Today In Cinema

Our connection to the theatrically-released surface pond scumfilm* industry is seeing adverts for their industrial dreck on the screen in our bunker, at least until the flick reaches our screen, so we don't give fuck one at a rolling doughnut (Man on doughnut!!) but what little curiosity remains to us was piqued by similarities between adverts for an explosion-fest called Olympus Has Fallen, which came & went w/o any impact we noticed beyond the ads, & current load of blammo White House Down. Hell, we suspected the current one was OHF retitled because it didn't do so well the first time out.

Guess not:

Maybe most to the point, I’d already seen—and loathed—pretty much the identical movie back in March. You remember Olympus Has Fallen, don’t you? It’s not just that the basic audience grabber—see the White House get trashed, everybody!—is the same. Plotwise, the two are twins at a level so freakish Diane Arbus would give her left eye to photograph them together. Wholesale attack by squads of creepily clad paramilitary baddies? Check. A lone hero who’s on the premises by accident and ends up as the last, best hope of mankind once POTUS’s protectors get blown away by the casual dozens just to ensure he’s indispensable? Bingo. An insider who’s a turncoat, some gobbledygook about accessing nuclear codes to start World War Three as the villains’ ultimate goal, a plucky child (the president’s son in Olympus, the hero’s daughter in WHD) in excruciating jeopardy? Yep, yep, yep.

[...]

Otherwise, the only claim I’d make for White House Down is that, if you only see one schlock movie about the White House under siege this year, this is the one to see. That isn’t really a sentence I ever pictured myself writing back in film class, but never mind.

Nothing we can add. This web log shizzle is pretty damn easy.

---

*It was asked recently-ish in comments at this dump if anything was still shot w/ actually-has-to-be-developed film. Good question, & we don't know, but our suspicion is that some older wretches may still use it, because lighting for a CCD isn't the same as lighting for toxic chemicals on a strip of celluloid or whatever plastic may have replaced celluloid, & said wretches don't want to learn new stuff when they're so close to retirement. We sure as hell don't, but we're already retired. (And gave up well before retirement.)