi’s dog Friday (Cosmo the dog) so the kids are forced to hide him. Poor Friday is little more than a street dog these days, and the kids are considering giving him to a home who can take better care of him, though they’re loathe to give up a furry friend their parents adopted as a puppy just before they died.

Good thing they stumble upon an abandoned old hotel AND 11 year old Bruce just happens to be something of an…engineering savant? Pretty soon they’ve not just got cozy digs for Friday but they’re providing sanctuary for all the homeless mutts in the vicinity. Which sounds like a nice thing except you know how those insatiable dog catchers are: relentless. The dog pound is strangely empty but they’re not going to let sleeping dogs lie, even when there’s 3 cute pups sleeping together like a French Bulldog sandwich.

Okay so it’s a ridiculous premise, all right? But full of cute dogs. Plus it’s no more ridiculous than the hotel we’re staying in, which does in fact have dogs – two Mexican hairless dogs named Luna and Pek who, between them, manage an awfully good impression of Diego, the dog from Coco, also a Xoloitzcuintli. But they’ve also got donkeys called Lupillo and Pepito, ducks, rabbits, goats, and 2 pigs that were rescued from a live nativity scene. Now if you can tell me what the hell pigs were doing at the birth of jesus christ, I will mail you ten dollars. Not even pesos. Dollars!

Entourage

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Sean

Matt and I took in a screening of Entourage on Monday. Full disclosure: I’ve never watched the show, not even once. So I went in basically cold, knowing just the basic premise. Fortunately, the writers had anticipated people like me (or possibly the premise was also the entire plot for the eight seasons the show ran). Either way, the movie jumped right into things and didn’t leave me behind.

it seems very fun to be a celebrity, and possibly even more fun to be in a celebrity’s inner circle. The four guys are inseparable and each of them gets about equal screen time as far as I can figure it. Vince, the actual star, certainly doesn’t get more screen time than his bros, both semi-biological and adopted, which is surprising in a way since the plot revolves around a movie that Vince is both starring in and directing. But it makes sense after I realized that the whole point of the movie, and presumably the show, is the relationship between these guys. That they are on this ride together even though only one is driving the car (which is a poor metaphor because apparently Turtle started out as Vince’s driver and seems to still fill that role despite also being a tequila baron).

By the looks of things, the boys had a fun time making this movie. It may just have been a good excuse to drive expensive cars and rent expensive houses and party with naked women on expensive boats, but isn’t that what being a celebrity is all about? Fortunately, their fun is infectious and I enjoyed tagging along. Entourage is a very entertaining movie and is the next best thing to having a famous friend. It gets a rating of eight extremely brief celebrity cameos out of ten.

Matt

This being his introduction to the glamorous world of Entourage, I was looking forward to hearing Sean’s take on the movie. It mostly hit the ground running but worked in a Piers Morgan segment early on that cleverly brought new recruits up to speed while dropping in-jokes for the fans.

This may not have been my initiation but I can hardly call myself a fan. I only binge-watched until the end of the third season. Lucky for me, not much seems to have changed in the last five seasons except that Ari is now somehow the head of a major studio and Turtle has lost a lot of weight.

How you feel about Entourage the movie probably depends on how you feel about Entourage the series. Watching the film at the screening last night was a lot like watching three back-to-back episodes of the show with a roomful of fans and Sean. They didn’t even skip the theme song. I will say that I laughed more consistently last night than I did watching the first three seasons of the show and that I can’t imagine a fan being disappointed. They’ll definitely get their money’s worth with a couple dozen or more celebrity cameos, even if only about half of them are used as effectively as they could be.

Mostly though, i couldn’t have said it any better than Sean. It’s the bond between these four guys and the agent that bet everything on them that makes this franchise work. It ties together all the otherwise seemingly random gags, cameos, and subplots into a coherent story and a very enjoyable movie.