Written by b Mar 15, 2008

This past Saturday, I was sitting at home staring at my Facebook page, trying to get inspired to go to the gym. The problem with trying to motivate to go to the gym on Saturday is that you always have Sunday as a bargaining chip. Why go on Saturday when Sunday will suck anyway?

As I sat there making mental pros and cons of Saturday gym-going, my phone rang. And by phone, I mean email. And by rang, I mean I hit send/receive. It was my friend, Robin, urging me to come over and either play video games or watch movies. Excited for an excuse to bump my workout to Sunday, I agreed.

Saturday was a beautiful day. The sun was out and it was very mild for mid March. We really should have gone to the park with our roller-blades, but neither of us were in the mood. In fact, I’m not sure my roller-blades still fit me. I haven’t worn them since I used to skate up and down my hallway when I lived in Brooklyn. And it was a short hallway.

When I got to Robin’s, I was happy to find her on the couch with the blinds drawn. The working philosophy was that you can’t feel guilty about not being outside in the gorgeous weather if you can’t SEE it. I’m all for this kind of thinking. I grabbed a spot on the couch and hunkered down to watch the movie already in progress. It was the Clint Eastwood vehicle, “Absolute Power.”

As a side note, when Robin and I tried to guess when this movie came out, we guessed the late 80s. Much to our surprise, the movie was made as recently as 1997. Even more to our surprise was the realization that 1997 was eleven years ago. How the hell did that happen?

In 1997, Absolute Power was probably a really good thriller. In 2008, it is exquisitely cheesy, rife with dramatic, over the shoulder look-backs and pants bucked up close to the breast bone. In 1997, one could just pop on a fake mustache and a hat and walk around unrecognizable to friends, family, and the Secret Service who are trying to kill you. In 2008, if you don a fake mustache, you’d get the crap beaten out of you by your friends and family for being a tool. No one is allowed to wear a mustache except for John Stossel and Magnum PI. No one. And I’m talking to you, John Bolton.

High-waisted pants and over-acting aside, the movie isn’t just bad, it somehow it falls into that elusive genre of It’s So Bad It’s Good. If you watched the movie by yourself, it would be terrible. It is a necessity to watch It’s So Bad It’s Good movies with at least one other person. You have to mock the intense stares at inappropriate times and wonder aloud to someone why, after 75 minutes of trying to kill off Clint Eastwood’s character, do the villains just drive by him (casting an intense stare) when he shows up in a remote location to save his daughter — the daughter who they’ve decided to kill by more creative means than simply gunshot or stabbing, but by pushing her car off a cliff (which, incidentally, gives her ample time to open her door and get out, though she opts to apply the brakes really hard instead). Strange choices these people from 1997 make.

I hope I am not spoiling the movie by telling you the good guys win and the bad guys lose. That’s apparently how 1997 was, devoid of even the smallest hint of irony. Blockbusters of the time may be lacking in complexity, but they do make for great bad movie watching.