Get Smart is the epitome of what I would call a decent movie. It would be crazy to call it great, but equally crazy to blast it. It’s like a sturdy table that lasts for fifty years—very capably constructed, without any real flaws, but nothing to write home about (clearly writing on the internet has a lower barrier to entry than writing home). If you’ve already seen The Dark Knight, Wall·E, and Hellboy II then go check it out—it’s worth both your time and your money. If you haven’t seen those other movies, then there can be nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
Platoon
I’ve just taken another significant step on the road from fake movie buff (“I love movies, me.” “What do you think of the Godfather trilogy?” “Um, yeah, I’ve been meaning to see those.”) to real movie buff. Platoon has sat on my DVD shelf for the last half year, ever since my last abortive effort to see it was scuppered by the shoddy workmanship of the Chinese DVD manufacturing industry (“Yarrr!”). Back then I settled for a long-overdue re-watching of Se7en, the better known sequel to S6x, to meet my John C. McGinley-viewing needs.
Still, the urge to see Platoon remained, so it got thrown on the DVD pile during one of my then-frequent purchasing sprees. And there it remained until today. I was looking through the available films on ScreenClick (our poor-man’s Netflix) compiling my wishlist, when I realised that I had an unwatched classic sitting on the shelf.
Not just one classic, actually. Today’s viewing was a toss-up between Platoon and Goodfellas—I know, I know, I suck at movies.
So that’s how my Sunday evening turned into a viewing of a bloody war movie filled with death, and guns, and War-is-Hell, and betrayal, and honor, and deceit, and that one guy with a massive scar, and McGinley—I swear to God this is true—saying the line, “Hey their Bob-o,” in exactly the same way he delivers it in Scrubs, and napalm, and the quiet religious guy who goes crazy.
Now I don’t want to give that whole spiel of an introduction and then finish with a one-line review. So I’ll do a two-line review instead. Here it is:
Well worth the wait.
Best. Death. Ever.