Showing posts with label scary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scary. Show all posts

Monday, November 16, 2009

Movie Review
    — 2012


Oh my God, what a steaming heap of…

Well, if you turn you brain off…

No, I mean really turn it off.  Don’t think about any of the stuff in the movie.

SPOILERS — SPOILERS — SPOILERS

  • Don’t think about the odds of surviving
    close call after close call after close call.
  • Don’t think about jumping a limo from the street into a sinking building, through the collapsing floors, and jumping it out the other side (just in time) and down a story or two with one door missing and neither losing any passengers nor setting off the air bags.
  • Don’t think about managing to get the plane to take off and then staying just 50 feet off the ground while buildings throw themselves at you.  Instead of going upAway from the destruction!
  • Don’t think about whether a super-heated volcanic ash plume only a few miles from a just-erupted supervolcano would foul the engines of a small prop plane, maybe melt things, or invade the interior air supply.
  • Don’t think about how an ash plume from Yellowstone can reach DC in 7 hours (averaging nearly 300 mph), and only reach Las Vegas (about 1/3 as far away and on the same side of the Rockies) in the same time.
  • Don’t think how a plane can take off from the Las Vegas airport, at the south end of the strip, and then cruise over/through the Wynn, the Venetian, and Paris casinos in that order, since those run north to south!
  • Don’t think about how they got two fat teens, two little kids, a fat adult man, two normal sized adult men, two adult women, and a small dog into a single Bentley.
  • Don’t think about how long it would take for hypothermia to set in atop a Himalayan glacier, for people wearing the same clothes they did in Southern California, Yellowstone, and Las Vegas.
  • Don’t think about how a 1500 meter tidal wave manages to make it far into inland India.  And really don’t think how it then increases to be more than 5000 meters high in order to crest the Himalayas.  (And definitely don’t think “Why didn’t any of the brilliant scientists question how a tidal wave would increase in height while travelling over a thousand miles of dry land?”, even if the in-movie answer would have be “We don't know, but there it is!”)
  • Don’t think about where the fuel is stored in a plane which falls off a cliff, impacts nose firsts, and explodes as a result.  And don’t think that there should be consistency when another plane runs nose first into the side of a ship.
  • Don’t think about how overtaxed the food stores would be on the ships after taking on twice the planned load.  Don’t think “Donner, party of five.  Donner, party of four.”
  • Don’t wonder about what devastation hit Africa, the only populated continent never mentioned during the destruction part of the movie.  (Because they actually sideswipe pretend to address that one.)
  • Don’t think about why there was no mention of the other half of the surviving rich people of the world at the end.

Once you stop thinking about science and the odds and geography and fuel lines and food… if there’s any of your brain left, you’ll probably enjoy the outright goofiness of this movie.

You’ll definitely be talking about this movie after it’s done.  You’ll be saying:

“What the…
how the…
fuck, that made no sense!”



Updated on January 2, 2010
 

Monday, March 24, 2008

Where were you when the lights went out?


Me, I was driving up Rainier Avenue.

It’s always a bit freaky to be walking or driving underneath a streetlight just as it decides to go out.   (Did I cause that?)    For years, I used to clap twice after that would happen (it happened at least once a week to me, I swear), claiming that it was a “psychic clap-on/clap-off light”.   The light would go off because I was about to clap.  Prove that it wasn’t!

Anyway…

The weird feeling of a streetlight gong off is nothing quite like driving through an intersection and the lights suddenly going off for blocks in every direction.  (Shit!   Did I cause that?)   That’s what happened last night, at around 11:30 pm, on Rainier near 23rd.   Bright flash and then dark.   Then about a block further, another flash as everything came back on, and then immediately off again, and then a couple more repeats of that in the next few seconds.   It started to look like a scene from a horror film.

Another half mile along and the power was on in that neighborhood, although when I cam back down Rainier an hour later, the power was still off in the zone I had been driving through.   I assume it’s back on this morning.  I don’t see anything on the Seattle Times website today, so I assume it was nothing big enough to mention.   No semi plowing into a transformer station to destroy a time-traveling killer robot or anything.<