Reviews From the Road

When the pep band goes on away trips, we spend a lot of time on the bus. Instead of being productive To make the bus ride less monotonous, we watch movies (or anything on DVD; when we went to Madison Square Garden last semester we watched two and a half hours straight of Community).

Over February break (six weeks ago . . .), on my first overnight trip with the pep band, we ended up watching three movies, one on the way to Dartmouth, one between Dartmouth and Harvard, and one on the way back to Ithaca. After our lunch stop on the first day of the trip, we put in Dodgeball.

There are some movies that you watch for their story, animation, cinematography, character development, or thought-provoking ideas. Dodgeball is not one of them. The entirety of the movie was slightly totally ridiculous. That doesn't mean I disliked the movie; in fact I enjoyed it, but if you do watch it, be warned that there is very little substance to the movie. A group of guys joins a dodgeball tournament to try and win the prize money that will save their gym from closure, and that’s about all there is to the movie.

Then after the Dartmouth game on our way to Harvard, we watched Love Story (spoilers ahead). There are only two scenes that the pep band likes – the beginning, where Cornell beats Harvard in hockey, and the end, where Jenny dies. During this trip, however, we watched the whole movie, which contained a contrived plot, terrible dialogue, and seven thousand renditions of the Love Story theme. It was somehow nominated for both Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards and spawned a sequel, which was universally acknowledged as being awful. I thought Love Story was so bad that I liked it. Time to find the sequel.

The last movie of the trip was Django Unchained, which would not have been my film of choice. We were warned that it was a violent movie before it started. That was a very accurate statement. The beginning has some violence, and there’s some scattered throughout the middle, but things really pick up in the ending sequence. Up until that point, the violence had been excessive, but in the last scenes it’s so utterly unnecessary it’s absurd. The movie’s about a freed slave who becomes a bounty hunter, so you know there’s going to be some shooting, and then the last half hour happens, and it’s a little more than some shooting. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, and if I did, it wouldn’t be soon. The movie was well done, but the violence is somewhat off-putting.

Overall, it was an interesting mix of movies on this trip. Nothing fantastic, but nothing I regret watching either, though my brain cells might beg to differ about Dodgeball.