Reel of Fish VIII
The hell? It's March 16th already? That doesn't make any sense! How can it possibly be that far into the year? I've barely even had time to think about the vast, horrific gulf of time spreads like a pool of nothingness between the beginning and end of time in which man and all his useless works are but the flutter of a dying hummingbird! I've hardly meditated at all on the feeble pointlessness of human life and the hollow emotions they lay claim to and the tintype souls to which we cling so desperately as to baffle the gods when the things are hardly worth the ectoplasm they're printed on! I haven't even mastered the Soldier's rocket jump in Team Fortress 2! And here it's already St. Patrick's Weekend. Which means I have to start thinking about dying my underwear green and how to get cans of Guinness into the Apple Store.
Well, one thing you can be sure of, children of the Revolution, and that's that there'll be a fresh edition of Reel of Fish every week and that I'll be drunk as hell tomorrow.
Two. Two things you can be sure of.
Well, okay, I might be a week or two behind in my Reels, so I guess I was right the first time. But that's one more thing to rely on than any church, lover or government can offer, baby.
So here we are at number 8, slowly catching up to the elusive, arbitrary goal I set for myself. And what better way to celebrate than by reviewing a movie that I spent 12 months swearing before God and Heaven and any saints who had a moment to spare that I would never see? But that's what happens when you're out on the town, cruising scenic West Palm Beach in the cool dappled midnight, driving around in a retrofitted police cruiser with a half-mad Army veteran and a Puerto Rican with a transplanted heart. It's either catch the midnight show at the Regal 18 or go to the Monkey Bar. But I wouldn't want to go to the Monkey Bar unless I was drinking banana daiquiris. And contrary to what you might be led to expect by their name, their banana daiquiris are TERRIBLE. Actually, I don't like most banana daiquiris. If I am to be honest with myself (always an exceedingly dangerous proposition), I think what I really want when I order a daiquiri is the Banana Kong that TGI Friday's used to serve, which was basically a banana milkshake with a tankard of rum poured in.
And this week, the midnight show at the luxurious and neon-laden Regal 18 (which is, if you'll go back a few sentences, what we're talking about) was none other than the much-heralded instant classic:
Week 8 of 51 - 10,000 B.C.
Director: Roland "Historical Accuracy" Emmerich
Starring: Steven "Warren Peace" Strait, Camilla "Devil in a Blue Toga" Belle, Cliff "Seriously, This Extremely Exotic Dude's Name Is Cliff Curtis?" Curtis, and a double handful of scrubs, has-beens, never-wases, and extras from Clan of the Cave Bear and The Mummy, and the tiger.
What It Is - It's the usual story. A tribe of well-groomed Californian mastodon hunters and the Eskimo shaman lady from The Simpsons Movie are busy hunting elephants when they find a blue-eyed girl from somewhere far away. They raise her while the hero, whose misunderstood father secretly leaves to go learn the secrets of corn since a man can only eat so much charred mastodon, spends all his time pining after her. Eventually the black-armored horsemen from Conan the Barbarian ride in and destroy all their tents and mastodon meat smokers, and the blue-eyed girl is kidnapped by Arnold Vosloo's evil cousin. The hero and his mentor and some spear-carriers follow the evil band on foot, passing through every biome on the face of the Earth in the course of their pursuit.
They meet an array of ethnically diverse warriors who agree to help them as they chase the horsemen all the way to, apparently, ancient Egypt, which is ruled by an enormous, shrouded alien (or possibly Ru Paul, it's hard to tell) and administered by a few dozen Deep Roys wearing mandarin Lee Press-On Nails. Also, it's revealed that the Zulu, pygmy, Jamaican and Congoese warriors agreed to help because the little jerk who's chasing his girlfriend is destined to kill the big transvestite alien, as revealed when he confronts a CGI tiger in every friggin' trailer ever produced for the damn movie. Spears are thrown, arrows are fired, and mammoths run as wild as the chronological inaccuracies. There's even some magic spells and a huge flaming boat at the end. A good time is had by all, except possibly the audience.
Comment il Rouler - This is a movie where you'll want a grain of salt the size of a deer lick along with your popcorn bucket and gallon of soda.
Frankly, I'm not sure why Emmerich didn't just set the story in some arbitrary fantasty world. He was pretty close to it anyway, with the aliens and magicians and foretellings and Aesopian giant cats. Setting it in Earth's history is slightly - problematic. Why, you ask? Well, let's take a look:
There's a whole lot of metal equipment being flashed in this movie. Spears, arrowheads, armor, horse barding; but copper and bronze and later ironmongery weren't mastered until about 6000 B.C., when copper smelting became commonplace in Mesopatamia. For that matter, horses weren't ridden in war until around 4000 B.C., and certainly not on slave-taking raids across the entire world. And the Sphinx and Great Pyramids, extraterrestrial blueprints or not, weren't built until after 2630 B.C. In 10,000 B.C., the Mesolithic period was just beginning. There were less than 5 million people in the world, and they were still learning how to make rudimentary pottery while horses were being hunted for food by European cave painters. There were no bowmen, no armorsmiths, no horse whisperers, and for damn sure no alien pyramid architects.
But that's not to say you came for the historical accuracy. You came for the AWESOME fight scenes (featuring anachronistic clothing, weaponry, and cultural tropes). You came for the incredible struggle between man and beast; beasts such as the (sadly extinct by 10,000 B.C., at least in the 18-foot variety) giant sabertooth tiger and the domesticated (they were never f'ing domesticated) mammoths who built the pyramids (?!) and the velociraptor-secretary bird hybrids who ravenously who stalk our tribal heroes through the dark jungle of ... Iraq? Mumbai? The Sudan?
That's another problem.
I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE HELL THIS MOVIE TAKES PLACE.
As near as I can tell, the movie begins somewhere in the steppes. It's cold, it's rocky, there's some sparse grasses, there's mammoths, people in low hide tents stocking long, slow fires to smoke their meats. Steppes for sure. So then the barbarian hordes ride in and burn the place down, more power to them, and gallop away with their small string of captives. The tribesmen pursue them over a range of tall, snowy Asiatic mountains that are exceedingly similar to the Himalayas, which they manage to cross, naturally, in a few hours. Then they come out of the mountains and walk DIRECTLY into the steaming, lush grass of an Indochina jungle, complete with stands of bamboo (which is, as you might expect, chock full of carnivorous ostriches). From there they go to the salt flats, cross a savannah and arrive in Zululand. From there it's straight to the Nile, then across the Sahara to Egypt. Then they take down the alien pharaoh and walk back to the steppes. Awesome.
I guess it looks something like this:
Not bad for a bunch of hairy yobboes running around in hide footwraps and mammoth fur mumus.
Given how abysmally bad the previews made the movie look, however, it was actually kind of fun once you force yourself to ignore the glaring historical inaccuracies and pretend you're watching a Red Sonja spinoff. It's not a movie you want to put much thought into. In fact, you might well want to drink yourself into a mild stupor or run headfirst into the doors of the lobby before you stumble into the theater, but the scenes with the block-hauling mammoths running wild in the pyramid and the bit where the solar-worshipping psychiatrist from Sunshine kills the hell out of a bunch of extras from Stargate with a bone spear that looks a bit like the tree of Gondor (watch me drop that mad pop culture science on your ass) almost make it worth the radical drop in I.Q. points most viewers experience. Fortunately, 10,000 B.C. basically qualifies as the first of the summer blockbusters for this year, so you don't have to think too hard about it. I mean, sure, it's a little early in the year for a summer blockbuster, but nothing else in this movie is accurate, so why mess with imperfection?
Endgame - This movie is stupid. Aside from the fact that it's a bunch of cavemen walking from Mongolia to Cairo by way of Vietnam and the Congo, it's got a hero who befriends a magic tiger and an Eskimo shaman casting Resurrection and aliens in gauzy dresses and Zulu warriors helping white Asians fight Indian slavers in Atlantean-ruled Egypt. The dialogue is over-the-top silly and the plot is absurd. It's a big, stupid, shiny movie that you should watch if you like that sort of thing, but only if you're not paying for it.
Wheel: paying for tickets to stupid movies so you don't have to.
I should mention, however, that if you want to watch a big, stupid shiny movie that's considerably LESS stupid and even MORE shiny (in the Firefly sense of the word), you should consider the magnificent Godzilla: Final Wars, recently released on DVD. It's an absolute f'ing epic. If you've ever entertained even the slightest interest in big rubbery kaiju, if you've ever lazed over a pitcher of Za-Rex on a Saturday afternoon and caught Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster on TBS, this is a movie you must run to see. It's the god damn Citizen Kane of giant monster movies. It's fucking glorious.
Why bring it up, you ask, aside from the fact that it's so much better than 10,000 B.C.? I'm glad you asked.
In addition to Stargate, Independence Day (my secret addiction), and The Patriot (Mel Gibson fights the ENGLISH? Weird!), B.C. director Roland Emmerich is also responsible for the execrable, nigh-unforgivable Godzilla of 1998, the movie that tried to Americanize Gojira. The movie has been rightfully ignored after its box-office flop (and short-lived but much-better-written spinoff cartoon series) by most kaiju fans until Final Wars, when the tuna-loving steam-breathing high-jumping mutated iguana Zilla, as he is now officially known, finally enters the Godzilla canon. Let's see how Roland's creation fares:
I fucking love that movie.
Well, one thing you can be sure of, children of the Revolution, and that's that there'll be a fresh edition of Reel of Fish every week and that I'll be drunk as hell tomorrow.
Two. Two things you can be sure of.
Well, okay, I might be a week or two behind in my Reels, so I guess I was right the first time. But that's one more thing to rely on than any church, lover or government can offer, baby.
So here we are at number 8, slowly catching up to the elusive, arbitrary goal I set for myself. And what better way to celebrate than by reviewing a movie that I spent 12 months swearing before God and Heaven and any saints who had a moment to spare that I would never see? But that's what happens when you're out on the town, cruising scenic West Palm Beach in the cool dappled midnight, driving around in a retrofitted police cruiser with a half-mad Army veteran and a Puerto Rican with a transplanted heart. It's either catch the midnight show at the Regal 18 or go to the Monkey Bar. But I wouldn't want to go to the Monkey Bar unless I was drinking banana daiquiris. And contrary to what you might be led to expect by their name, their banana daiquiris are TERRIBLE. Actually, I don't like most banana daiquiris. If I am to be honest with myself (always an exceedingly dangerous proposition), I think what I really want when I order a daiquiri is the Banana Kong that TGI Friday's used to serve, which was basically a banana milkshake with a tankard of rum poured in.
And this week, the midnight show at the luxurious and neon-laden Regal 18 (which is, if you'll go back a few sentences, what we're talking about) was none other than the much-heralded instant classic:
Week 8 of 51 - 10,000 B.C.
Director: Roland "Historical Accuracy" Emmerich
Starring: Steven "Warren Peace" Strait, Camilla "Devil in a Blue Toga" Belle, Cliff "Seriously, This Extremely Exotic Dude's Name Is Cliff Curtis?" Curtis, and a double handful of scrubs, has-beens, never-wases, and extras from Clan of the Cave Bear and The Mummy, and the tiger.
What It Is - It's the usual story. A tribe of well-groomed Californian mastodon hunters and the Eskimo shaman lady from The Simpsons Movie are busy hunting elephants when they find a blue-eyed girl from somewhere far away. They raise her while the hero, whose misunderstood father secretly leaves to go learn the secrets of corn since a man can only eat so much charred mastodon, spends all his time pining after her. Eventually the black-armored horsemen from Conan the Barbarian ride in and destroy all their tents and mastodon meat smokers, and the blue-eyed girl is kidnapped by Arnold Vosloo's evil cousin. The hero and his mentor and some spear-carriers follow the evil band on foot, passing through every biome on the face of the Earth in the course of their pursuit.
They meet an array of ethnically diverse warriors who agree to help them as they chase the horsemen all the way to, apparently, ancient Egypt, which is ruled by an enormous, shrouded alien (or possibly Ru Paul, it's hard to tell) and administered by a few dozen Deep Roys wearing mandarin Lee Press-On Nails. Also, it's revealed that the Zulu, pygmy, Jamaican and Congoese warriors agreed to help because the little jerk who's chasing his girlfriend is destined to kill the big transvestite alien, as revealed when he confronts a CGI tiger in every friggin' trailer ever produced for the damn movie. Spears are thrown, arrows are fired, and mammoths run as wild as the chronological inaccuracies. There's even some magic spells and a huge flaming boat at the end. A good time is had by all, except possibly the audience.
Comment il Rouler - This is a movie where you'll want a grain of salt the size of a deer lick along with your popcorn bucket and gallon of soda.
Frankly, I'm not sure why Emmerich didn't just set the story in some arbitrary fantasty world. He was pretty close to it anyway, with the aliens and magicians and foretellings and Aesopian giant cats. Setting it in Earth's history is slightly - problematic. Why, you ask? Well, let's take a look:
There's a whole lot of metal equipment being flashed in this movie. Spears, arrowheads, armor, horse barding; but copper and bronze and later ironmongery weren't mastered until about 6000 B.C., when copper smelting became commonplace in Mesopatamia. For that matter, horses weren't ridden in war until around 4000 B.C., and certainly not on slave-taking raids across the entire world. And the Sphinx and Great Pyramids, extraterrestrial blueprints or not, weren't built until after 2630 B.C. In 10,000 B.C., the Mesolithic period was just beginning. There were less than 5 million people in the world, and they were still learning how to make rudimentary pottery while horses were being hunted for food by European cave painters. There were no bowmen, no armorsmiths, no horse whisperers, and for damn sure no alien pyramid architects.
But that's not to say you came for the historical accuracy. You came for the AWESOME fight scenes (featuring anachronistic clothing, weaponry, and cultural tropes). You came for the incredible struggle between man and beast; beasts such as the (sadly extinct by 10,000 B.C., at least in the 18-foot variety) giant sabertooth tiger and the domesticated (they were never f'ing domesticated) mammoths who built the pyramids (?!) and the velociraptor-secretary bird hybrids who ravenously who stalk our tribal heroes through the dark jungle of ... Iraq? Mumbai? The Sudan?
That's another problem.
I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE HELL THIS MOVIE TAKES PLACE.
As near as I can tell, the movie begins somewhere in the steppes. It's cold, it's rocky, there's some sparse grasses, there's mammoths, people in low hide tents stocking long, slow fires to smoke their meats. Steppes for sure. So then the barbarian hordes ride in and burn the place down, more power to them, and gallop away with their small string of captives. The tribesmen pursue them over a range of tall, snowy Asiatic mountains that are exceedingly similar to the Himalayas, which they manage to cross, naturally, in a few hours. Then they come out of the mountains and walk DIRECTLY into the steaming, lush grass of an Indochina jungle, complete with stands of bamboo (which is, as you might expect, chock full of carnivorous ostriches). From there they go to the salt flats, cross a savannah and arrive in Zululand. From there it's straight to the Nile, then across the Sahara to Egypt. Then they take down the alien pharaoh and walk back to the steppes. Awesome.
I guess it looks something like this:
Not bad for a bunch of hairy yobboes running around in hide footwraps and mammoth fur mumus.
Given how abysmally bad the previews made the movie look, however, it was actually kind of fun once you force yourself to ignore the glaring historical inaccuracies and pretend you're watching a Red Sonja spinoff. It's not a movie you want to put much thought into. In fact, you might well want to drink yourself into a mild stupor or run headfirst into the doors of the lobby before you stumble into the theater, but the scenes with the block-hauling mammoths running wild in the pyramid and the bit where the solar-worshipping psychiatrist from Sunshine kills the hell out of a bunch of extras from Stargate with a bone spear that looks a bit like the tree of Gondor (watch me drop that mad pop culture science on your ass) almost make it worth the radical drop in I.Q. points most viewers experience. Fortunately, 10,000 B.C. basically qualifies as the first of the summer blockbusters for this year, so you don't have to think too hard about it. I mean, sure, it's a little early in the year for a summer blockbuster, but nothing else in this movie is accurate, so why mess with imperfection?
Endgame - This movie is stupid. Aside from the fact that it's a bunch of cavemen walking from Mongolia to Cairo by way of Vietnam and the Congo, it's got a hero who befriends a magic tiger and an Eskimo shaman casting Resurrection and aliens in gauzy dresses and Zulu warriors helping white Asians fight Indian slavers in Atlantean-ruled Egypt. The dialogue is over-the-top silly and the plot is absurd. It's a big, stupid, shiny movie that you should watch if you like that sort of thing, but only if you're not paying for it.
Wheel: paying for tickets to stupid movies so you don't have to.
I should mention, however, that if you want to watch a big, stupid shiny movie that's considerably LESS stupid and even MORE shiny (in the Firefly sense of the word), you should consider the magnificent Godzilla: Final Wars, recently released on DVD. It's an absolute f'ing epic. If you've ever entertained even the slightest interest in big rubbery kaiju, if you've ever lazed over a pitcher of Za-Rex on a Saturday afternoon and caught Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster on TBS, this is a movie you must run to see. It's the god damn Citizen Kane of giant monster movies. It's fucking glorious.
Why bring it up, you ask, aside from the fact that it's so much better than 10,000 B.C.? I'm glad you asked.
In addition to Stargate, Independence Day (my secret addiction), and The Patriot (Mel Gibson fights the ENGLISH? Weird!), B.C. director Roland Emmerich is also responsible for the execrable, nigh-unforgivable Godzilla of 1998, the movie that tried to Americanize Gojira. The movie has been rightfully ignored after its box-office flop (and short-lived but much-better-written spinoff cartoon series) by most kaiju fans until Final Wars, when the tuna-loving steam-breathing high-jumping mutated iguana Zilla, as he is now officially known, finally enters the Godzilla canon. Let's see how Roland's creation fares:
Click to view
I fucking love that movie.