Blue Jasmine v Judgment Night

I am a man of leisure come Monday's. It's slightly surreal to not work Monday's after working every monday of my life for the past 13 years. I still haven't established any decent routine, but it really is the only day in the week where I get to do capricious things. Like blacken the bumper of my crappy car. Or hit the cinema whilst still dressed in my gym shorts. I caught the only showing of Blue Jasmine that day. 

Plot summary


Cate Blanchett gets hammered a lot and shows off her sweaty armpits in every other scene.

When I was watching films growing up my dad would always join the film halfway through. He would ask me what film I was watching, which I would repeat 3 times. Then he would ask, 'Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? Face Off was incredibly confusing for him. But I always admired his black and white approach to films. He was basically asking: 'Who do I root for in this?' And the main problem this film has, is that there are no characters you can really get behind. Cate Blanchetts character doesn't redeem herself and I found myself a little bored during some of her scenes. However her sister (Sally Hawkins) with whom she lives, actually had a more interesting role, and together with Alec Baldwin there is enough interesting stuff here to make this worth a watch. Did you know that Woody Allen writes all his scripts on the same typewriter that he's used since a teenager? of course you did. Incidentally has anyone ever thought that John Parrott could make an excellent stunt double for Alec Baldwin?

Ahhhhh maybe not.
In fact, I'm way off.

Tomato Meter - 91% (critics)
Tomato Meter - 83% (audience)
Peter Meter - 69%

So I caught Judgment Night on the iPlayer the other week.

Plot summary

Emulsion Estevez thinks he's well hard in this. Unbelievably, so does everyone else. 

You know if you type Emilio into your blower, the predictive text will come up as 'Emulsion'. I have now got into the habit of looking up words that I don't know the definition of and when I looked up 'Emulsion' on wikipeadiea it came up with this
An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (nonmixable or unblendable). Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Although the terms colloid and emulsion are sometimes used interchangeably, emulsion should be used when both the dispersed and the continuous phase are liquids. After about 15 minutes, I was still not entirely sure what the word meant, but I realized the 15 minutes I spent reading up on emulsion was far more enjoyable than the 2 hours I spent sitting through Judgment Night. The main disappointing thing is that I'm a huge fan of Emulsion Estevez, but he is not a tough looking dude. Jeremy Piven does his slippery weasel schtick well enough to keep me interested, but he's better in Very Bad Things. Which isn't a flawless film by any means and completely loses itself in the final act, but it's Gone with the Wind compared to Judgment Day. I couldn't find the scene where he accidentally murders the prostitute in the bathroom whilst shagging her, but I did find the bit where he accidentally murders his brother with the car.


Tomato Meter - 31% (critics)
Tomato Meter - 30% (audience)
Peter Meter - 29%

Verdict

I realize when I watch some of my favourite actors appear in shitty films, I get cravings like a pregnant woman to watch the films that made me like them in the first place. Helps me cleanse the palette so to speak. So I looked up some scenes on Young Guns on YouTube this week and started to feel a lot better about life. Emulsion, I forgive you because you were in one of my favourite western films of all time.

Enjoy this scene where his mate Charlie loses his shit in a shoot out. So WATCH Charlie lose his shit in Young Guns and NOT Blue Jasmine OR Judgment Night.