White House Down : a movie review

Tags

bad marketing, Good movie, movie review, movies, postaday2013

My hubby and I went back to the movie theater. We were originally going to stay at home, I had plans to work outside in the garden, the roses need pruning and sitting by the pool is usually nice, but by 9:30 my hubby and I were roasting in the sun and there was surprisingly not a breeze to be found. The sun felt as if it were hovering just a few feet over our heads so that made short work of our plans to continue doing anything in the garden.

We hadn’t planned to see White House Down because only three months ago we had seen a similar action movie “Olympus has Fallen” with Gerard Butler, a good movie so why see the same premiss again? The marketing machine hadn’t done a very convincing job in making this film very different from the prior action movie targeting the White House, but given the fact that we have seen everything else under the sun, we decided to give it a shot. What’s the worst thing to come from seeing a ho-hum movie, we would be sitting in air-conditioning watching previews and a movie, not that bad of a deal.

All that I can say is that if I were Channing Tatum, Jaime Foxx and Roland Ehrenreich, I would be so very mad at the marketing and publicity arm of the movie studio’s. The movie was really, really good; my hubby went as far as saying “Die Hard” good. There was a surprising element to the entire movie that we weren’t aware of, a brave, smart, determined and gutsy young girl. In my mind she was the X factor that made this movie much, much better than “Olympus has Fallen”.

I’m not going to bore you with the action details or the fighting sequences, those are text book with a few twists but still action movie standards, what set it apart is the hope and faith that is exhibited by a young person. We left the movie theater so happy that we took the chance to see the movie, it was worth it.

We can be taught

Tell us a moment or an incident that you treasure – not necessarily because it brought you happiness, but because it taught you something about yourself.

An important moment for me during my younger days was the day that I went to Barnes and Noble to complete research on what exactly was driving me to want to keep losing weight and pursuing it using any means necessary to the ruin of my health and sanity. I remember first going to the library, my usual refuge from the world and spending hours looking for resources associated with excessive exercising, starvation, and distorted body perception. The research eventually led me to the term anorexia nervosa, a term that I had never heard of before, but mind you this was 1986/1987 and we didn't have Doctor Phil yet. I am not even sure if Oprah was on, if she was, I think that she was focused on her own weight loss, but in an entirely different way. I am pretty sure that Phil Donahue wasn't talking about it. I felt alone in my struggles and I took to my beloved books for the answers. This habitual refuge into books helped to save me from further self-destruction. I came to understand the underlying causes of my newly discovered eating disorder and that helped me immensely in my road towards recovery. I won't dishonor the disorder by saying that there haven't been many lapses in my recovery, there have been quite a few, but for now I am doing so much better. And like many other types of recovery, it is always one day at a time.