Clear's Own

Well, I'm Back

2012-01-09T06:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah yeah, I know I said I was moving to Tumblr. I know I said I wouldn't write for Examiner anymore. That being said, hi Blogger readers. Here's the link to my latest Examiner article, a review of Young Adult.

Good News and...Bad News?

2011-10-25T20:36:00.001-04:00

My blogging hiatus is almost over, I think. At the very least, I should be able to put up a couple posts a week. That's the good news. The..bad news? No, the other news is I'll be pulling up stakes here and moving this operation over to Tumblr. Mainly, they have some features I like plus Blogger has been down the last two times I tried to log into it and Tumblr hasn't. The new address is http://michaelclear.tumblr.com or, if that's too much to remember, try http://www.michaelclear.com. I'm still working on some other projects so I guarantee nothing when it comes to supplying free entertainment. Fortunately for you, I rather enjoy doing it. See you there.

Nothing To Braga About

2011-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Who has two thumbs, some blog space and predicted a science fiction show created by former Star Trek writer Brannon Braga would suck? This guy did, that's who. One thing I can say about Terra Nova is that it actually exceeded my expectations. Yes, it was actually worse than I thought it would be. Somehow, Braga and his crew managed to fail on every level. It was so bad that it actually drew me out of my blogging hiatus. I was going to do a review but no, it deserves a full on Liveblog. Normally, I only do these if I haven't already seen it but the hell with that. Please enjoy my epic takedown of Terra Nova, the new Fox show that can only be ironically described as science fiction.

0:00:30 -- Yes, you're reading the time correctly. Only 30 seconds went by before I felt compelled to comment. The show opens on the Moon or, rather, on a cheesy looking CGI representation of the Moon. Narrative text starts running to explain the state of the world. This is a violation of the famous "Show, don't tell" rule of storytelling and I always consider this or a narrator to be the last refuge of incompetent screenwriters. The beauty of this, though, is that this is only one way in which I was annoyed by the opening. Another is that it's white text on a light background, something you would normally only see on old Geocities pages in 1999. The third is this:

The story is set in the year 2149 WHICH IS NOT THE "DAWN" OF THE FUCKING CENTURY, IT'S THE HALFWAY POINT. Oh, there was a fourth way I was annoyed. I'm watching this on Hulu and the streaming video froze up on me 10 seconds in which meant I had to hit the REFRESH button and watch a damn Geico commercial before it would start for me again. This is going to be fun fun fun.

0:17:38 -- Commercial break. Time to pee, grab some chips and write snarky comments. The basic, stupid premise of Terra Nova is that, in the year 2149, Earth is now an environmental hellhole with an atmosphere so polluted that you never fully see the Sun and need to wear a filter whenever you go outside. Another reason you pretty much want to avoid the "dawn" of the 22nd century is that there is also an overpopulation problem so severe that America has adopted Chinese style limits of two children per family and has pretty much done away with civil liberties in order to enforce this law. The question for me is: how the hell do you have both a poisonous atmosphere AND a population problem? The first thing should pretty much take care of the second. To top this off, the solution to society's problems is Terra Nova, a colony set up 85 million years in the past that you get to by going through a one way fissure in the time/space continuum. So, they can't clean up pollution, something well within the realm of technological possibility, but they CAN travel through time, something that is, for all practical purposes, impossible. Anyway, let's meet the Shannon family. Dad Jim comes home to wife Elisabeth, teenage kids Josh and Maddy and adorable toddler Zoe. Suddenly, their home is visited by ruthless agents from population control. As I mentioned, you can only have two kids and Zoe makes three. Jim handles this the right way, by blindly lashing out at three armed men. He spends two years in prison for this before Elisabeth tells him she and the two older kids have been approved to settle in Terra Nova. They have to leave Zoe behind because, after all, society certainly wouldn't want you to take away the illegal kid it didn't want you to have in the first place. Elisabeth slips Jim a laser past the ever-so-smart prison guards and he breaks out of prison so he can join his family. The prison officials did think to implant a GPS device on him in case he escaped and they naturally figured the best place to put this would be just under the skin of an easy-to-reach spot on his arm so he could effortlessly cut it out and leave it behind. He manages to sneak past dozens of armed guards to meet up with his family at the time portal but the crack security there finally realizes they're supposed to keep out intruders and pull him out of line. Elisabeth assures the kids they can go ahead through the portal because, "Your father will find a way, he always does." This is the guy who decided to pointlessly start a fight with law enforcement so his plan is something along the lines of yelling "RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY" while entering the portal. The guards seem perplexed that he ignored their commands to stop so they could separate him from his family forever but it's too late. He's now in Terra Nova and they even had Zoe in a backpack so it's a happy ending except that this is not the end. Damn it.

Not at all ripped off from Blade Runner and I don't know why you would think that a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies.

0:30:12 -- Another commercial. This one is something about how malaria is bad so keep that in mind. The Shannons, along with the rest of the new colonists, are being escorted single file from the entry point to the fenced in settlement of Terra Nova. Why aren't they being transported in armored vehicles to keep them safe from the carnosaurs (large T-Rex type carnivores) that are running around? Shut up, that's why. Jim and Elisabeth are taken to Commander Nathaniel Taylor who is played by Stephen Lang, the same guy who played the evil Colonel in Avatar, fitting since Avatar is one of the movies that this show is ripping off. Even though Jim has just broken a fresh set of laws, he seems surprised that the gruff, non nonsense Taylor won't let him join the compound's security detail (he was a cop before he went to prison though, considering his behavior and temperament, he must have been one of those "let's pepper spray the peaceful protesters" type of cops). Taylor puts him on the agricultural detail and they're escorted to their new luxury Terra Nova condo. The Shannon son, Josh, shows that pretty much the only thing he brought with him from 2149 was teenage moodiness as he lays into his father for being in prison because he selfishly tried to protect his family. They are literally in their new place for 2 minutes before losing track of Zoe who, it turns out, has gone out to play with the dinosaurs. Parenting tip: if you should ever see your child playing with wild animals, even if they're not dinosaurs the size of buildings, freak the hell out and get them to safety. Don't stare in fascination and start playing with them yourself. Yes, they were brachiosaurs (I think) and thus herbivores but they were also large, incredibly strong and rendered the protective fence useless by sticking their long necks over it.

Really?

1:02:00-- I've skipped the last few commercials so, to sum up, Snickers are yummy, rainforests are good and you should be driving a Kia. All caught up? Cool. If you follow me on Twitter or read my Tumblr page, you know that I've said before that the heart of Terra Nova's problems is a staggering lack of imagination. People were paid millions to create something that the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction wouldn't have paid a nickel a word for. It's supposed to be 2149 yet technology has barely advanced. There are no robots or advanced machinery to assist with the back breaking labor required to maintain what is basically a frontier colony. The computer technology of 2149 is pretty much what it is today except that the tablet computers are now see-through and, well, that's it for iPad advancement in the next 140 years. I guess Apple should have tried harder to hold on to Steve Jobs. The vehicles are basically Jeeps and they still don't fly which means we have to still hear those damn "Why no flying cars?" jokes between now and 2149. There are weapons that exist today you could mount onto a Jeep that could take down a carnosaur in one shot but, for some reason, they stopped making those in the future so that they're pretty much defenseless when carnosaurs attack their vehicles. Oh, one of them did trip once, so that's something, I guess. Clothing and hairstyles are the same. I can understand not wanting to go too far with those as anything too radical becomes a distraction but they are EXACTLY the same. Science fiction is a challenge because creating a future world that is believable and entertaining to modern audiences and the makers of Terra Nova are not up to the challenge. It doesn't help that they have apparently picked the stupidest people to populate this colony. Son Josh takes a break from being belligerent to his dad to follow a group of his fellow teenagers on a trip outside the gate to see the moonshine still they have set up. Even though the rest of the group has been there for quite some time, they see no reason to bring along any weapons in case they met, say, a 20 foot carnivore. A pretty girl named Skye manages to convince Josh to cliff dive with her, mainly by stripping down to her bikini and saying, "Follow me." This is the most believable thing in the whole show. Meanwhile, a thief trying to steal power is captured while another man tries to assassinate Taylor. Jim foils that and gains enough of Taylor's trust to be appointed to a job in security. We discover that these people are called Sixers, a breakaway group who seem to have their own agenda. Some other Sixers, including Mira, their leader, simply drive right into Terra Nova without getting shot even though one of their comrades tried to kill the Commander. I wonder if al Qaeda ever tried just driving into Guantanamo to retrieve their people. It may be worth a shot.

Terra Nova, filmed entirely inside some guy's Macintosh.

1:26:00 --On their way out of Terra Nova, the Sixers find the vehicle the kids used to drive to their still and stop to strip its power cells but they get attacked by an unseen foe and one of them dies. In a turn of events no one could possibly have foreseen, we find out that traipsing around unarmed in a prehistoric jungle loaded with dangerous and powerful animals is a really bad idea as the kids get attacked by slashers (basically, velociraptors with barbed tails). They take refuge in one of the vehicles which turns out to be woefully inadequate as shelter from dinosaurs, something I think I mentioned earlier but hey, what the hell do I know, right? Things look bleak until Jim, Taylor and a team of soldiers show up and scare off the slashers. Josh decides that his dad saving him was grounds for taking a break from being a dick and they head back to Terra Nova for a big, squishy reunion with Mom. Meanwhile, having learned nothing from the fact that one of their comrades was just killed by slashers, Mira and another Sixer go back to stare at some geographic drawings the kids found earlier. Mira says they were drawn by Taylor's son who went missing years earlier and that they represent the true purpose of Terra Nova, that, "He who controls the past, controls the future," which makes no sense since it was established early on in one of the show's few nods to scientific thought that this is a timeline separate from the one they came from. This means they can't do anything that would change their own past and can't change the time from which they came in any way. Was I the only one listening to that? Oh well, the hell with it. At least there was no human/lizard hybrid sex like some other shows I could mention so I'll consider that progress.

On the bright side, he'll be the first human in history to die because he was a reckless dumbass who didn't think to stay out of a dinosaur filled jungle.

Still Busy

2011-08-07T17:29:00.003-04:00

I'll probably be off for another week. My spare time is being eaten up by work, other writing projects and wanting to take advantage of the Summer. It's times like this I'm happy I don't have loads of regular readers to lose.

Gross Encounters

2011-07-29T02:40:00.015-04:00

I missed this movie last November when it came out. I was all set to see it then heard it sucked, calculated the odds of whether I would agree with the reviews and skipped it. Rotten Tomatoes rates is at 16% positive among critics but what do those elitists know? After all, the audience rated it at 19% so I'm sure I'll have too much fun as I do another Liveblog for the science fiction masterpiece Skyline.

0:10:00 -- We're off to a rousing, imaginative start as the movie opens with title card sequences that basically look like someone sneezed on the camera. I see this was directed by Colin and Greg Strause, the guys who gave us Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem. If you've never seen it, it is the worst movie ever in the history of anything. I'm talking "should be encased in cement and dropped to the bottom of the Merianas Trench where it can never hurt anyone again" level of bad. Showgirls and Transformers wish they are as bad as AVP:R. I'm sure the Strause family has learned from the mistakes made in that debacle and are now ready to entertain us with some science fiction that is as thrilling as it is thought provoking. Where were we? Oh, yeah, everything looks like someone sneezed on the camera. We then see the city of Los Angeles, also known as the Big Apple or...something. Actually, it's known as the go-to first stop in any decent alien invasion and the aliens in this movie are no exception as lights drop from the sky. This wakes up two characters named Jarrod and Elaine played by two actors who are sort of/kind of vaguely recognizable television actors named Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson. I know their names because IMDB exists as they are in shows I don't watch. The producers have obviously bought into the myth that movie stars no longer matter and you can see by the movie's stellar $21 million domestic gross how well that idea worked out. Jarrod looks out at the lights and turns all white eyed and veiny but, suddenly, he and Elaine are on a plane and it says "15 hours earlier". I'm not sure what will happen in the next 15 hours that will top "alien invasion" but I trust the Family Strause completely to keep me entertained. They are in L.A. to visit Jarrod's old pal Terry played by another television guy. At least I know this is Donald Faison (Turk from Scrubs). Terry has made it in the music business and I guess he and Jarrod used to be in a band or something but I can't believe any of this will matter once the aliens land so let's move on.

"Who are we? I can't quite place us," they're thinking.

0:30:00 -- Terry wants Jarrod to quit his crap job, whatever the hell it is, and work for him in Los Angeles. From the way he describes his life, Jarrod and Elaine aren't living too far above the poverty line and it turns out they have a baby on the way so, naturally, they're resistant to the idea of moving from whatever shithole, rock-eater infested town they live in to L.A. where they would lead exciting lives on an exorbitant salary. None of this matters, though, because we have reached the 15 hour mark and once again lights are falling from the sky turning people who look at them into white eyed and vein covered zombies who walk into them and disappear. Jarrod and Terry decide to leave the womenfolk behind and go to the roof to investigate. Jarrod brings a camera and Terry brings a gun so decide who you want at your side during the Apocalypse. Jarrod fails to keep the door to the roof open and it locks behind them but, luckily, he brought the camera which is of no use whatsoever in this situation. The gun, however, comes in handy when more lights fall from the sky and we see that they're dropping from alien spaceships. Terry manages to shoot the lock off the door which is great because pregnant Elaine was right on the other side of it but she's fine. Well, except for when she looks into the light and goes all zombie on them.

This and the other picture show Eric Balfour's single, all purpose expression. He has it down though.

0:50:00 -- There's no television or radio and news websites haven't been updated for hours so I must reluctantly applaud the efficiency and competence of the alien invaders. They want people for something or other as they are slurping boatloads of them into their ships but I'm sure they just want to bring us all back to a planet called Happy Funtime Place. Terry has the genius idea that they will be safe on his boat and Jarrod agrees. The women think that's stupid but they have lady parts and icky menstrual cycles so Jarrod and Terry wisely ignore them. Candice (Brittany Daniel), Terry's bitch girlfriend (she gets away with that by looking like this), insists on riding in a separate car because she just found out Terry has been nailing her pretty assistant so Terry and the assistant drive out together and, in an event no one could have foreseen, immediately get attacked by some giant alien robot thing. Terry gets out of the car and back to Jarrod but he gets snatched by an alien tentacle. If only Jarrod had thought to bring his camera, he may have saved Terry but he didn't so Terry got sucked into what looks like a big alien vagina. In fact, all the alien vehicles have a "giant vagina" theme going so I'm guessing the Strause brothers didn't date much during high school. They are saved by Oliver, the building manager (David Zayas, and again, I must thank IMDB for giving me his name though I could have probably just said he plays the detective sergeant in Dexter). They go back to Terry's penthouse none the worse for where save for the fact that two of their friends are now dead.

This should work. Be sure to throw the gun itself when you run out of ammo.

1:12:00 -- For the last 20 minutes, our four survivors have spent the bulk of their time sitting around Terry's luxury apartment and looking bored over the fact that the world was ending. If the goal of the filmmakers was to get me to feel was the characters are feeling, congratulations, you did it. There was a scene where the military nuked one of the ships but it turns out that the aliens were only MOSTLY dead. Meanwhile, Jarrod has this spider web looking pattern growing all over his chest and even manifests super strength when Oliver tries to foil yet another of his genius plans to leave the relative safety of the apartment building and try to gain the attention of some Army snipers stationed on the roof next door. Meanwhile, Candice starts doing the white eyed zombie thing and steps out onto the balcony to be slurped by a pissed off looking alien vagina. Jarrod and Elaine did manage to get the Army guys to call for a rescue chopper but SURPRISE the aliens are knocking it out of the sky. At this point, I'm wondering what sort of lame ass weakness the invaders will turn out to have. Like, maybe they're allergic to zinc so we start throwing bottles of zinc supplements at them. Or maybe Jarrod will be running along, trip over their world wide master control center and hit the OFF switch. The good news is the movie only has 20 minutes left to go so I won't have to wait long.

Blowed it up real good.

1:33:00 -- OK, I was wrong. No zinc allergies. Earth was conquered and everyone died. It turned out the reason they wanted us was to rip the brains out of our heads, inject them with some sort of glowy shit and eat them. Now, Jarrod never struck me as any sort of an Einstein what with just having the one expression which could be described as "always looking like he has to fart" but he was apparently such a brainiac that he took over the alien who ate his brain. He then rescued Elaine and defended her from the alien hordes and, we assume, sent them packing and made the world safe for white, wealthy Christian Americans once again. IMDB tells me there will be a Skyline 2 next year. yay. Will the Krausi learn from their mistakes? Sadly, I fear the place you will find out will be another Liveblog.

Jarrod is finding out that, at some point, every man is brought down by vaginas.

Fuck Yeah!

2011-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

That's the title I wasn't allowed to use over at Examiner.com. I half expected them to censor the one I did use but, so far, no one has even noticed it's a reference to the F-word.

A Good Man Goes To War

2011-07-18T04:28:00.002-04:00

I loved the new Harry Potter film. Find out how much at Examiner.com.

You're Not The Boss Of Me

2011-07-11T05:14:00.002-04:00

It's always surprising when a so called "comedy" like Horrible Bosses actually turns out to be funny. Still, I wish it had been about farting penguins but those can't be in every movie.

Lizards Do It At Warp Speed

2011-07-08T00:00:00.003-04:00

Yes yes, I know I haven't been paying much attention to you folks lately. Allow me to make it up to you with that thing many of you live for, one of my Liveblogs. Normally, my rule is that the target of the Liveblog be something I haven't seen before but I recently noticed that episodes of Star Trek: Voyager were available on Netflix Instant and sure enough, they had the worst episode of what was the lowest point in Star Trek history until Enterprise premiered. So please sit back and enjoy my takedown of one of television's stupidest moments, an episode called Threshold.

0:05:00 -- It opens with Tom Paris, the second dullest character on the show flying in a shuttle craft while talking to Harry Kim, the dullest character on the show. Sadly, this takes place in season two, before Seven of Nine, the woman whose ability to give men erections back in the 90s was matched only by Viagra, joined the cast which means we'll get little in the way of sex appeal but don't worry. They'll make up for it with loads and loads of bullshit technical jargon. For instance, when Tom says he's having problems with one of the warp nacelles, Harry says, "Try to stabilize your field symmetry." Yeah, what the hell, let's do that. And hey, it worked. Yay! Tom is flying a shuttle craft loaded with some new transwarp drive which, one assumes, does something good but he can't get it to work and it BLOWS UP AAAHHH but don't worry, it was all a dream. Or rather, a holodeck simulation. As I recall, this is the one episode in which the holodeck actually worked and didn't create sentient holograms that tried to take over and/or destroy the ship. You'd think they would have learned to stop using the damn thing after a while but no, it remained the go-to plot device when the writers couldn't think of anything else to do. One important thing you see in the opening credits is the name of the screenplay's writer, Brannon Braga. Braga is, simply, one of the shittiest writers in the history of television who has diminished or destroyed anything to which his name has ever been associated. He and his pal Rick Berman turned Star Trek from a show emphasizing adventure into a melodrama filled with scientific gobbledygook like strengthening your field symmetry or using a duranium alloy or flooding the warp plasma coils with chronoton particles. He went on to produce a dumb alien invasion series (also called Threshold), write for the worst season of 24 and then to make the very lame Flash Forward. This episode, however, is where I first saw, and never forgot, his name.

He who shall not be named. Except in the opening credits, of course.

0:12:48 -- This seems like a good spot to stop as this was where, in the olden days, the first of those quaint things we called "commercials" would have played. Paris, Kim and the half Klingon engineer B'lanna Torres are trying to figure out a way to reach the supposedly impossible speed of warp 10 but they can't do it without their shuttlecraft falling apart. The basic premise of the show is their ship is trapped in the Delta quadrant of our galaxy and it's going to take decades to get home, a problem that could be solved if they can reach warp 10. As the show was in no danger of being cancelled at this point, they should have known it wasn't going to work but they tried anyway. Neelix, an alien they picked up when they got trapped in the Delta quadrant, gave them some homespun wisdom about something or other and, from that, they figured out that...um...something about making sure the ship's hull didn't depolarize. Hell, I could have told them not to let the hull depolarize. That's just common sense. Paris wants to be the one to make this historic flight but Captain Janeway considers grounding him since it turns out he has some sort of enzyme imbalance that could cause him to...you know, they never said why this was bad. Paris manages to convince Janeway to let him make the flight by pleading in a way that made me think he was going to hyperventilate. Dull, melodramatic moments like this are what really set Voyager apart from previous incarnations of Star Trek and were why I never cared for this show. Anyway, Paris manages to pass the warp 10 threshold and disappears off their scanners. So, you know, that's bad. Luckily, Paris is a series regular. Had he been someone we'd never seen before, he'd have been a goner for sure. Star Trek has a history of casually killing off its extras that stretches back to the show's beginnings when Kirk would say, "Scotty, Spock, Bones, Sulu and Checkov, you all come with me. Ensign Smith, go check out behind that rock," and then you'd hear a scream and they'd find poor Ensign Smith with all his minerals drained out of him or something. The good news is that the actor who played Ensign Smith would have a guaranteed lifetime income from Star Trek convention appearance where he'd tell the same story over and over about how William Shatner stole his danish.

Is she upset over Tom Paris or does she just need to fart? Find out after this commercial break.

0:19:07 -- So, Tom Paris has disappeared. Why? We don't know. All the cool stuff is happening off screen and we're only getting reaction shots so we're not exactly getting any Dave-Bowman-entering-the-monolith moments. Suddenly, he reappears and is found sleeping aboard the shuttlecraft. The holographic Doctor wakes him up and he again sounds like he's about to hyperventilate as he tells how he was existing in every point of the universe simultaneously. If it were me, I'd have reentered the universe next to those green Orion slave girls but Paris came back to Voyager. Everything is just great, just spiffy, nothing at all wrong here until Paris suddenly has patterns of veins forming on his head and collapses. So, you know, maybe that whole "enzymatic imbalance" thing turned out to be a valid reason to ground him after all. At least I'm sure he won't be going through any weird transformations.

Has turning all veiny and glassy eyed ever been a good thing?

0:27:25 -- Paris begins undergoing a weird transformation, something no one could have foreseen. Apparently, he's now allergic to water and eventually he can only breathe a combination of nitrogen and acid. He does begin doing some decent acting so I suppose there's a bright side to the fact that all sorts of lesions are now forming on his body. After a while, his cells mutate so much that there's nothing he can do and he dies. But wait, it turns out he was only MOSTLY dead and he wakes up. He easily pulls out a tuft of his hair and whimpers about it which is a pretty pansy ass thing to do considering it's the alternative to death. Oh, he now has two hearts. He'd better not be a Timelord.

I'd forgotten about her. Kes, the space elf. At least they shuffled her off and replaced her with Seven of Nine.

0:36:38 -- Paris continues mutating until he eventually starts looking like a lizard. He says things like, "The present is in the past and the past is in the future," which means that at least part of him is mutating into something that's making him high as a kite. The Doctor thinks they can destroy the mutated DNA with anti-proton bursts cause, you know, why not? Unfortunately, he finally gains some super strength, breaks out of his restraints and begins a rampage through the ship. Oh, one of the crew members is working for the Kazon. Along with Kes, I'd also forgotten about the Kazon, some of the lamest villains in Star Trek history. They're some sort of warrior race like Klingons except that they're also dull as dishwater. They were not missed when they were finally vanquished.

Some topical ointment should clear that right up.

0:45:53 -- And now, the reason I curse Brannon Braga's name. Paris disabled the ship and kidnapped Janeway. He brought her onto the transwarp shuttlecraft, escaped the ship and went to warp 10. Three days later, Voyager tracks them down on some planet somewhere and they're now lizards. The Doctor says this is actually the next 4 million years of human evolution accelerated by crossing the warp 10 threshold which, you know, makes a whole heaping shitload of sense. Get to warp 10, you're a lizard. Stephen Hawking has probably written all about this in his books. Really, you'd be shocked if anything else had happened. While on the planet, Janeway and Paris have hot lizard sex and have some lizard babies and no, I'm not making that up. It turns out that de-lizarding them is fairly easy. They decide to just leave the lizard babies on that planet which denies them an invaluable scientific opportunity as well as violating the Prime Directive but it's hardly the stupidest thing that's happened so fuck it, let's move on. Do they continue to explore the possibilities of using warp 10 to get them home? Nope, that gets dropped even though they now understand the side effects and have a workable method to reverse them. And so, they continue their adventures in the Delta quadrant, blandly going where no one has gone before. I'm really looking forward to Brannon Braga's new show, Terra Nova. You should too as it will almost certainly be the subject of a future Liveblog.

And here it is, the perfectly sensible, logical result of achieving warp 10.

Less Than Meets The Eye

2011-07-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

What better way to celebrate the birth of our nation than to read my review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon? If there's a better way, I can't think of it.

Seasonal Affected Disorder

2011-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm still not back up to full writing strength but I did manage to post a review of the Season of the Witch DVD over on Examiner.com.

She's Bad

2011-06-27T00:00:00.001-04:00

It's nice to be back writing again. On the off chance you haven't moved on to some other amateur film critic, here's my review of Bad Teacher.

Oops

2011-06-21T08:44:00.001-04:00

Looks like my last post got deleted. Basically, there will be nothing from me this week in either of my two writing forums. I'm dealing with a death in the family and then it's back to work. See you next week.

On The Bright Side...

2011-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

...another Transformers movie will soon come out and most likely set a new standard of dumb that movies like Battle: Los Angeles can only aspire to. My DVD review is over at Examiner.com.

EEEEEEK.T.

2011-06-13T03:42:00.002-04:00

I posted this review of Super 8 on Saturday at Examiner but forgot to mention it here till today. Traditionally, of course, I don't post here on weekends anyway but that tradition is rather pointless. Then again, keeping pointless traditions is a sign of true class. I think.

Does This Bug You?

2011-06-10T00:00:00.005-04:00

It's been a while since I've had time to do a Liveblog but that only means this one will be extra special. If it's not extra special, it's probably your fault in some way but we'll have to figure out why another time because it's time to get on with the movie. When I first saw this on Netflix Instant, my thought was, "Fuck me, there were three of these?" I sort of, kind of remember hearing about it but, for some odd reason, I never considered the existence of this sequel to be worth remembering. Anyway, let's hope the second in the series didn't contain anything important as I am never, ever going to watch it. Instead, let's all watch me as I watch 2008's straight-to-DVD freak show Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.

0:10:00 -- This movie is rather dull but, to make up for that, it's also poorly made. The director, Edward Neumeier, has a distinguished IMDB profile that consists mainly of writing mildly entertaining sci-fi films and their crappy sequels. He wrote all the Robocop films as well as the first Starship Troopers film which means he's one of the people I need to yell at for taking Robert Heinlein's adventure classic and turning into gross torture porn. A quick note to all you conservatives out there: why the hell do you all worship that sociopathic windbag Ayn Rand when Robert A. Heinlein expressed many of her ideas while also being able to tell entertaining stories? I'd join your movement if you'd abandon Atlas Shrugged and replace it The Man Who Sold The Moon. Hell, one of the plot points of Starship Troopers (the novel) is that the Earth is being successfully run by a benevolent military dictatorship. Someone at Fox news get on that. Anyway, they somehow managed to get Casper van Dien back to reprise the role of Johnny Rico. That's quite a "get" for them. I wonder how they managed to convince him to take time out from sitting around in his underwear and asking his neighbors if they wanted to come over and watch his Blu-Ray edition of Starship Troopers again. He's a colonel fighting the alien Bugs on a planet called Roku San. The Bugs now have these organic grenades they toss into his camp. The grenades are effective because, when the troops see one, they stand around and stare at it until it opens up and explodes instead of running away. Rico's unit is receiving a visit from an old buddy named Dix Hauser who's now dating one of rico's old flames, Capt. Lola Beck. She's played by Jolene Blalock whom you may remember as the Vulcan from Star Trek: Enterprise who logically concluded that she must wear tight clothing that showed off her flawless figure. Has anything actually happened in these first ten minutes? No, not really but I'm sure that's just a bold filmmaking choice and not indicative of the rest of the movie.

The girl standing next to Rico has a French accent so thick that she's nearly unintelligible. My assumption is that she'll be naked later in the film and then all will be forgiven.

0:30:00 -- Also arriving on base is Sky Marshal Anoke. Anoke is such a popular soldier that he's used in propaganda videos to get people to join the Federation Army. This is so despite the fact that he's short, bald and looks like a strong breeze would blow him over. So why is he mankind's greatest hero? Probably for a reason our primitive 21st century brains could never understand. In addition to all this, he's probably a traitor. I say this because he keeps talking about the Bugs with respect in his voice and a menacing look on his face. Meanwhile, General Dix Hauser is having fun listening to Rico and Dix's new girlfriend talk casually about all the good times they had when they were dating. There's actually some decent acting going on here as it's obvious that all this idle chat about picnics and sports activities that comprised their dating life is really about all the awesome, epic level fucking they used to do and they're saying this in front of her new boyfriend. A couple of Roku San farmers come into the military bar and start picking fights and criticizing the military and the war. This society hangs war protesters so Hauser orders them arrested before getting into a fight with one. Rico prevents Hauser from summarily executing the farmer and is relieved of his command just as the security fence fails and all the fierce, cartoon Bugs start swarming the camp. I'm sure that Sky Marshal Anoke has nothing to do with this even though he vanished for a while and mysteriously reappeared looking dazed. Lola flies Anoke off the planet while everyone else starts fighting the seemingly unstoppable Bug swarm. Oh, we haven't seen the hot French girl's boobs yet. I'll keep you informed.

Why is everyone so frightened of these? Just tell the CGI guy to reboot his Macintosh.

1:00:00 -- So, Roku San was a complete clusterfuck and they're laying the blame all on Rico who is sentenced to be executed for both incompetent command and hitting Dix. The whole time, all I could think was, "Is the hot French girl ok?" We haven't seen her in the past 30 minutes and I'm beginning to despair that this film will contain no gratuitous nudity. Meanwhile, the ship that Lola and Anoke escaped on is either attacked or blows up on its own and it really doesn't matter. What does matter is that everyone has to board escape pods so they can get away from the hilariously inept looking CGI spaceship crash. They land on some sort of habitable desert planet. The planet has bugs on it, of course, but they don't attack even though they spot the survivors fairly quickly. In addition to curbs on various civil liberties, all religion has been banned in this society which is why Lola is annoyed that everyone, including the Sky Marshal, is religious. He keeps talking about higher powers, talk that becomes suspicious when we find out that he was fascinated by the so called Brain Bug that the humans have in custody. Meanwhile, Rico is saved from execution by Dix who needs him to go after Lola. For reasons I'm sure will annoy me for their stupidity, an Admiral has ordered the Rescue Fleet not to go after Lola and Anoke so Dix, who has not yet tired of Lola's nether regions, wants Rico to take a small squadron and go after her. This leads us to a good five minutes of Rico meeting his new unit and everyone talking about how it's a good day to die and they'll kill the Bugs and let's all eat strudel which very well could have been in there since I stopped paying attention.

The ship probably wouldn't have crashed if they had just stopped shaking the damn camera.

1:25:00 -- Cool, the hot French girl (whose name, it turns out, is Link Manion which is probably also writer/director Neumeier's YouTube comments section name) is alive and well and part of Rico's squad. Oh, and she's naked. Gloriously and wonderfully naked along with Rico and the rest of the rescue squad. Why? Because the one thing this movie can do as well as the first one is to gives heaps of hot, naked bodies. No crap CGI necessary here. Want to see screenshots? Tough. I watched this piece of shit and deserve to see naked French girls. Back on Earth, the evil Admiral Enolo Phid has faked a bombing of the ruling council to cover up the disappearance of the Sky Marshal and Dix. Phid takes him to see the Brain Bug and shows him footage of Anoke being taken over and referring to the Bugs as God. Which, of course, begs the question of why he wasn't taken into custody long ago but there's not time to answer that because the Brain Bug has started shrieking and causing everyone's head to explode before Dix grabs a rifle and kills it. Why didn't it use the shrieking/head exploding thing before now? Let it go, people. This thing will last eight hours if we tie up all the loose ends. Back on the Bug planet, we find out that the Bug God is summoning Anoke to it and ends up swallowing him to gain his knowledge. Now, only Lola and some really annoying Jesus freak girl who was Anoke's assistant are left. I'm sure they'll now die and Rico won't drop in at the last minute to save them.

This Bug God could be easily dispatched with a grill and some barbecue sauce.

1:45:00 -- Jesus freak girl manages to convert Lola when they're at the mercy of the Bug God and they pray for angels to save them. Just then, in a stunning plot twist no one could have foreseen, Rico and his team land. They're decked out in some super powered armor and manage to take out not only a swarm but the Bug God who turned out to be surprisingly easy to kill, probably because he chose not to do that shrieking/head exploding thing, the most effective tactic in the history of warfare yet the Bugs have only used it once.. Why the Federation has never used this super armor before is yet another mystery but who gives a crap? Rico saves Lola and Jesus girl and who turns into Jesus Woman by convincing the Federation to legalize religion again. This means that now the Federation can hang war protesters with God's blessing, which they do when they kill the war protester they framed for Anoke's murder and some other shit happens but none of it involves French girls with perfect bodies so let's just call it a day.

Wow, must be some kiss. Dix got to kiss Jolene Blalock which means he's the only one who got anything good out of this movie other then me who can now celebrate that it's over.

Here's What's Going On

2011-06-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm still very busy and have no spare time so no new posts probably until Friday. Sorry.

Things I've Learned From Watching Movies Part 91

2011-06-03T00:00:00.003-04:00

They say major Hollywood releases are mindless, intellectual wastelands but I say they teach the best lessons of all. For example:

Just because you've squeezed every last drop of story and then some from a concept that's already been the subject of four movies doesn't mean you shouldn't try again.

Outdated methods of recording can be made into incredible action flicks. This opens the door for monster movies about Betamax and zip discs.

The addition of Heather Graham to the cast means it's perfectly acceptable to jack off to a kid's movie. Seriously, go ahead and whip it out. The theaters will be totally cool with it.

The end of the world is near. The fact that this movie exists is proof.

This movie may or may not be good. It's hard to tell because it stars Ryan Reynolds and you can't trust the judgement of a guy who got sick of fucking Scarlett Johannson.

That Wisconsin governor may have a point about teachers.

If you make a touching fantasy movie about learning to live for others and trying to preserve a precious way of life that's in danger of coming to an end, be sure the sequel is about spies and shit like that.

I'm telling you, we are truly in the last days. Need even more proof. How about this?

Look At My Briefs -- 6/2/11

2011-06-02T00:00:00.001-04:00

As usual, it's over at Examiner.com under a different, blander name but it's still another edition of my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

Making Hard Men Humble

2011-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Here I am once again with a new review of Hangover Part II over at Examiner.com. I still can't guarantee a return to regular posting but things are looking better than they were.

Four Is A Tragic Number

2011-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm still getting slammed at work but I did manage to crank out this DVD review of I Am Number Four.

Lacking Deppth

2011-05-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Ah, what a week. Hopefully, life is back to normal now. To prove it, here's my review of Pirates of the Caribbean at Examiner.com.

Sorry

2011-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

I'm getting slammed by a new job which leaves me no time to write. I might not be back till Monday though I might be back tomorrow. Even I don't know so we'll see what happens.

Priest Lacks Bite

2011-05-16T00:00:00.001-04:00

Sadly, it looks like the Liveblog I wrote for Battlefield Earth is lost forever, a victim of the great Blhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifogger outage, and I'll have to rewrite it which I really don't want to do. To console ourselves, we can all read my review of Priest posted at Examiner.com. I've heard encouraging others to read it gives you multiple orgasms.

Oh, Hi

2011-05-13T13:41:00.002-04:00

Blogger has been down since yesterday which is why you don't get to see the Liveblog I wrote for Battlefield: Earth since it's been eaten. This could be Google telling me it's time to move my stuff off their servers or that I should keep copies of my posts. Oh well, I'll write it up again when I have time. have a good weekend.