First things first: I saw Star Trek today. Prepare for a full write up some time early next week. The quick review is that I liked it and think the super nerdy comic book lead-in was helpful in filling in the gaps.
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Last night the Doctor Who party ended up being a little too hastily planned, so those in attendance ended up joining me in scrapping the Who action in favor of some good old-fashioned "Guy Movie" fun. We watched the most ridiculous scenes from Commando and Rambo, including the "Schwarzenegger kills an entire compound of drug lord soldiers and Rambo destroys pretty much everything with that huge gun" before watching Taken. For two of us, it was a repeat viewing; for the others, it was a first time experience.
Upon re-watching Taken, I noticed a few things not apparent on the first viewing. For one thing, the whole "setting things up" trope takes much longer the second time around, mostly because you know the movie can and will be more effective once Liam Neeson gets to France. That renders the first fifteen to twenty minutes pretty much unnecessary and they accordingly feel much longer.
The second tidbit we fixated on is that Taken pretty much takes the position that "Mass Murder is preferable to Selling People" in moral equivalency. In Commando, Arnold is killing everyone guarding the person who kinapped his daughter and because they're shooting at him. In Rambo, John Rambo gets all medieval on the bad guys because they want to kill missionaries for pretty much no reason and someone hires him to find them.
In Taken, Bryan Mills not only kills the Albanians who kidnapped his daughter, but he pretty much kills anyone he meets before and after that. If you're involved in any way in the human trading business, you're dead meat because Liam Neeson is going to murder you and continue killing. Even if you're just kind of hanging out on a boat, you'll be lucky if he doesn't just throw you overboard. In fact, that's the nicest thing he does to anybody in the second half of the film.
After the Albanian shootout, Taken introduces us to a number of characters simply so Liam Neeson can kill them, and at the end (SPOILER) he gets to go back to America, no questions asked. It was also pointed out that he took advantage of France's health care system beforehand to recoup from being stabbed by an Arab stereotype. Now that's some lesson in morality.
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Finally, whilst surfing the Playstation Store, I noticed that two movies are inexplicably available in HD. I've never heard of Robot Holocaust before, but I suddenly need to see it and $4.50 doesn't seem so unreasonable.
The other movie available in HD for no apparent reason: Troll 2.
Guess what just made its way onto the Summer Fest lineup. No seriously, take a guess.
If you guessed "Not Troll 2", you are wrong.
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