Saturday, September 22, 2007

Man of the House


Tommy Lee Jones is a Texas Ranger who's housesitting a group of University of Texas cheerleaders who have witnessed a murder. Either you'll want to watch the movie after reading that, or you won't, so I don't really have to say more. I will, of course.

There's some nice scenery in this one, including some fine shot shots of UT and the Governor's Mansion. Rick Perry, the current gov, whom I loathe, even has a speaking part. The Capitol building stands in for the county, or maybe the federal, courthouse.


The picture begins like a straight action movie with lots of shooting and explosions. It might even have been a good one. But right after that, it becomes an out-and-out comedy.

Jones is the straight-arrow, uptight guy who's going to get loosened up by his association with the life-embracing cheerleaders. He plays it deadpan all the way, and very effectively, too. The cheerleaders wear skimpy clothes. It's thoroughly implausible and, let's face it, dumb. I laughed a lot. You might not.

5 comments:

Benjie said...

My wife loves Tommy Lee (go figure her and older men), so we had to see this one. We were disappointed. The previews were great, but they had all the good gags in the previews that I saw. It was laughable, though. I think my favorite part was Jones showing "hook 'em horns" as a male cheerleader.

mybillcrider said...

For me, the low point was when one of the cheerleaders mentioned a course she'd taken "last quarter." I mean, the movie was filmed in Austin, on the campus. The scriptwriter could at least have checked to see if UT (or, for my Aggie readers, t.u.) was on the semester system.

Anonymous said...

That's always the problem when you know something about the subject - you will inevitably know more than the scriptwriter and the actors.

For instance, there was the Murder, She Wrote where mystery writer Jessica Fletcher went to the big mystery convention, the Boucheron (pronounced in the French style).

*bangs head on wall*

Brent McKee said...

Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. I have difficulty watching any American made movie about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Something like the Sergeant Preston radio or TV shows are so full of historical and technical errors that you can't even count them.

Anonymous said...

Wathching HAWAII FIVE-0 as a resident of the archipelago was always a fun experience; even the non-resident might wonder why the state police force had five members constantly in suits in Hawaii. That their office was apparently in Iolani Palace (rather like having Scotland Yard working out of a wing of Buckingham) was a nice touch as well, as was the administrative dominance of the islands by pale Caucasian men, which had pretty much ceased to be true even by the late '60s when the series started, but network suits probably couldn't handle that truth.