I picked up the 2008 film Get Smart on a whim and watched it a couple of months ago. It was cheap at Target and I had just spent part of last summer watching the Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created TV series. All 5 seasons were pretty cheap from Target. I occasionally get nostalgic for some of the shows that I watched as a youngster and Get Smart was a favorite back in the 60's. It mostly turned out to be fun to watch them again. There's a lot of good and bad jokes, and sometimes Max's stupidity gets a bit trying, but overall it was entertaining. The first couple of seasons might be the best ones to watch but there are entertaining guests and regulars throughout the series. A couple of weeks ago it came up that I had bought the movie adaptation and Mike said he was interested in watching it. Tonight I brought it along and we did watch it. Steve Carell plays Maxwell Smart in the movie and Anne Hathaway plays Agent 99. Alan Arkin plays the Chief and Dwayne Johnson plays a new character, the handsome and dashing Agent 23. There are a nice bunch of good characters actors and comedians rounding out the cast. Look for some of my favorites: Kevin Nealon, Patrick Warburton, Davis Koechner, Terry Crews and Blake Clark. When the movie starts Max is not an agent yet but a Control analyst. He sits at his work station, gathering data, dreaming of passing the field agent test. He failed the first 7 times but Max won't give up. When he finally passes the 8th test the Chief doesn't promote him to agent, feeling he's too valuable as an analyst. When Control is attacked by Kaos and some data is stolen that compromises Control's field agents the Chief, lacking manpower, assigns Max his coveted agent status. He's #86 and it's the best day of his life. Max and 99 head off to Russia on the trail of 
Siegfried. They get attacked on the plane by Dalip Sing Rana or The Great Khali, his professional wrestling name. He's massive. Siegfried is played by Terance Stamp. The original Siegfried, Bernie Kopell, has a tiny cameo. He's pretty much the only one of the original cast to be in the movie. Original TV series producer Leonard Stern plays the poor pilot that gets tossed out of his plane when Max and the Chief commander it. Stern is also the guy who co-invented Mad Libs and he's the Stern of humor publisher Price Stern Sloan. Bill Murray makes a cameo as Agent 13. He's stuck in a tree, all alone, and no one wants to talk to him. Dave Ketchem played Agent 13 in the 1966-67 season. There are some great shots of Moscow when Max and 99 get there. Max kills the bad guy they are investigating and blows up his bakery. Siegfried has a plan to blow up the US president and Control has to stop them. There's lots of action and some of it is pretty good. The jokes are mostly ok. It was fun to watch again. Peter Segal directed the movie and he did a pretty good job. His first movie was the third Naked Gun movie and he directed three Adam Sandler movies before Get Smart, including 50 First Dates. The movie nearly tripled it's 80 million dollar price tag in box office gross and there's talk of a sequel. Carell, according to the Wikipedia, passed on the first script for the sequel. I'd check out a sequel but until that happens I'll be happy to have a copy of the first one on my shelves.
I'll might pick up a copy of Terminator: Salvation if I can find it cheap enough. I'm not going to be in a big hurry though, it's not a movie that I would want to watch all that often. I couldn't remember if I had seen the movie until I started watching it. That's not nescessarily the fault of the movie. I looked it up on my watched movie list. Yep, I'd seen it. Back last Jan 8, 2010, over at Joe's. He'd just got his new 50 inch LG tv and a BluRay of the movie from NetFlix. I don't know if we saw the theatrical version or the director's cut. We watched the 118 minute director's cut tonight. It's three minutes longer. The movie is directed by McG. His first two movies were the Charlie's Angels movies back in 2000 and 2003. I enjoyed those but haven't seen them in a few years. He directed a couple of movies I haven't seen after the CA movies but they don't seem too interesting to me. I probably will never see them. In 2009 he's helming the 4th movie in the Terminator franchise. Christian Bale plays John Conner. He leads a group of soldiers, including Terry Crews, into a Skynet base. They find some info and everyone but John Conner gets slaughtered. It''s a tough, dark, deadly world in the future. In the opening of the movie we join Sam Worthington, playing a murder on death row, who donates his body to Cyberdyne. They pump him full of poison in the death chamber, his POV fades out, and he wakes up 15 years later in John Conner's nightmare world of 2018. He was in storage in that base that John just laid waste to. Sam crawls out of the wreckage to find that there's been an apocalypse and the robots are puttin' some genocide on the human race. There's a rag tag resistance and scattered pockets of humanity left surviving as best they know how. Sam hooks up with John Conner's father Kyle Reese and eventually John. He's got a surprise for the pair of them. There's a lot of robots and explosions and big flying vehicles. There's a lot of punching and crying and anguish. It's loud and overblown for the most part and there's very little humor. I guess I'm not as big a fan of the dark dreary future as I used to be. I didn't find it as good as the first movie in the series, or even the second. I guess I'd rather watch Get Smart again before I get back to this.
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