Ace Wins

So here's pictures of the stage that we built last night. The kids in the school painted the tarp. There are actually two tarps, and yes, we realize that the colors don't match up, but that wasn't us. We built a wooden frame to support the tarp, the brown paper and the black sheets. I also reran the wires for the microphones (they had all been going over top of the stage before). I still can't believe the thing is as sturdy as it is consider how little overall time was spent putting everything together.


The regular television season is over. We've entered the repeat wasteland and I've burned through all the shows I had stored up on the TiVo that I was even marginally interested in watching but could never find the time. Back to watching movies I suppose. I got Smokin' Aces through Netflix because I had seen the commercials for it when it came out and it looked like an interesting action flick. The movie isn't long on plot, it's about a guy that's connected that decides to turn state evidence and the mob decides they don't want him saying anything. Once word about the size of the bounty hits the streets every hitman (and woman) within driving distance is coming to take the guy out and claim their reward. Stir in some Feds trying to protect him and add a dash of flavor with some behind the scenes manipulations and you have yourself the basic movie. There are a lot of players in this film. In fact part of the whole aspect of the movie is how many people are out to whack this one guy. The movie is very very predictable in that I personally think they telegraph just about everything (except for one minor aspect at the end that I missed). But I didn't rent this one for a twist ending or mystery, it was all for the action scenes. And there's a fair number of them. There are a lot balls / plotlines being juggled simultaneously in this film and it's hard to keep everything tight with that much going on. Having said that, it does a really admirable job of keeping everything moving and staying on message, and they even manage to squeeze in minor bits and pieces of character development here and there (no small task when your cast is twelve plus people). If you do grab this, be sure to watch the outtakes / blooper reel. There's a scene in it with Ben Affleck playing pool where I was just about dying from laughing so hard. Overall if you're looking for an action flick, this one I feel is a bit better than average.