Guilty Pleasure No. 78: Armageddon (dir by Michael Bay)

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Remember that time that Bruce Willis and a team of oil drillers saved all of humanity from a giant asteroid that was apparently the size of Texas?

Sure, you do! Everyone remembers Armageddon!

1998’s Armageddon is a film that doesn’t get a lot of respect but which everyone remembers. There’s been a lot of movies made about giant asteroids on a collision path with the Earth. Ever since scientists announced that a collision with a comet or an asteroid probably killed the dinosaurs, there’s been a somewhat irrational fear that the same thing could happen to us. Back in 1978, Sean Connery and Karl Malden tried to stop a Meteor (and failed). In 1998, the same year that Armageddon came out, Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, and Elijah Wood tried to stop an asteroid from causing a Deep Impact (and failed). Adam McKay made an entire film about everyone saying, “Don’t Look Up,” in an attempt to promote increased panic about climate change (and failed). (“I’m so scared!” Leonardo DiCaprio shouted and audiences responded, “Oh, calm down.”) And yet, it’s Armageddon — ridiculed by critics, endlessly parodied by other movies — that people use as their go-to source for commenting on the prospect of a mass extinction event. Mostly because, in Armageddon, humanity didn’t fail. Bruce Willis showed that asteroid who was boss!

Why do we love Armageddon? A lot of it has to do with the cast. Not only do you have Bruce Willis battling an asteroid but you’ve also got Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Michael Clarke Duncan, Peter Stormare, William Fichtner, and a host of others working with him. You’ve got Billy Bob Thornton working ground control. You’ve got Liv Tyler, somehow managing to give a decent performance even while Ben Affleck attacks her with animal crackers. It’s not just the cast is full of familiar and likable actors. It’s that the members of the cast know exactly what type of film that they’re appearing in and they all give exactly the right type of performance for that film. They deliver their lines with conviction while not making the mistake of taking themselves too seriously. Bruce Willis announces that his crew will destroy that asteroid in return for never having to pay taxes again and he announces with just the slightest hint of a smirk, knowing that the audience is going to cheer that moment.

But really, the real reason why Armageddon has survived that test of time is because it’s just so utterly shameless. Director Michael Bay will never be accused of being a subtle director but Bay instinctively understood that Armageddon was not a film that demanded subtlety. Armageddon is a film that demands that constantly moving camera and all of those carefully composed scenes that were clearly made so they could be included in the trailer. It’s a film about big moments and big emotions. Unlike something like Deep Impact, it doesn’t get bogged down in trying to be better than it actually is. Unlike Don’t Look Now, it doesn’t degenerate into a bunch of histrionic speeches. Armageddon exists to make the audience cheer and it succeeds. It takes guts to include a slow motion scene of a bunch of kids celebrating in front of a faded Kennedy For President poster but Bay is exactly the type of director who can pull that off. Michael Bay’s style is not right for a lot of films. But it was perfect for Armageddon.

As I sit here typing this, there are some people panicking because there’s speculation that a meteor is going approach the Earth in the 2030s. It’ll probably miss us but who knows? But you know what? I’m not worried at all. I’ve seen Armageddon. So, on this International Earth Day, let’s remember the courageous men who saved this planet back in 1998.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

The Challenger (2015, directed by Kent Moran)

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Jaden Miller (Kent Moran, who also directed) is a former honor student who threw away his scholarship to a private school when he got into a fight while defending another student. Having dropped out of high school, Jaden now works as an auto mechanic in the Bronx. When he and his mother (S. Epatha Merkerson) are evicted from their crummy townhouse, Jaden tries to make extra money by becoming a professional boxer. As the “Bronx Boy,” he becomes a local hero and eventually, he wins the chance to challenge the light heavyweight champion of the world (Justin Hartley).

A by-the-numbers boxing movie, The Challenger was the final film of Michael Clarke Duncan and he’s the best thing about the movie. Duncan plays Duane Taylor, the former boxing trainer who dropped out of the spotlight after one of his boxer threw a fight. Duane agrees to train Jaden because he has a secret connection to both Jaden and his adoptive mother. Clarke, with his powerful voice and his infectious laugh, is close-to-perfect in the role and he keeps things interesting, even when the movie sinks into an ocean of cliches. The Challenger was released thee years after Duncan’s tragic death and the end credits feature behind-the-scenes footage of a friendly Duncan smiling and laughing with the film’s crew. The movie may be imperfect but it serves as a tribute to a talented actor who passed away too young.

Shattered Politics #62: Bulworth (dir by Warren Beatty)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, if you’ve ever wondered what happened to Robert Redford’s Bill McKay after he was elected to the U.S. Senate at the end of The Candidate, I imagine that he probably ended up becoming something like the protagonist of 1998’s Bulworth, U.S. Sen. Jay Bulworth.

As played by Warren Beatty, Bulworth is a veteran senator. A former liberal firebrand, he may still decorate his office with pictures of him meeting Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King but Bulworth sold out a long time ago. Now, he just says whatever has to say in order to get elected, including pretending to have a happy marriage. He has become a part of everything that’s wrong with Washington.

Sick of both politics and life in general, Bulworth decides that he’d rather be dead. But, in order to make sure that his daughter collects on his $10,000,000 life insurance policy, Bulworth cannot commit suicide. Instead, he arranges for a contract to be taken out on his life. In two days, Bulworth will be assassinated.

Returning to California for his campaign, Bulworth gets drunk and suddenly starts to say what he actually believes. He attacks the Washington establishment. He attacks the voters. He attacks the insurance companies and comes out for single payer health insurance. With his desperate press secretary (Oliver Platt) chasing behind him, Bulworth spends the night dancing at a club where he discovers marijuana and meets a girl named Nina (Halle Berry).

(Platt, meanwhile, discovers that he really, really likes cocaine.)

Soon, Nina and Bulworth are hiding out in the ghetto, where Bulworth meets both Nina’s brother (Isiah Washington) and local drug dealer, L.D. (Don Cheadle), and gets a lesson about how economics actually work in the ghetto. Soon, Bulworth is appearing on CNN where he raps his new political platform and suggests that the solutions for all of America’s problems would be for everyone to just keep having sex until eventually everyone is the same color.

Of course, what Bulworth doesn’t know is that Nina also happens to be the assassin who has been contracted to kill him…

I have mixed feelings about Bulworth. On the one hand, the film starts out strong. You don’t have to agree with the film’s politics in order to appreciate the film’s passion, Bulworth is an angry film and one that’s willing to say some potentially unpopular things. It’s a film about politics that doesn’t resort to the easy solutions that were proposed by some of the other films that I’ve reviewed for Shattered Politics. Warren Beatty does a pretty good job of portraying Bulworth’s initial mental breakdown and Oliver Platt is a manic wonder as he consumes more and more cocaine.

But, once Warren Beatty starts rapping, the film starts to fall apart and becomes a bit too cartoonish for its own good. You get the feeling that Warren Beatty, at this point, is just trying to live out the liberal fantasy of being the only wealthy white man in America to understand what it’s like to be poor and black in America.

Bulworth starts out well but ultimately, it begins better than it ends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SgQKpWGD4

Trailer: Green Lantern (2nd Official Trailer)

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Arleigh

The WonderCon 2011 exclusive trailer and footage was a major step in creating major buzz and hype for Warner Brothers’ and DC Entertainment upcoming superhero film Green Lantern. With just a little over a month left before the film premieres the second (most likely the final trailer for the film) trailer has been released and whatever doubts early marketing and ads the film seemed to give rise to have gone away with this final release.

Green Lantern is sort of the Iron Man of the DC Comics pantheon in that he’s one of the more powerful characters in that universe, but he never got to the level of iconic status as Superman and Batman. There’s a reason why the only DC comic characters to have sustained any sort of film franchise have been Superman and Batman. The Green Lantern character was never about fighting evil on Earth. His fight was always on a much more cosmic-scale and this trailer shows that the danger in the Green Lantern is cosmic in scale even. The last superhero to attempt such a concept story-wise was the Fantastic Four sequel with Silver Surfer and Galactus. That didn’t turn out as well as many hoped it would. Here’s to hoping that Green Lantern will succeed where the Fantastic Four sequel failed.

Green Lantern is set for a June 17, 2011 release. It will come out in both 2D and 3D (RealD and IMAX 3D).

Your Highness (Official Trailer)

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Arleigh

With all the talk of Natalie Portman as the front-runner to win Best Actress in this upcoming Oscars (hope I didn’t just jinx her chances) for her role as Nina in Aronofsky’s Black Swan it would seem she has two films to follow her critically-acclaimed performance. One just came out this weekend and not what many of her fans would consider as worthy of her talents after what she did in Black Swan.

I am talking about the romantic-comedy No Strings Attached where she is paired up with one Ashton Kutcher. To say that critics didn’t like this film would be an understatement. The fact that it was the number one film during it’s first weekend release just boggles the mind.

The other film she has coming out soon after Black Swan if the fantasy comedy directed by the guy who made the hilarious Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green) and stars Danny McBride, James Franco, Zooey Deschanel and Justin Theroux. The film is called Your Highness and Portman plays the warrior Isabel and in the trailer shows that she can dish it out when it’s time to be fightin’ ’round the world.

Though I’m sure that one thing which sold this fantasy comedy to her male fans (probably quite a bit of her female fans as well) is the bit where she’s about to go bathe in the river. That and her wearing period style corset and such. Well, just go watch the trailer and decide for yourself.