Frank Moses is bored.  He lives in an unremarkable house, in an unremarkable suburb.  The high point of his month is chatting with his retirement plan’s customer service rep when his monthly check never arrives.  Or when he tears up the check to have an excuse to call and chat with her about her life and the newest paperback espionage thriller she’s reading.

Frank is retired, but not really liking it much.   Especially when people start shooting at him in the middle of the night.  That’s enough to bring anyone out of retirement.

Turns out Frank is actually RED: “Retired/Extremely Dangerous”   The designation given to retired black-ops CIA agents when they want out.  And what happens when the bad guys come after a RED agent?  He’ s going to fight back – after he figures out what in the heck is going on and who’s after him this time.  And he’ll need help from the rest of his old team of course.

Based on the DC serial of the same name, and directed by Robert Schwentke (Time Travelers Wife/Flight Plan)  RED is a fun espionage/caper film  starring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Dreyfus.

To explain who does what to who and why would give it all away,  but picture Dame Helen Mirren dressed to the 9′s firing an enormous machine gun in a parking ramp, John Malkovich chasing the bad guys on foot while wearing a huge bomb strapped to his chest, and Bruce Willis getting the girl.

What do you get when you take a handful of  action movie heroes from the last three decades, add a couple professional wrestlers, a martial artists master, an ex NFL Line Backer turned actor, two notoriously creepy film bad guys, and a whole lot of guns?  You get   “The Expendables.”

The cast is a who’s who list of tough guys – Sylvester Stallone,  Jason Statham, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, and Eric Roberts.

Now I’ll admit – The Expendables is not a plot heavy film.  And it won’t ruin it if I give you the basics:  As the leader of a crew of mercenaries, Barney Ross (Stallone)  is approached by the mysterious “Mr Church” (Willis) about a job.  It seems that Mr. Church and the people he works for want Ross and his team to remove a dictator from power in a small island country in the Caribbean.  The fact that Mr. Church most likely works for the CIA makes  Ross very cautious, so he and one of his team (Statham) fly down and enter the county under cover to check out the situation for themselves.  After meeting up with their island contact they discover that the big trouble is really a rogue CIA agent turned drug kingpin (Eric Roberts).  When their cover story gets blown all hell breaks loose and they race to get off the island alive, bringing their contact out with them.  But of course she refuses to leave at the last minute.  They manage to get out in a blaze of bullets and explosions worthy of any good action flick.  But once back in the US, Stallone’s conscious gets to him and he decides to go back himself and bring his contact out.   And in true action hero movie style his whole team decides to come along to watch his back.

I warned you – not the most amazing plot.  But who goes to an Action film for the plot?   You really go for the fight scenes, the car chases, and the explosions.  And The Expendables has those.  LOTS of those.  And the fact that most of these guys are middle aged or older, makes the fight sequences even more impressive.

Special effects technology has improved greatly since the action films of the 80′s and the special effects in this movie were great.  And as much as I hate to admit it, I replayed a few of the gun fight scenes just to watch the special effects a second time.  Gross, but very well done.  They managed to have a very high bad-guy-death-count while showing a surprisingly small amount of blood.  And there was some pretty impressive editing and camera work as well, especially in the pickup truck chase sequence.

And while you could predict how the movie would end from the very beginning (guess who wins) the ending was well done, and definitely a set up for a sequel (which is due out in 2012).   But it was lots of fun for a stormy Sunday afternoon.  If you’re an action movie fan,  and you didn’t have to Google more than two of the stars names, you’ll like this one.

I’ve fallen in love.  Not with a person but with a place I have yet to visit:  Italy!  Someday I’ll go there, but for now I go there through the movies.

Here are some of the movies that made me fall in love with Italy.

Cinema Paradiso – the story of a young boy Toto growing up in a Sicilian village in the late 1950′s.  Toto’s best friend is old Alfredo the projectionist at the village movie cinema, and through this friendship Toto develops a love for movies. A love that will change the course of his life.   Starring Philippe Noiret, Jacques Perrin, and Salvatore Cascio.  Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film 1990.  Filmed in Palermo, Sicily.

Under the Tuscan Sun – An American writer who travels alone to Tuscany to mend a broken heart.  Without planning to she falls in love – not with a man but with an old house.   She sets out to restore the house, and finds a new life in the process.  Starring Diane Lane, Sandra Oh and Vincent Riotta, this was filmed in Florence, Tuscany.

Much Ado About Nothing -  Shakespeares’  story of young lovers Claudio and Hero who are to be wed, and Hero’s sharp tongued older sister Beatrice and the man she loves to hate, Benedick.  Or does she hate to love him?  Starring Kenneth Brannagh,  Emma Thompson, and  Kate Beckinsale, this was filmed throughout Tuscany.

Romeo & Juliet – Probably the most well known movie interpretation of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy of star-crossed lovers,  Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet  was filmed in and around Rome, but takes place in Verona Italy.

I can only imagine that Inside Job, which won this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary, is not popular among the Wall Street and Washington DC set.  The film makes them all look incredibly bad.

Charles Ferguson, who also directed No End in Sight, takes a slow, deliberate approach to explaining reforms made after the Crash of 1929, deregulation in the 1980′s and 1990′s, the housing bubble, the rise of financial derivatives, the events of the financial crisis, and the government’s response (such as TARP).  Although narrated by Matt Damon, a great deal of the film is based on interviews with people from across the political spectrum, including economists, government officials, world leaders, regulators, politicians, lobbyists, bankers, and journalists.  Ferguson is pretty tough in his interviews and does prompt several moments where “I’m not answering that” or “this interview is over”  are exclaimed.  I’m surprised that some of them ever agreed to be interviewed for the film.

Although this film is very compelling, it’s a downer. But Ferguson is good at engaging the viewers’ emotions. You will get mad.  You will want to make a genuine, impassioned speech resembling something like Howard Beale’s in Network.

For a great audio overview of the financial crisis, check out This American Life–Your Guide to the Meltdown.  We also have a selection of books on the subject if you want to learn more and explore different sides of the issues.

If his new exercise DVD series counts as evidence, it is proof that Bob Harper likes to make people suffer.  His Inside Out Method DVDs are tough.  Tough! Personally, I found the Inside Out Method videos more difficult than ones I’ve done by Jillian Michaels.   If you want a step up from Banish Fat Boost Metabolism or No More Trouble Zones, check out  these:

Body Rev Cardio Conditioning includes two workouts: a twenty minute strength training routine and a full hour that incorporates both cardio and toning.  In the one hour workout, you start with several sets of deadlifts followed by some kettlebell inspired moves with double arm and suitcase swings.  He uses these weighted moves as a recovery between jump squats, weighted jumping jacks, weighted jump rope, mountain climbers, and fast feet to 180 jumps.  It isn’t just the difficulty of the moves that makes this workout intense.  It is the amount of repetitions and the length of time a move is performed.  He also throws in a couple of scorpion push-ups.

If you are interested in strength training, try Pure Burn, Super Strength. The DVD includes a full hour workout and a twenty minute beginner’s routine. The full workout covers your arms (bicep curls, tricep overhead presses, arms raises, and shoulder presses), legs (squats, lunges, matrix lunges, and chair squats), and abs (crunches, planks, side knee planks, and twisting planks).  Of course, there are other moves that work everything, such as down and outs, and push ups into a weighted t-stand. The t-stands are very challenging.

My one problem with the series is that Harper doesn’t really do the routines, but he has three exercisers in each video.  In Pure Burn, Super Strength, they have a hard time doing some of the exercises, especially at the end.  I’m not sure why this was done.  I prefer to have the people in the video do the exercise so I can learn how to do it correctly.  Fortunately, most of the moves are familiar if you have attended fitness classes or used other videos.  If you are just starting out in exercise, I would wait on these videos and try something a little less demanding.  As always, talk to your physician before starting to exercise.