ten little reviews--THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

SPOILERS!!!

When I was little, I was terrified of the Emergency Broadcast System. I have a traumatic memory of running through the house screaming my head off while that buzzing filled the house, my dad shouting from the shower for me to shut up. I used to keep a pillow case of my favorite stuffed animals under my bed in case we needed to head for the basement to hide from a tornado, or if a fire broke out and we had to make a run for it. I was neurotic from a very early age.

Now I have to be afraid of Overnight Ice Ages. Great.

The Day After Tomorrow was the spoonful of sprinkles on top of an evening that left me wishing it was the day after tomorrow. This has nothing to do with the movie, but I must share that The Husband and I went on another of our trademarked Dollar Movie and Taco Bell dates, and not only did the movie suck ass but the guy working the pick-up window at The Border tried to pick-up me. While my husband was sitting next to me in the car. He fondled my hand as he gave me my change. And then he was so preoccupied with Rico Suaving me that he forgot to give us some of our food, necessitating a trip inside. AND I was very sick to my stomach after eating the food, but that may have been the Grinders from earlier in the day but I'm not willing to believe that because Grinders is awesome.

In other words, WHAT A NIGHT.

The Day After Tomorrow is one of the worst movies ever made. I feel I can say that unequivocally. In fact, I could not watch it without giggling and thinking of motifs to lift to improve my own Flush Point. Because they are the same movie. But with hail instead of toilets. The Day After Tomorrow is also exactly like Godzilla without Godzilla and Matthew Broderick and Independence Day without Will Smith's pecs. Because seriously, Dennis Quaid is the new Bill Pullman.

The Day After Tomorrow is all about a catastrophic climate change that results in destruction not anywhere near as cool as the White House getting torched by space aliens. Instead it snows. A lot. And gets really cold really quick. Which for a person like me--who right now in the midst of mid-80s temperatures is wearing a t-shirt and black fleece pullover--is true horror. But stuff happens to people we should give a shit about but don't, and Dick Cheney is an ass even as a fictional character, and hey, isn't the president that guy that ran a detective agency off of a boat and homo-erotically palled around with another guy and a geek who's best friend was a robot?

Dennis Quaid knows something bad is going down, but no one will listen to him because for some reason everyone but Bilbo Baggins hates him. It's probably because he has a job that takes him away from home for months at a time but he has the smug audacity to own house plants AND come home acting all pissed because they're dead. He's divorced/separated from a doctor who cares more about her patients than herself, which should be an endearing quality but instead made me wish all the more for her Tragic Onscreen Death. They have a son who's WICKED SMART and has A CHIP ON HIS SHOULDER, so he's totally going to redeem himself by knowing what the hell's going on and building out of a tub of recycling and a roll of scotch tape the spaceship that will take everyone to another habitable planet. Not really but almost. So then it snows some more, and people burn stuff to stay warm, and then it snows, and then everyone goes to Mexico and lives happily ever after, YAY AMERICA!!!

Just to warn everyone ahead of time, THIS MOVIE IS FICTION. Although it is based on the non-fiction work of two crazy people, "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber (SIDE NOTE: I have all of Whitley Strieber's books and I used to listen to Art Bell's radio show, until he left the air after the Government threatened him and his family with death for SPEAKING THE TRUTH), you recognize it as fiction when at the end of the movie the Dick Cheney character APOLOGIZES FOR BEING WRONG. This would never happen in real life, and totally breaks the fourth wall and ruined all illusions I had about the movie.

Although I do not have any trouble believing what I've now decided is the GRAND PLAN OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. See, they are intentionally screwing with the climate in order to bring about a global environmental catastrophe in order to bring about radical positive changes in family values. Because in this film it is once again proven that there is nothing better at bringing about the reconciliation of a failed marriage like catastrophic global catastrophe. Because everyone lives happily ever after, even if they are in refugee tent camps in Mexico.

And everyone does live, because apparently no one dies during such catastrophic events unless they are smarmy or misguided, and even then it happens off screen so we don't care. Seriously, like, these people thought snow was the worst thing they had to contend with, when days before they were swimming in CHEST-HIGH NEW YORK SEWER WATER? I must have missed the memo sent out congratulating humanity on totally wiping out cholera.

I do have to admit I felt some affinity with those heartbroken at having to burn books to stay alive, although if I were them I totally would have been like, "Anne Rice books first!!!" That would have kicked ass.

All, though, is not lost. There is a moral to this story: Nature proves that God loves Monty Python as much as we do, as a tanker floats through downtown Manhattan, just like at the beginning of The Meaning of Life.

Unfortunately for us, The Day After Tomorrow lacks a plot, plausible acting, realistic dialogue, and a machine that goes "ping."

Cloud Nine--THE PLEASURE OF MY COMPANY

This one will be short and sweet.

I read. I know that after seeing my other entries, this is difficult to believe. You probably think, all she does is watch TV and go to the movies, but that fact is if I try real hard I can read at around a college level, and I occasionally do.

I should be reading around the college level research for my thesis, but instead I'm working my way through everything that's been recommended on Salon.com in the last couple of months, and some shitty books "YOU'LL LOVE IF YOU LIKED THE DA VINCI CODE!!!" Which I have but haven't read yet, but I'm a sucker for a conspiracy, especially if it involves the Illuminati or some variation of, so even though Angels & Demons sucked ass I'm totally going to read the Da Vinci Code. But I refuse to try to figure it out for myself!!! I may even read the last page first.

But I felt compelled to write. I just finished a book that had me crying so hard at the end that The Husband awoke from a deep sleep next to me in bed and told me to go blow my nose. That book was Steve Martin's newest novel, The Pleasure of My Company.

Granted, I cry at everything. I cried at the end of Shrek because it was so happy. I cried when they first showed the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park because it was so damn cool and real. I BELIEVED the dinosaurs were real!!! Seriously, it was awesome.

This book made me cry because it was very melancholy, and then very happy. I sound like a four year old talking about my favorite My Pretty Pony, but you must forgive me as I'm still blubbering.

Daniel is trapped in the throws of OCD. His weekly walks to the local Rite Aid to stare longingly at Zandy the Pharmacist take 45 minutes because he can't walk over curbs. On a lark he enters an essay contest, "Why I am the Most Average American." His fascination with his therapist, Clarrisa, is rivaled only by his obsession with Elizabeth, the real estate agent showing apartments across the street. Despite his shortcomings, Daniel thinks very highly of himself, with some disastrous results. Eventually he comes to find the tightly ordered routine of his life coming apart at the seams, and instead of retreating into himself, he reaches out to grasp onto the passing sleeves of those around him, a child guided over the curbs of life.

So, the book is fantastic. Did you ever see LA Story? It's like that, funny and yet bittersweet. You never saw LA Story? DAMN YOU!!! Go and see it!!! But please, at some point read The Pleasure of My Company. It's only 162 pages long, a three hour read at the most. And it's awesome. I think it may be up there with Microserfs, my all-time favorite book.

I'm off to blow my nose, take a couple of Excedrin, and try to calm down a little. Sometimes a good cry feels really good, you know?

eight--I, ROBOT

SPOILERS!!!!

So the brother and I were on the phone a few weeks ago: he was thanking me profusely for emailing him a link to the new Alien V Predator movie, and I was telling him to have a good time seeing it without me because there are TOTALLY going to be Things Popping Out of People in the movie and although I have gotten a bit better with watching things that tangentally can be considered Things Popping Out of People (like Ron Weasley vomiting up slugs in that Harry Potter movie that I can't remember which one it was specifically) Alien is the Numero Uno Things Popping Out of People experience for me and so it will always be avoided at all costs.

Even watching the trailer for Aliens V Predator is a big step for me. I should be congratulated.

So anyway, the brother and I are on the phone a few weeks ago when I ask if he's seen the trailer for Will Smith's movie, I, ROBOT.

"Yeah, and it looks like it's going to suck," he says. "When did you want to go see it?"

So it was with extremely low expectations that I entered I, ROBOT. In the end I was pleasantly surprised. It's not all that bad, although the brother hated it, but he's still into wrestling, so take his opinion as you will. It's decent enough for a summer movie, with lots of stuff blowing up, and a decent enough story that makes sense until you think about it later, but by then you're so struck by the coolness of the movie you don't care but you still do because yeah the plot holes are pretty big. But then again you don't care because you saw it in the afternoon so you didn't pay full price.

Will Smith stars as Will Smith, a cop with a grudge/secret emotional pain/bad attitude/chip on his shoulder/cynical streak/problem with authority/hatred of the world. Pretty sucky stuff happened to him that seriously messed him up, but of course he immediately goes back to work because it's better to be messed up in the head when you're at your cop job and have access to perps and guns, rather than recuperating at home where the worst you can do is eat a lot of Cheez-Its and watch Maury's "I'm fifteen, I was pregnant at twelve, You are the father of this baby" show. Will Smith hates robots and unfortunately for him this is Chicago 2035, where the cars don't fly but there are fifty kagillion robots running around. Everyone has one, because it's obviously better to dump that annoying illegal immigrant you can barely understand and who costs five dollars a day to scrub your toilets when you can pay ten thousand in one lump sum and get a robot to do it.

Seriously, just to jump in here: there are like NO HOMELESS PEOPLE in Chicago in 2035. I'm assuming they've all been killed and converted into Soylent Green. Because when you've got robots working at Fed Ex and tending bar at your local dive, where are all the people who used to have those jobs going to go? Bush is behind this, I just know it.

Just to jump in again: The aforementioned local dive in the movie is the OVALTINE, which even though is supposedly in Chicago is actually in Vancouver, and was featured in the third season X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." I am not a geek.

So Ephram Cochran is making robots, his discovery of warp drive apparently a side project he thought more of as a hobby. At the beginning of the movie he does a Greg Louganis out the window of his 20th floor lab. His hologram calls Will Smith in to investigate, and of course while everyone else is quick to write it off as a suicide, Will Smith knows that it's murder. Because the chip on his shoulder whispered it to him. He immediately fingers a suspect: Sonny, a Robot with Feelings. At first, Will Smith thinks Sonny killed Cochran just to see what it'd be like to kill someone, but Sonny keeps calling Cochran "Father," and I think this was supposed to have Jesus overtones, but I just kept thinking about Data on Star Trek and his evil twin, Lore. Which this is sort of like but not quite.

So then there's this hot chick and she's a psychologist working to make the robots more humanlike. Which of course is ironic because she's a severe, stone cold bitch. Get it? This movie is FILLED TO THE BRIM with ironies, like Will Smith hates robots who are marginalized in society and he's black so his people have been marginalized so you'd think he'd relate and then the chick has no feelings but she studies the human mind and tries to get robots to seem like they feel things. It's deep. Seriously.

So then the movie is kind of like a weird buddy-cop movie, because Will Smith is kinda working with the bitch scientist (because after overcoming an initial period of hate and distrust they grow to like and respect one another and recognize their own faults and attempt to overcome them while working together to achieve a common goal), but then he's also kind of working with the robot (because after overcoming an initial period of hate and distrust they grow to like and respect one another and recognize their own faults and attempt to overcome them while working together to achieve a common goal). And then the robot kicks ALL SORTS OF ASS!!! And Will Smith says some smart ass things which is incredibly endearing and everyone comes to realize that he was right all along and actually has a heart of gold and was working for the betterment of man- and robot-kind. And then there are more Jesus allusions. THE END.

Which is really sad because this movie would have been awesome had it been like Alien Nation, and Sonny and Will Smith become partners on the Chicago police force and get into zany adventures which are predicated upon some misunderstanding arising from an inadvertent miscommunication. And then there'd be homoerotic overtones.

Because you know this whole time you've been thinking about sex robots.

On a side note, the showing I attended featured a trailer for RESIDENT EVIL : APOCALYPSE. Apocalypse is my favorite word because it makes me think of Acapulco. Which makes me think of The Love Boat. Gopher was so hot. Anyway, this trailer made me realize that giving up smoking was the worst thing I could have ever done because

A) Killing zombies is cool, but killing zombies while you're smoking is even cooler and

B) You never know when you're going to have to set something on fire, and you're guaranteed to have a lighter on you if you smoke. Imagine, just for a minute, if zombies actually did take over the world and you had just doused a warehouse full of them with gasoline and you're standing there wanting to set it ablaze but you can't because you gave up Camels and threw out your "Life's a Bitch and So am I" disposable lighter. I'm just saying.

Lucky #7-SPIDER MAN 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

Before I begin, I just have to preface my review by saying that I have no right whatsoever to talk ill of comic book geeks. I collect my fair share of crap; why, just this afternoon I was at The Laughing Ogre, screaming at my brother because I couldn't figure out in what order to read the various books of 30 Days of Night (soon to be a Major Motion Picture) and lamenting the fact that the new Neil Gaiman series, at $3.50 a piece and eight issues total, would run altogether far more than the $22 I'd originally estimated. Funny side story: the brother looked at me askance and was all like, "You did see how much they cost right?" And I'm like, yeah, three fiddy. And he's wheels turning in his head and smoke coming out of his ears and he's like, "That's...more than twenty-four dollars, not twenty-two!"

Math is hard.

But as I was saying, I have no right to talk about people. Why, just this afternoon as we drove to the theater, we were behind a car with an Enterprise Car Rental sticker on the bumper, and I thought back longingly to the days when I wanted a Lariat Car Rental company bumper sticker for my car.

Never heard of Lariat? That's strange...because Lariat was the company Mulder and Scully always rented cars from when they were off on cases.

See. I can't talk about people.

HOWEVER, there was a group of people outside the theater after SPIDER MAN 2: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK discussing myriad ways the plot diverged from the comic continuity. "I don't remember Mary Jane getting married until much later," said one.

Actually, it was in AMAZING SPIDER MAN #392 that she first talked about marriage.

I'm evil. It was actually FANTASTIC SPIDER MAN #195.

Anyway, this is not why you're here.

Let me begin by saying SPIDER MAN 2: THE LEGEND OF CURLY'S GOLD is the GREATEST MOVIE EVER. This is not hyperbole. Although I will say now that it will only hold this title until BLADE THREE: RETURN OF THE KING OF VAMPIRE ASS KICKING comes out this winter, which we saw a preview for and which features shitloads of Wesley Snipes being a total badass and blowing a lot of shit up. That's one thing SPIDER MAN 2: 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS lacks in spades: ass-kicking Wesley Snipes. It also lacks a lot of shit blowing up, and when I say it lacks shit blowing up I mean shit does blow up a lot but it's not cool shit. It's like lame ass Necessary For The Plot shit. The Kelmeister only gives a stamp of approval to completely gratuitous sex and violence.

So why did I think Spider Man 2: The Secret of the Ooze was the greatest movie ever made? It made me cry. And I saw a naked picture of Tobey Maguire on the internet and he's hung like Seabiscuit and I couldn't get the mental image of him playing naked cards with Leo DiCaprio and David Blaine out of my head. But this was okay, because Kirsten Dunst had protruding nipples through the whole film, so my husband had something to think about instead of me thinking about Tobey Maguire.

Also, J.K. Simmons, who is Jameson, rocks. You might remember him from his star turn as the ass-kicking Dr. Skoda on Law and Order. I miss Dr. Skoda. Also he was on Oz, but I don't have cable and I would watch it on DVD but I have to keep myself pure until ALIAS season 3 comes out.

By the way, the season finale of Alias was awesome right up until the end. I still can't decide if it sucks ass or not.

So, anyway, Spider Man 2: On The Rocks was awesome. It was funny and sad and inspiring and made me Proud To Be An American. Although, dude if you're living in a shit apartment and your elderly aunt is getting thrown out of her house, you stay with her and give her some of your pizza delivery money. It doesn't take a super hero to figure out the best way out of that situation. I mean, Peter apparently still spends a lot of time there anyway. And if he's concerned about having his own place to attract the chicks...he wears a costume. The chicks would dig you more if you lived in your parents' basement. MJ only likes him because she knew him before the suit. And she probably knows he's hung like Seabiscuit.

Also, pay attention to the very end. It's weird. I think it was supposed to MEAN SOMETHING PROFOUND, but was instead a downer and non-sensemaking.

Looking back on my review, it may seem like I actually hated Spider Man 2: Back in the Habit, I'm thoroughly recommending it. You can't go wrong with Spider Man 2: The Quickening. My mother would totally love this movie, and that really means something. I'm totally looking forward to Spider Man 3: Revolutions, when Spidey battles the evil Hobgoblin, who will in the movie be the alter ego of Harry Osborn although in the comic he's Roderick Kingsley.
Also, as a shout out to Nala and Giga, we now know who does the super hero's laundry.