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I love sleeper spy agent movies! Salt was non-stop action even though its run-time was only an hour and thirty-nine minutes, which in my opinion definitely goes to show that longer isn’t necessarily better as is the case with many inflated Hollywood movies these days. The spy-thriller plot is complex enough to keep you guessing, and Angelina Jolie turns out a great performance in this film, mixing in a little Lara Croft with some Mrs. Smith action from her acting repertoire. Although it’s only rated at 58% on the Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer, I still enjoyed it from start to finish.

Evelyn Salt is a CIA operative, sworn to defend her country. When a KGB defector shows up at CIA headquarters and says that Salt is a trained Russian sleeper agent (insinuated into American society as a child as part of an elite operation), who is going to kill the Russian President, Salt is immediately on the defensive. She wants to make sure her husband is safe so she breaks out of lock-down causing a massive full-on agent chase with some nice trailer-truck leap-frogging stunts. In a complete reversal of what I expected (that she was a good guy), she makes her way to NY, assassinates the Russian President, and then turns herself in. Escaping police custody, she meets up with the Russian defector on a barge where he kills her husband in cold blood. Masking her devastation, Salt learns that it is all part of a greater plot to kill the US President and start a multi-nation war to bring down the United States. She eliminates everyone on the barge, and heads to the White House to stop a series of carefully pre-planned events involving a lot of sleeper Russian agents like herself. In a heart-stopping sequence from where one of the Russian spies makes a move on the US President, Salt makes it to the safe-bunker where she learns that her CIA partner is also part of the Russian mission, and is about to set off a nuclear missile. She breaks in and stops him but not before the SWAT team takes her down, believing her to be the bad guy. In the end, she manages to escape with the reluctant help of the main agent in pursuit who believes her account of what really happened.

There aren’t a lot of special effects or CGI, just awesome plain vanilla action that keeps you on the edge of your seat. I found Angelina Jolie’s performance as a spy to be exactly what it needed to be – great fight scenes, decent acting with not a ton of needless dialogue, and a great poker face. She is a spy after all! The convoluted conspiracy theory plot had me guessing as to where Salt’s loyalty lay, but in the end, she did prove to be one of the good guys and saves the world from nuclear disaster. I loved the twist where she shoots the Russian President with a paralysis toxin from a spider, because she knows that if she doesn’t do it, someone else will do it for real. I thought the fleshing out of the real plot (complete world anarchy) was believable, and Salt ends up being the rogue Russian-turned-American spy who brings the whole conspiracy down.

Overall, Salt was good, mindless but engaging fun. As an action film, in my opinion it held its own against the Bourne movies or even the James Bond franchise. Just because Salt’s a chick doesn’t mean that she can’t lay a good beat-down on the bad guys. Cool, action summer flick, plus the boys will like the part where she, um, takes off her undies to block a surveillance camera. Part Bond, part Basic Instinct, what’s not to like? I would rate Salt 3 and a half out of 5 stars.

So yes, I am absolutely guilty of not updating as regularly as I have been, and I have no real excuse other than I’ve been traveling in Europe and haven’t come across any “fantasy-esque” or writing-related things to talk about. Still, it’s a good excuse! In the last couple days, I’ve been to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and back. And in the middle of all that, I had the incredible good fortune to stand stage-side at a Damian Marley and Nas concert at the Couleur Cafe (an amazing urban world-music festival) in Brussels. Music does inspire me to write so maybe this little hiatus of mine will have some good results!

Check out a couple photos I took below.

Wicked: The Musical is based on the book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. It’s an awesome back-story on the classic fantasy tale, The Wizard of Oz. I’d always wanted to see the musical but just never got around to it until recently. It was amazing! I read the book a few years ago and enjoyed it, but nothing prepared me for how funny and entertaining the musical was going to be.

Wicked tells the story of how Elphaba, The Wicked Witch of the West, came to be – her birth, her school years, being roommates with the good witch, Glinda, at Shiz University, and how they both ended up in Oz. If you know anything about the book, you’ll know that it is an incredibly insightful story about politics and greed and clever machinations, and how environment can shape the purest intentions into something else entirely. It’s a classic story of “beauty and the beast” – why is the beauty automatically good while the beast is automatically evil? Does being different make someone a bad person? Can someone who is intrinsically good become evil due to influences outside of their control? Can you be forced to be something because of how you look or how you are perceived? In Wicked, the answer to the last three is yes, and the moral of the story is the classic – don’t judge a book by its cover.

I absolutely loved both girls in Wicked: The Musical. Glinda was charming, feather-headed, vapid, and over-excited about everything. She was hysterical – trying to teach “Elphie” how to do her signature hair toss. Lean back and toss toss! Hilarious! You couldn’t help not like Glinda despite her flaws, and you kept hoping that she would come through for her friend, Elphaba, despite the social pressure. She does in the end, but it’s too late…their fates are all sealed.

Elphaba was magnificent, trying to be so good and just getting the short end of the stick every time. All she wanted to do was to fit in, be loved, and prove to her family that she was worth something. It’s so interesting to see how someone can be shaped into something when they become cornered and have nowhere else to go (if you corner a cat, it’s going to scratch you). She has some funny moments too – her love/hate relationship with Glinda, trying to be more popular like Glinda, and falling in love (um, with Glinda’s boyfriend). I really connected with her and when she sang “Defying Gravity” I got goosebumps. It was heartbreaking to see her lose everything (her love, her integrity, her life) when she’d had so little to begin with. Whoever thought you’d empathize with the “wicked” witch who turned out to be not so wicked after all? Just goes to show – you can’t possibly know what makes someone they way they are.

I love how you learn the back-stories of the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow, as well as the back-story of how the infamous jeweled shoes came to be before Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. After Elphaba tries to help her disabled sister walk by creating the magic shoes, there’s her classic line, “Oh, the injustice of it! What sort of person steals a dead woman’s shoes?” Gives a new take on Dorothy, doesn’t it?

I LOVED this musical and would see it again in a heartbeat. I would rate Wicked 4 and a half stars, it’s one of the best I’ve seen on Broadway (the half star deduction is for the male lead – he was completely overshadowed both in voice and stage presence by the strength of the two female leads, and he seemed way too Disney-prince-ish for the role). Other than that, it was wicked awesome!

Columbus’ Top 4 Rules for Surviving Zombieland

01. Cardio (be fit; the fat guys get eaten first)
02. Beware of Bathrooms (zombies go for easy prey)
03. Seatbelts (self-explanatory)
04. Double Tap (always shoot or hit a zombie a second time just to make sure they’re really dead. Again.)

Zombieland definitely lived up to its 89% tomato-meter rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was AWESOME! Let me start by saying I am the furthest thing from a zombie fan you will ever find. Night of the Living Dead gave me nightmares for years when I was a kid – when you’re fourteen and dreaming of half rotten corpses chasing you for fresh brains, it’s not like you go looking for zombie films of any kind. Period. It was a major feat to even get me to go see Shaun of the Dead, which I ended up quite enjoying despite the miles and miles of gore.  “Oh, my God! She’s so drunk!” I still chuckle at Shaun and Ed thinking the zombie chick in their back yard is drunk out of her mind.

That said, I do have to say however, (and I know some will disagree), that I loved Zombieland WAY MORE than Shaun of the Dead. Although the main character Jesse Eisenberg was more or less a wannabe Michael Cera, the quirky writing and the rapport between the four main characters more than made up for that after the first ten minutes. Woody Harrelson was fantastic, as bad ass as he was in Natural Born Killers, just with a sense of humor, a talent for killing zombies, and a manic obsession with Twinkies. Zombieland was certainly bloody enough – picture a wife chewing on her husband’s intestines and then cracking his arm bone to suck out the marrow in all its graphic gory glory. Next picture a soccer mom in a minivan being chased by a fairy princess party – 12 year old princess zombies? You got it. Notwithstanding the ample display of blood and guts, Zombieland was also a feast of comedy that had me laughing throughout. Add in a surprise cameo appearance by Bill Murray and a hilarious reenactment of Ghostbusters, and you’ve got some sheer comic genius. I laughed until my sides hurt. To top everything off, there’s also a sweet cat and mouse romance between Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and Wichita (Emma Stone from Superbad), that gets cemented when he changes rule #17 – Don’t be a hero to Be a Hero by literally hammering a zombie clown (see insert) to save his love. You also won’t be disappointed by the awesome music soundtrack.

All in all, blood and guts and flesh-eating zombies aside, I give Zombieland a double-tap thumbs up. As Tallahassee says, “nut up or shut up!” GET THERE.

Check out the Bloodspell music playlist that inspired and kept me going while I wrote my novel!