Earth go boom. Happy.
Deary me, clearly an official Week From Hell, haven't posted since, gawsh, Tuesday. Sorry, internets. Inadequate brain/time representation in the State of Me. Four more days and I'm on leave for two weeks. If I keep the chocolate biscuit supply constant, it's conceivable I may escape before I actually slaughter a student.
In keeping with the current theme of Brain? What Brain?, this morning we (jo&stv + self) took ourselves off to see 2012, on the grounds that if you're going to watch California crumble, tilt and slide into the sea, it may as well be on the big screen. Before anyone feels the need to pillory my taste in film, let me hasten to add we fully expected it to be loud, stupid, clichéd, cheesy and dire, and I'm happy to say it delivered exactly what it says on the box. It was also, in a heady, shitballs-retarded sort of way, and probably as a direct result of our cheerfully low expectations, bloody good fun. The cast was a bit patchy - am I alone in finding John Cusack increasingly unappealing? he seems to be creeping inexorably into Nicholas Cage territory, although mercifully without the wig malfunctions. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt were watchable, though, and I recognised with glee a slightly heartstring-tugging turn from Blu Mankuma, who's horribly familiar most recently from Supernatural as a nice-but-doomed doctor, and way back when in X-Files. Also, bonus Insane!Woody Harrelson, although that might actually be a tautology.
This thing has not much in the way of plot, just enough to vaguely point all the special effects in an approximate direction as they stagger along like drunken juggernauts. I thus feel absolutely no compunction in spoilering it all to hell, it won't affect your enjoyment of the movie one iota since the clichés broadcast their inevitable upshot VERY LOUDLY from the word go, and in any event all the really cool catastrophe sequences are in the trailer. In terms of clichés it has 'em all: separated couple with Cute Kids, check, and Inevitable Reconciliation. Nice Guy new boyfriend, check (doomed, obviously). Hairs-Breadth Last-Minute Escapes, some self-sacrificing, check. Doomed Extraneous Ethnic Characters, check (old black dudes, Russian mobster's moll, Russian mobster, nice Indian physicist and family, Wise/Wizened Gnomic Tibetan Monk). Really Bad Science, check (lots of neutrinos! start acting as a wave! new particle invented!). "My God" count, only 2, but "This is impossible!" probably four or five, I lost count. Entirely spurious moral message tacked on in defiance of logic, consistency or justice, check. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, check.
California go boom. White House go boom (gets an aircraft carrier dropped on it, which I can only assume is an entirely unintended ironic commentary on the Bush regime). Yellowstone Park go boom. Hawaii go boom. Tokyo go boom under crashing tsunami waves. The Cape ends up, in a move which caused the entire movie house to collapse giggling, as the New Hope for all the giant space-agey arks, since apparently the Drakensberg are the new highest point in the world. (All the fancy tech for keeping track of things signally fails to go boom, fortunately for the film's overall comprehensibility. But they still can't pronounce "Drakensberg"). Overall blood, none at all bar scratches, scrapes, one lost leg and a dead moose. Kids and small dogs entirely unharmed, save the little Indian boy, who was a chess-playing geek and presumably doesn't count.
Overall cheese factor: those little highly-processed soft cheese triangles in the individual wrappers. Not much flavour, very packaged, curiously more-ish despite being fundamentally disgusting and leaving you with a thin film of plastic on your tongue.
Somewhere in my future is an extended meditation on exactly why it is that disaster movies make me so incalculably happy. I can't work out if it's my primitive sense of justice, my inbuilt belief in the ultimate insignificance of humanity despite its delusions to the contrary, or if I'm just a nasty, vindictive sort of person, but Earth go boom, I'm happy.
Now I go forth to assist the Evil Landlord in his fixed, Germanicly stubborn purpose of braaing despite a merry south-easter. If I'm off the 'net for a while, it's because a low-flying tree branch has clocked me and laid me out.
In keeping with the current theme of Brain? What Brain?, this morning we (jo&stv + self) took ourselves off to see 2012, on the grounds that if you're going to watch California crumble, tilt and slide into the sea, it may as well be on the big screen. Before anyone feels the need to pillory my taste in film, let me hasten to add we fully expected it to be loud, stupid, clichéd, cheesy and dire, and I'm happy to say it delivered exactly what it says on the box. It was also, in a heady, shitballs-retarded sort of way, and probably as a direct result of our cheerfully low expectations, bloody good fun. The cast was a bit patchy - am I alone in finding John Cusack increasingly unappealing? he seems to be creeping inexorably into Nicholas Cage territory, although mercifully without the wig malfunctions. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt were watchable, though, and I recognised with glee a slightly heartstring-tugging turn from Blu Mankuma, who's horribly familiar most recently from Supernatural as a nice-but-doomed doctor, and way back when in X-Files. Also, bonus Insane!Woody Harrelson, although that might actually be a tautology.
This thing has not much in the way of plot, just enough to vaguely point all the special effects in an approximate direction as they stagger along like drunken juggernauts. I thus feel absolutely no compunction in spoilering it all to hell, it won't affect your enjoyment of the movie one iota since the clichés broadcast their inevitable upshot VERY LOUDLY from the word go, and in any event all the really cool catastrophe sequences are in the trailer. In terms of clichés it has 'em all: separated couple with Cute Kids, check, and Inevitable Reconciliation. Nice Guy new boyfriend, check (doomed, obviously). Hairs-Breadth Last-Minute Escapes, some self-sacrificing, check. Doomed Extraneous Ethnic Characters, check (old black dudes, Russian mobster's moll, Russian mobster, nice Indian physicist and family, Wise/Wizened Gnomic Tibetan Monk). Really Bad Science, check (lots of neutrinos! start acting as a wave! new particle invented!). "My God" count, only 2, but "This is impossible!" probably four or five, I lost count. Entirely spurious moral message tacked on in defiance of logic, consistency or justice, check. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, check.
California go boom. White House go boom (gets an aircraft carrier dropped on it, which I can only assume is an entirely unintended ironic commentary on the Bush regime). Yellowstone Park go boom. Hawaii go boom. Tokyo go boom under crashing tsunami waves. The Cape ends up, in a move which caused the entire movie house to collapse giggling, as the New Hope for all the giant space-agey arks, since apparently the Drakensberg are the new highest point in the world. (All the fancy tech for keeping track of things signally fails to go boom, fortunately for the film's overall comprehensibility. But they still can't pronounce "Drakensberg"). Overall blood, none at all bar scratches, scrapes, one lost leg and a dead moose. Kids and small dogs entirely unharmed, save the little Indian boy, who was a chess-playing geek and presumably doesn't count.
Overall cheese factor: those little highly-processed soft cheese triangles in the individual wrappers. Not much flavour, very packaged, curiously more-ish despite being fundamentally disgusting and leaving you with a thin film of plastic on your tongue.
Somewhere in my future is an extended meditation on exactly why it is that disaster movies make me so incalculably happy. I can't work out if it's my primitive sense of justice, my inbuilt belief in the ultimate insignificance of humanity despite its delusions to the contrary, or if I'm just a nasty, vindictive sort of person, but Earth go boom, I'm happy.
Now I go forth to assist the Evil Landlord in his fixed, Germanicly stubborn purpose of braaing despite a merry south-easter. If I'm off the 'net for a while, it's because a low-flying tree branch has clocked me and laid me out.