There are some nights when you just want to watch some really bad TV. And thankfully, in the UK, five exist for just that purpose. Tonight’s special was a Steve Oedekerk cliche-a-thon in the shape of “Nothing to Lose”. Starring Tim Robbins (who had a high point in 1994 with both The Shawshank Redemption and The Hudsucker Proxy, but seems to have not made a good film before or after that), Martin Lawrence (Yet Another Eddie Murphy Wannabe, but not a bad one, to be fair) and That Guy Out Of Scrubs Who Plays Dr Cox as some psycho highway robber dude, it’s a completely cliched, no-brain-required, almost so-bad-it’s-good waste of a couple of hours. I’d never recommend anyone actually go out and try to see a film that five have broadcast, but as a way to provide diverting sound and images for a couple of hours in an evening, they’re unparalleled. Hurrah for five.
In other news, a large part of the northeast coast of America is currently without electricity. To put this into some kind of perspective, it’s roughly equivalent to the entire national grid turning off; you’d imagine there were some kind of backup systems or redundancies in the grid to allow for this sort of thing, but no, apparently not. And you thought it was bad when the substation down the road blew and took your street out…
I’ve just watched pictures on the news of New York’s streets filled with people walking rather than cars because the traffic light were out. It’s amazing how much society relies on something as simple as traffic lights. I just thought ‘no power for the computers!’
Oooh – controversial? Tim Robbins? Good in only two movies? What about The Player, Bob Roberts, Short Cuts, Arlington Road and Jacob’s Ladder? And who could forget the classic masterpiece, Howard The Duck? Well okay, maybe not that one!
I’ll confess to not having seen any of those films; and I’m also willing to concede he was good in High Fidelity (I didn’t even realise it was him). But for heaven’s sake, he was in Toy Soldiers. And Twister. And AntiTrust *shudder*.
This post is definitely a candidate for ‘When IMDB goes wrong!’
And having just looked at imdb.com there are definitely other films that Tim Robbins has done that are good.
In fairness, they also showed the Matrix first. Some of their stuff isn’t bad – it’s the bought-in American dreck that’s the problem…