Katie Loves James McAvoy, But…

Wanted was a very bad movie.  Just awful.  The only thing that redeemed it in any way (besides the fact that James McAvoy was in it…YUM!) was that I saw it at the Alamo, which meant I got to have a beer while I watched.  Double yum!

 

Wanted tells the story of a one-thousand-year-old group of assassins called the Fraternity whose main method of killing comes in the form of quite unbelievable stunts.  And I mean laughably unbelievable.  I think the first sign that a movie is bad is if your fellow watchers in the theater are laughing at parts that were not intended to be humorous.  The time I saw First Daughter, starring Katie Holmes, in the theater comes to mind.  While watching Wanted, I became aware of the laughter that seemed to accompany a lot of the movie, despite the fact that it had a serious tone and more gore than I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while (probably because I tend to stay away from horror films).  The part I laughed the hardest at was a stunt towards the beginning of the movie that should have warned me of what was to come.  Now, I’m pretty crummy at describing things, but bear with me.  This is a stunt that took place in a parking lot.  James McAvoy (I’m going to use the actors’ names because I am really bad at remembering character names and too lazy to look them up) was running away from a man who was trying to kill him—running away because he did not yet know that he himself was a killing machine with the ability to shoot the wings off flies.  (How in the hell did Morgan Freeman find those housefly bodies after McAvoy had shot the wings off in order to show them to McAvoy and convince him of his shooting skills?  I would have assumed that they landed in the trashcan that they were flying over and that Freeman would have had to sift through all the garbage with little hope of finding tiny little wingless fly bodies, but apparently Freeman has extraordinary fly-finding powers.  Anyway, back to the stunt.)  McAvoy is running through a parking lot, he is being chased by a man driving a dog food truck, and instead of running in between the cars that were parked, McAvoy insists on running in a straight line so that his only hope to escape from the bad guy is suddenly to be able to run faster than a vehicle.  But wait!  What’s this?  Angelina Jolie’s character is coming to the rescue in some kind of sports car (I know nothing about cars, sorry.).  And here is the funniest stunt of the movie: Jolie drives straight for McAvoy’s back, but instead of hitting him, she opens the passenger side door, hits the brakes, and slides the car so that it is going perpendicular from its original path, and McAvoy miraculously lands in the passenger seat.  What makes this so absurd is that if a car came at you, even sideways, going probably 50 mph, I’m pretty sure that you would be hurt, whether or not the door was open.  Since McAvoy had no way of knowing that this car was coming up behind him, he most likely would have been struck by the footboard around his ankles and ended up underneath the car, not in it.  I laughed for probably three minutes.  Maybe you just have to see it to realize how funny it is, but please.  Wait until it comes out on video.

 

The most prevalent “stunt” of the movie was another shooting skill.  Freeman, Jolie, and others teach McAvoy how to curve his bullets by bringing his gun behind him and then slinging it forward as he shoots.  I have no idea whether this is possible in real life, and I would really like to know.  I’m pretty sure that there are a ton of teenaged boys out there trying to do it after having seen this movie, which sort of scares me.  Although straight shots have killed people perfectly well in previous movies, almost every shot that these assassins took required them to curve their bullets.  If I were forced to go see this movie again, I would definitely take a tally of how often it happens.  Anyway, the main point that bothered me with this one was the poorly written script that accompanied the training sequence.  McAvoy is bewildered when he is asked to curve his shot so it can go around a giant dead hog hanging from a meat hook and hit the bull’s eye on the target directly behind it.  He stammers out, “How??”  Freeman wisely replies, “It is not a question of how, it is a question of what.”  No, I’m pretty sure it’s a question of how, Morgan. 

 

And on to the plotline.  I have no problem with the whole idea of “Oh, Mr. McAvoy, you are the best assassin the world has ever seen, just like your estranged father, whose death you must avenge.”  My problem comes with this Fraternity and how their assassination plans work.  Located in a textile factory (yeah, why do they have animal carcasses hanging from meat hooks in a textile factory?  That wasn’t really explained…) the Fraternity is able to “read” weavings they…receive, I guess, from Fate.  (I’m not all too clear on this point because I went to use the bathroom around the time it was explained).  The weave of these weavings tells the Fraternity the name of their next target, and because it is governed by Fate, we are able to assume that the person they are supposed to kill deserves to die.  And somehow, these weavings are able to communicate this name in code.  In binary, to be exact.  What?  So confusing.  I’m just going to leave it at that. 

 

Oh, and we are told by Jolie that it’s ok to kill these people unquestioningly because they are killing one to save thousands, or something like that.  But then Jolie does something stupid and drives a car into the side of a train so she can get out and help McAvoy kill someone on the train, which has the disastrous effect of getting stuck on the outside of a tunnel while the train is on top of an impossibly high bridge over a ravine, so that the entire train derails and slides down into the ravine.  I’m pretty sure she killed thousands there.  Oh, yeah, and they don’t really tell you how Jolie and McAvoy are able to escape relatively unharmed after the railcar they were in gets stuck sideways in the ravine…

 

(Spoiler alert for the rest of this posting!  Don’t read if you actually think you would like to waste an hour and a half of your life on this ridiculous movie!)

 

And, finally, the climax and end of the movie.  McAvoy suddenly realizes that the Fraternity has been lying to him this whole time, his father was not actually killed by this other group of assassins.  Rather, McAvoy was taken on by the Fraternity in order to kill his father, who had become a member of the “bad” guys (Star Wars, anyone?).  And he achieves this, killing the man who he believes murdered his father only to find out that he has, in fact, just shot his father.  So wait.  The Fraternity are actually the bad guys?  Yes, that’s right!  What a twist!  Oh my gosh!  I’m stunned!  And Jolie has been given orders to shoot McAvoy!  What is going to happen next?! 

 

McAvoy manages to get inside the Fraternity’s compound, kill everyone in sight except for a few who hold him off in his quest to kill Freeman.  McAvoy then informs them that Freeman has been undermining Fate by not passing on orders from the textiles.  McAvoy’s father was told to kill Freeman, so Freeman had McAvoy’s father killed by McAvoy, the only man Freeman knew his father wouldn’t kill.  Hey, that sentence makes sense in my head.  Go figure it out.  Anyway, Freeman shows Jolie and all the other assassins who have formed a circle around McAvoy that their names, too, have shown up in the weave, but Freeman has protected them and not let anyone assassinate them.  So really, he was just doing them a favor.  The expected result of this revelation is that they will all turn on McAvoy and kill him.  Unfortunately, Jolie is big on fate and, it being her duty to carry out fate’s plans, she determines that if the weave thinks they should all die, then they should.  So, in one final glorious stunt, she curves a bullet so it goes around the circle, entering the brains of the people standing around McAvoy and killing them, before she straightens up and accepts the bullet into her own brains.  That’s right, everyone dies.  And McAvoy kills Freeman.  And apparently it doesn’t matter to Jolie that the weave also told her to kill McAvoy because she doesn’t shoot him before she dies.  So much for duty.  At the end of the movie you have no idea whose side you are supposed to be on.  There is a general sense that Freeman is a bad person for having McAvoy kill his own father, but then again, McAvoy is rather evil by the end and is willing to kill everyone in sight.  And what is he going to do now that the entire of the Fraternity is dead?  Is he going to keep on reading binary code from textile samples in order to find out who to kill?  I guess we can only hope for a sequel.  Then again, maybe not.

Katie Napkins: Baby-Sitter Extraordinaire

Last week I had the pleasure of baby-sitting my seven-month-old nephew.  His mom had to take him to Passways with her, the camp her church’s youth group was going to, and she asked me to watch him while she would be out doing activities with her youth.  This ended up being a good portion of the day, so I was given a great opportunity to bond with little Zeke.

 

Spending so much time with a baby you love is a very rewarding experience.  This is not to say that it isn’t hard work.  Within the first twenty-four hours I had a new respect for what my sister does on a daily basis.  Really I had the watered-down version because 1. I did not have to nurse him (that would have been awkward, huh?  But it would have led to some great posts on breastfeeding…), 2. I didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night with him, and 3. I wasn’t balancing a baby with a full-time job.  And, honestly, watching a baby is a full-time job, so my sister really has two!  How she has managed to remain the kind, fun, thoughtful person that she is for the past seven months is beyond me.  The only explanation I can come up with (beyond the fact that she has a husband, church, and family who love and help her when possible) is that when Zeke smiles at you or laughs, most, if not all, of the stress and fatigue that has accumulated during the day seems to melt away.  As an added bonus for my sister, Zeke definitely knows who his Mom is and immediately lights up when she comes into the room (although this can make it hard when you’re baby-sitting and the baby is well aware of the fact that you are not who he would prefer to be with).

 

I know that the time I spent with my nephew last week is something I will treasure forever.  Yes, it was hard to get him down for naps—there is no worse feeling than having a baby scream and cry at you for an hour because he refuses to let go and drift off to sleep.  But the rest of the day outweighed those moments for me because there is no better feeling than having a baby smile his gummy little smile at you.  We went on walks outdoors, which he loved.  Zeke seems to be the calmest and happiest when he is outdoors, exploring the world with his eyes, ears and hands (occasionally mouth, as well).  We took a blanket out one day and lay on our backs looking up at a tree.  Zeke also enjoyed scooting to the edge of the blanket so he could pluck up stems of grass.  Often, however, we played inside, out of the heat and humidity that defines a Carolina summer.  One of Zeke’s favorite toys ended up being my cell phone.  Like most things, he insisted on gnawing on it, but the way it lights up mesmerized him—a fact that definitely came in handy when I needed to calm him down.  Babies are like pets, apparently, in that their favorite toys are not the ones you bought for them but the everyday items that they discover on their own, including cell phones, door stops, and a piece of yarn.

 

Some of the funniest moments of the week came during feeding time.  Zeke made hilarious faces as I tried to feed him bananas and applesauce, giving me looks that seemed to say, “What are you trying to pull?  This is NOT milk!”  Nonetheless, he’d always open his mouth for more. 

I also got to take him swimming.  He was pretty tired when we went, but he seemed to enjoy splashing and watching the other kids.

 

During the week I began to find it easier and easier to read Zeke’s body language.  I could tell when he was tired, when he was hungry, when he was overwhelmed.  I also found many ways to entertain him: standing next to a window so he could slap it over and over again with his chubby hand, dancing and singing funny made-up songs, playing peek-a-boo.  It was a great week, and I’m so glad I had the chance to be there with him, especially since it may be harder to do once I have a job and live in Boston.  I hope there are more opportunities for us to bond in the future and that he always knows how much I care about and love him.