review--THE ACTUAL WHITE NOISE MOVIE

SPOILERS!!!

Once upon a time, The Mother used to listen to Art Bell on the radio, really late at night. The next day, she'd call me at work and recount the previous night's show, and then I would further explain to her the intricacies of Ufology and crystal healing and Black Helicopters and the HAARP Project. Because I'm down with all that craziness.

So anyway, on one show he featured this story (now confirmed to be a hoax) about these Siberian oil drillers who drilled into the earth and punched into a pocket and they stuck a microphone into the hole thinking they'd hear tectonic plate movements and instead they heard THE VOICES OF HELL.
Check this shit out in real player
So, yeah, this story is totally whack; I mean, why in the hell would anybody be carrying around a nine mile long microphone cord to listen to tectonic plates shifting? But The Mother told me about the tape and I looked for it on the Art Bell site and I listened to it and I nearly peed my pants because I'm totally gullible like that.
WHITE NOISE is not as scary as that tape, although they totally played something like that in the movie.
The movie stars Michael Keaton as a guy who makes shitloads of money so he can freely indulge in whatever craziness he wants for two hours because he doesn't really need to go to work. His wife dies tragically and then a fat guy starts following him around. The fat guy tells him he's been receiving messages from Keaton's wife from beyond the grave by recording the ambient noise in rooms and then filtering it through the computer. And seriously, if you squint really hard and have a small grasp of Esperanto it does sound like his wife saying his name. And some other stuff. So Keaton goes out and buys shitloads of equipment because he can, and he spends all his time trying to tape his wife. And then she starts showing up and tells him cryptically to rescue people, but she's totally not because that's not what she's saying at all and you can tell he's totally making that shit up because he's desperate for his wife to be a life-saving angel and not a hell-bound demonic spirit bend on global dominance and destruction.
At least that's how I translated that section of Esperanto.
But then he figures out that all the people who are dying were also going to the fat guy to hear their dead relatives, and then his creepy girlfriend shows up in a tape and does a Louganis off her balcony but she doesn't die for some reason, and there's a serial killer and some creepy shadow demons and a climatic fight to the death and THE END.
But back to Art Bell. Another show that totally freaked The Mother out was one about "SHADOW PEOPLE." These are the forms that you see flutter by out of the corner of your eye when you're alone in a room. Here's a supposed picture so you can be as freaked out as my mom. Shadow people figure prominently in the action of WHITE NOISE (actually more like in the televisions) but there should have been way more of them.
So WHITE NOISE wasn't really all that scary. I told The Brother that I was going to pee my pants in fear but that was more from the soda. He said I looked very engrossed all hunched over and leaning toward the screen near the end of the movie, but that was to relieve the pressure on my bladder. See, I kept thinking that if I left to pee I'd miss the really scary part, but there never was a really scary part. There were a couple of scenes that were jump-out-of-your-seat moments, but that was more from the fact that you're watching the tape and watching the tape and watching the tape and listening to the static and you think you hear a Jonathan I love you and then OHMYGODYOUBASTARDPIGROTINHELLDIEARGH!!!!ANDEVILNESSONTHETELEVISIONFORASPLITSECOND and then it's over.
I think the idea (without overanalyzing) was that when you're supposed to go, you're supposed to go. And the "Other Side" is not something for the living to be meddling in. And if you meddle you've gotten a glimpse of something no living person should see, and so the Shadow People come and get you. Unless you're a crazy girlfriend doped up on tranquilizers because then they don't bother you. Or something. But part of the problem with WHITE NOISE is that the Shadow People didn't fuck around with the living enough. Not that I wanted limbs torn off torsos or anything.
Did you see GHOST? You did? Because you wanted to see Demi Moore naked and at the time that Righteous Brothers song hadn't been played into the ground so you could still stand to hear it without desperately wanting to stick a Q-Tip into your ear all the way totally going against everything they tell you on the packaging? You remember the scene at the end where evil murderer and attempted rapist Tony Goldwyn gets the shit kicked out of him by the evil smoke demons and they drag him to hell? You do?
The end of WHITE NOISE is exactly like that.
No, really. Only no Patrick Swayse.
I will also readily admit that more than once during the movie Michael Keaton gave this penetrating look of concern and concentration that made me think to myself "I'M BATMAN." Which threw me out of the movie. But afterwards The Brother confessed he thought the same thing. And also his dead wife appears to him in person as this apparition and granted the rest of the film was pretty unbelievable but I'd successfully suspended my disbelief but THAT was crossing a line of credulity that even I would not walk over. It was just really cheesy and stupid.
Once again I was taken by a preview. But I did tell The Husband that I would see it again at the dollar theater, because I have to admit that part with the OHMYGODYOUBASTARDPIGROTINHELLDIEARGH!!!!ANDEVILNESSONTHETELEVISIONFORASPLITSECOND part was really fucking awesome. There just needed to be way more than that.
There was this awesome syndicated show on called SIGHTINGS. On one episode they interviewed this women named Sarah Estep, who is a researcher in Electronic Voice Phenomena. She went to a civil war cemetary with her tape recorder and started asking questions and when she got back to her lab and listened to the tapes there were these voices talking about their experiences in the war. It freaked my shit out. That was way more scary than WHITE NOISE. The Brother's theory, which sounds completely plausable, is that because you are seeing it under the guise of "documentary" your mind automatically says "TRUTH," because you're conditioned to believe that things you see in documentaries are true. So documentaries are scarier because you believe everything in them acutally happened and are possible. And there's a certain clinical detachment as well that adds to the scare. WHITE NOISE spends so much (or so little) time trying to get you to give a rat's ass about the people in the movie that you aren't as frightened.
And you keep thinking, "I'M BATMAN." Which doesn't help.
So the Moral of the Story, according to The Brother, is DON'T FUCK WITH THE DEAD. I am leaning more towards DON'T HAVE MORE THAN ONE TV, AND IF YOU DO, FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T PUT THEM ALL IN ONE ROOM. And also DON'T BUY LILIES FOR ANYONE EVER, THEY'RE TOTALLY BAD LUCK.
Next week: ELEKTRA. I'm hoping for some really shitty MORTAL KOMBAT-y goodness. And crossing my fingers for a Christopher Lambert cameo. More films need Christopher Lambert. And Jean-Claude Van Damme. But that's just me.
PS. The best part of WHITE NOISE was that as The Brother and I were leaving we passed by this couple, and the chick was totally crying. I don't know if someone close to her had just died, or she's been contacting the dead recently, or what, but--not to be mean--that's really fucking funny. I mean, why would you go see a movie about contacting the recently deceased if you have had someone recently decease? I mean, recounting the plot to The Mother, I told her about this part where this girl gets a message from her recently deceased grandmother, and I got kind of choked up and my grandmother's been dead for three years!!! So why you'd actively search out a movie like this in those circumstances is beyond me.
But then again she could have been upset about something completely unrelated to the movie. It's not nice to make fun of people. I don't know why I brought it up.
She was probably upset that she wasted two hours of her life that she'd never get back.
PPS. Just to geek for a moment, the way the fat guy EVPs in the movie is totally not how you do it in real life. But I'm not going to get into that. As I'm not one to nitpick.
PSS. Have you ever thought about reincarnation? You know how people are always claiming that they were someone famous, like Napoleon? Did you ever stop to think that if you were reincarnated, and your future self were to get hypnotized and relive your life, that they'd totally tell people they were Napoleon, too, instead of admitting their previous life was spent in a cubicle during the day, and then playing video games at night? I often thought about that when I worked at the bookstore, like how depressing would that be to relive a past life and you're like, "I was a supervisor at a Borders, OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO." No one's ever a scullery maid, you know? Were there even such things? How did the world end up the way it did with fifty gajillion Napoleons running around?

review--BLADE:TRINITY

SPOILERS!!!

So, I finally dragged myself out to see BLADE. And I mean that literally: before going to the movies with The Brother I'd left the house approximately two times in the week following Christmas. I was in bed on New Year's Eve at 10pm. AND I was pissed at the neighborhood partiers for making it hard for me to go to sleep.

I have become a lazy bum.

So anyway, on the way out of the movie The Brother and I had the following exchange:
ME: Do you know who Dracula was? He looked really familiar.
THE BROTHER: No. We'll have to look him up when we get home.
ME: He was kind of a hottie.
THE BROTHER: I wouldn't know, I was too busy looking at Jessica Biel.
ME: There's nothing like watching BLADE: TRINITY to make you feel fat.
THE BROTHER: Ryan Reynolds did not look like that in VAN WILDER.
By the way, as a side note Ryan Reynolds guested on THE X-FILES on that episode where Scully's investigating the never-dying photographer and she gets shot. Just in case you wanted to know.
BLADE: TRINITY is the ironically named third installment in the BLADE trilogy, and it features a host of REALLY HOT ACTORS. I say "ironically" not because it's THIRD in a TRILOGY, or that there are THREE VAMPIRE HUNTERS (although one is taken out of most of the action for a good deal of the movie so technically that's not true), but because Blade has three lines in the whole movie:
"I forgot my sword."
"Choochie-coo."
"*grunt*"
Okay, I may be exaggerating, but seriously Blade's in the movie for all of five minutes.
BLADE: TRINITY is about a group of vampires who awaken Dracula (who's buried in Iraq for some reason) because they believe he's the only thing capable of killing off Blade once and for all. Meanwhile the FBI's gunning for Blade because he's a Menace to Society, and they end up blowing up his hideout. And some of the cops are helping the vampires. It looks really bad for our hero until a heretofore unmentioned shadow network of vampire killers led by heretofore unmentioned Whistler's daughter Jennifer Biel comes out of hiding to rescue him and help him out. And then there's fighting and stuff blowing up and sarcastic line delivery and tight abs and THE END.
The acting, for once, is top notch. Parker Posey, Queen of Indie Film, plays the head vampire, and you can tell she's having fun bossing people around, throwing fits and torturing people. Also she looks like a bad ass. Ryan Reynolds is kind of funny. The guy who plays Dracula is awesome (he was TV's JOHN DOE, by the way, on Fox's short-lived series).
And this is where the problem comes in. BLADE: TRINITY had the possibility to be something really great. It's hinted at in a couple of places: you have the King of All Vampires coming head-to-head with the King of All Vampire Killers. What kind of strange dynamic would this create? What sort of mutual introspection would it lead to? Dracula talks about an honor modern vampires have lost, an honor he finds in Blade. In the end, he "sacrifices" himself so that Blade can live. AND there's this awesome scene where he goes into a goth shop and is horrified to discover how his legend has been twisted by lame poseur kids. So many possibilities!!!
Then there's this MATRIX-y subplot where the vampires have victims set up in this warehouse being artificially kept alive so that their blood can be continually harvested. It was really cool looking, but pretty easy to undermind: Blade grunted at the only tech to "turn it off."
The only other thing worth noting was that Dracula's "true form" was fucking BAD ASS. This movie did some cool stuff with the conceit from the second of the vampires with the expanding jaws. But in the end I think it was just way too much trying to be packed into one movie. Not that I expected BLADE: TRINITY to be a Master's Class in character development, but it was disappointing even from a blowing lots of shit up angle.
I think I have to stop trusting in trailers. I'm learning that they don't often deliver what they promise.
I'm JUST NOW coming to understand this?!?!?!?
Coming up: WHITE NOISE (which still freaks my shit out), ELEKTRA, HIDE AND SEEK (looks pretty awesome), and CONSTANTINE. And some other stuff. Also I just bought some really awesome crap films like ZOMBIE LAKE, THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG, and DEMON UNDER GLASS featuring the sort-of-hot goateed guy from BABYLON 5. So I will be wallowing in shit for some time to come, and I'm taking you with me.
PS speaking of zombies, The Brother made The Mother watch SHAUN OF THE DEAD after telling her how awesome it was. The Mother hated it. Her exact quote was, "Why did it need to be so violent? I mean, did they really have to eat those people?"
We tried to explain the concept of zombies to her, but she wasn't having it.