on the passing of Michael Joseph Jackson

I was driving home from work Thursday when I first heard rumors of Michael Jackson’s death. The afternoon sports talk guys on ESPN radio had brought it up, almost as a joke really, because at the time only TMZ was actually reporting that he had died, while more reputable news outlets were merely saying he’d been rushed to the hospital. In any case, it was the first I’d heard of it, though I had already read about Farrah Fawcet’s death, which otherwise would have produced the day’s most notable obituary.

By the time I got to my apartment and got online, Jackson’s death had been confirmed and I already had seven — count ‘em, seven — Facebook friends who had mentioned his death in their status in some way. I was never a fan of his and didn’t listen to his music, and despite his having produced the top-selling album of all time (1982’s Thriller, released when I was barely 2 months old, and believed to have sold over 100 million copies worldwide to date), I probably couldn’t name more than 4 or 5 of his songs if I heard them.

In my post-adolescence, he was in the news far more for his often bizarre and mostly disturbing personal scandals than he was for his actual music, and the fact that he only released 3 albums of new material in the past 2 decades could be seen as either the partial cause or the effect of that. I didn’t follow his career and had only a cursory knowledge of his biography, let alone his discography.

However, when Michael Jackson’s name comes up in conversation years from now, I’ll still have 2 distinct memories related to his music. The first was his electric performance for the halftime show of Super Bowl XXVII (won by the Cowboys, thank you very much). He performed some of his most recent (at the time) popular material for about 6 minutes, danced all over the stage, and shattered the record for most crotch-grabs at a Super Bowl (which I’ll assume was previously held by Charles Haley). He was a decade removed from Thriller, 14 months removed from the release of Dangerous (his 2nd highest selling album), and still 2 years away from HIStory (a double album that had some of his biggest hits on one CD and brand new music on the other). He was a spritely (better adjectives could probably be chosen) 35 years old, still in the late prime of his career, and 3/4 of the way through a run of 4 albums — released between 1982 and 1995 — that today have combined to sell nearly 200 million copies! Read that last part again. In the span of 13 years, he released 4 albums that sold just shy of 200,000,000 copies worldwide! That, combined with his radio hits, brought him more music royalties than you could shake a white glove at.

But back to Super Bowl XXVII. It’s interesting to contrast Michael Jackson’s set with halftime performances at more recent Super Bowls. The most striking thing about it is he performed in broad daylight, not under a night sky on a field lit with all the snazzy lights, video screens, fireworks, and bells & whistles the National Football League can buy. The game was played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California and the game began at around 5:30 Central time, as pretty much all Super Bowls do. So he was outdoors and it was most likely not even 6 p.m. Pacific time when he appeared on stage. It was fairly obvious he was lip synching but he still had all his patented dance moves and the crowd (an estimated 98,000+) went wild.

I’ll always remember watching that, though it was unfortunately followed by children gathering around the stage as he lead them in singing the almost unlistenable “Heal the World”. I was a 4th grader at the time, and within a few weeks somebody brought a tape of that song to class and it ended up getting played incessantly (thank you, Mr. Bolton!) And yet somehow, it wasn’t even the most ridiculously overplayed song of that year (on our classroom’s tape player anyway, if not radio itself); that honor went to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” by Brooks and Dunn, but that’s neither here nor there.

My other distinct Michael Jackson memory recalls my first month of college. My roommate and I were watching the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards (apparently I had nothing better to do) when *NSYNC came on near the end to perform “Pop” (the video for which won them 4 awards that night) from their final album Celebrity, which had been released a few months earlier and had already been certified 6x platinum. *NSYNC sang, danced and basically mailed in a 4 minute performance, backed by lights, extra dancers, props, gaudy costumes, and other aesthetic features that will make all future generations wonder how *NSYNC became so popular in the first place. As their performance ended, Michael Jackson (by then 43 years old) made a surprise appearance (it’s at about the 4 minute mark in the video), and immediately the crowd at the show became about 40 times more excited than they were at any point during *NSYNC’s routine. Jackson danced for all of about 30 seconds, strung together a few of his most familiar moves, then finished and waved to the crowd and exchanged hugs with all the members of *NSYNC. I distinctly remember my roommate having a very excited “No way!” reaction upon Jackson’s appearance.

The MTV Video Music Awards have had a history of surprise appearances by music icons, and this one fit right in line with that, though Jackson’s minute-long cameo certainly had to have been at least partially related to the fact that his final album, Invincible, was to be released in less than 2 months. It was the last distinct memory I have of Jackson performing, and the last impression I ever got of just how hugely popular he was even 19 years after Thriller when he was into his early 40s. Perhaps just as notable was the fact that the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards show took place at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City just 5 days before 9/11.

Invincible was released at the end of October that year and received mediocre reviews and sold poorly (by Jackson’s standards anyway). And for the rest of the decade he served as little more than the butt of jokes from late night comics and as the central character of “The Jeffersons”, a memorable South Park episode that aired in April of 2004. He was mired in scandal and financial troubles for the last few years, but always had his ardent (and frankly delusional) defenders among his worldwide fanbase (myself, not being among them).

He was scheduled to play 50 concerts at the O2 Arena in London beginning in less than 3 weeks, which was to mark his musical comeback after all his recent personal and musical troubles. Obviously, that won’t be happening now. If nothing else, it certainly would have been interesting to see if his 50 year old legs could still pull off the moves he did as a 25 or 35 year old. Presumably he could have sold out arenas while performing in a wheelchair just based on his back catalogue alone. After Thursday, that’s what his fans will have to remember him by.

funniest movie edits for network TV

I was going to make this a Top 5 Tuesday entry but had trouble coming up with 5 examples I could find video for. While I was at work today I started thinking about my favorite content edits made to movies so they can air on network TV stations. I found a few of the best ones I could think of on youtube, but not enough for a real Top 5 Tuesday, so I’ll have to delay that category’s resurrection another week.

I’ll begin with arguably the two most legendarily awful edits, the ones most frequently brought up in discussions on this topic.

The Big Lebowski: John Goodman takes a crowbar and breaks all of the windows on a nice sports car, yelling at its supposed owner, “You see what happens when you f*** a stranger in the a**?” But in TV edits, the line is heard as “You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?”

Die Hard 2: Bruce Willis has just had a fight with a terrorist on the wing of a passenger jet about to take off, and the fight ended with Willis getting kicked off the wing and falling to the ground, but in the process he manages to open the fuel door/hatch thing (do planes really have those right there?) and as the plane escapes it leaves a trail of fuel behind it. Willis takes out his lighter, says his trademark “Yippie ki yay, motherf*****!” line and throws the lighter onto the line of fuel, which eventually gets to the plane just as its taking off and blows it up. But in the TV version, Bruce Willis says, “Yippie ki yay, Mr. Falcon”, and in a voice that is obviously not that of Willis.” High comedy.

The Usual Suspects: Career criminals (played by Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, and Kevin Spacey) are put together for a police lineup of suspects. They are told to read the line on the card they are passed. They all take their turns reading the line, “Hand me the keys, you f****** c*********!” In the TV version, however, they all say “Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother.” That’s one of the more inspired ones I’ve ever seen.

Pulp Fiction, as you can imagine, is nearly unrecognizable when it appears on edited TV stations. There’s not really one good clip, but there is a pretty good video compiling some of the more obvious edits.

One of my other favorites was a number of Samuel L. Jackson’s lines in Jackie Brown, such as “motherf*****” becoming “my friend”, or “motherfu**ing” becoming “mutual-funded”, but I haven’t found any videos of that. And it’s late and I need sleep. If anyone can think of other good ones, feel free to mention them, or post video links.

give Roger Moore a bailout

The past couple weeks at work have been pretty slow for the most part. I’ve had some books to deliver but I’ve had several days where I’ve either gotten all of my work done pretty early or I’ve come into work in the morning with nothing there for me to do. Scott, the guy I share an office with, has had a similarly tedious time with his job during that time. Predictably, this has lead to even more extended pop culture conversations than we usually have in a given week, and several visits to wikipedia whenever we’ve brought up an obscure movie one of us barely remembers, or a random actor who came up in a conversation. Yesterday I mentioned Ryan O’Neal after a story Scott told me – which involved him buying lunch from Quizno’s and then absent-mindedly walking out with chips and a drink when he’d only ordered a sandwich – reminded me of a scene in What’s Up Doc?, a 1972 movie that starred O’Neal and a very young Barbara Streisand. Scott couldn’t remember who O’Neal was, so he read a bit from his wikipedia page, which detailed the various domestic disputes he and his sons have gotten into. This was quite hilarious in a most unintentional way.

Later in the day, Scott ended up on the wikipedia page of British actor Roger Moore, or rather Sir Roger Moore, I should say (he was knighted 5 years ago). One of the pictures on that page seemed to tell us more about his altruism (or possible lack thereof) than he might want people to know. In the picture, which was taken on his 80th birthday just over a year ago, Moore is wearing a very nice grey suit and is holding something in each hand. If you zoom in on the photo (see below) you can see a $1 bill in his left hand, which was presumably drawn from the huge roll of money in his right hand, which he seems to be putting back in his pocket.

The photo is cropped a bit and even in the full picture you can’t see the entire context of the photo, but in looking at it Scott and I guessed that he had the bill out as a tip for someone. I mean, what else would he possibly be doing with a $1 bill? Getting a Cherry Coke or a Snickers from a machine perhaps? If he was intending to give that as a tip, then he’s either a lousy tipper or he’s fallen on hard times. It’s an amusing photo to see; a wealthy movie star who has been a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for five years wearing an expensive three-piece suit and holding a large roll of cash in one hand and a solitary Washington in the other. Is our economy that bad? Is Sir Roger Moore reaching the point where he can only afford to give $1 tips to valets or bellhops?

If the U.S. government is going to designate tens of billions of dollars for bailouts of large corporations like A.I.G., Bear Stearns, and General Motors (that last one hasn’t happened yet, but the liberal union-friendly Democrats in Congress want it to) because those are institutions which are – we are told – vital and “too big to fail”, then surely a bailout for Sir Roger Moore should be in order. Sure he’s British and is most famous for playing two iconic British characters (James Bond and Simon Templar), but the James Bond series of movies have been vital to the long-term financial success of landmark American film studio United Artists (started in 1919) and its parent company MGM Studios (founded in 1924), and Roger Moore, having played Bond in seven movies, is a man inextricably linked to that character and that series. We can’t have him in such a state, as it’s not just him who could be hurt, but also the James Bond image and the studios who produce his celluloid exploits. Stated plainly: he is just too big to fail (and if you saw Moore’s last turn as James Bond in A View To A Kill, then you know that sentence could have multiple meanings). We need to get the Senate Appropriations Committee working on this right away.

——

Speaking of Bond, the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, will be released tomorrow and I’ve already bought my ticket. I’m going with a small group from church, and the ringleader who sent out the email asked that all the men going wear a suit and tie. I don’t have a proper suit coat at my apartment so I may have to settle for my dark jacket. The previous Bond film, 2006’s Casino Royale, was the first one of the series that I watched in the theater, and only the second one that I’d seen period (the first was Moore’s first Bond film, Live and Let Die). So needless to say, I’m not a huge aficionado of the series, but I really enjoyed Casino Royale, which was light years above anything Roger Moore did with the series.

I’m hoping the new movie will be just as good, though my expectations have been somewhat muted after I read a review in this week’s Dallas Observer in which the writer (Robert Wilonsky) praised Casino Royale before calling Quantum of Solace “easily one of the worst” films in the series. For much of his stated criticism of the movie and its supposed failures, he blames director Marc Forster, who he thinks was in over his head helming a James Bond movie when his “biggest action sequence to date involved Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton getting it on” in 2001’s Monster’s Ball (which is a terrible choice for a first movie to watch with a girl, I might add). It’s a clever line, though only if you forget the more visually rich sequences in such Forster-directed movies as Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, or last year’s adaptation of The Kite Runner for that matter. Mocking Forster’s filmography is a low blow when other directors who worked with the Bond franchise had similarly thin résumés in the area of action filmmaking. Before John Glen directed 1981’s For Your Eyes Only (the first of five Bond movies he would direct), his sole directorial credit was one episode of the TV series “Man in a Suitcase” (which aired 30 episodes in its only season, which ran from 1967 to 1968). 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which is widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise) was Peter Hunt’s directorial debut, though in his case he had worked as a film editor for several years (and four previous Bond films) before his first turn in the director’s chair.

So that’s what’s on tap for tomorrow evening. Traffic can be bad around here so I’ll probably go to the theater straight from work. My brother called while I was writing this and told me he had tomorrow off from work and might drive up here to watch the movie with the rest of us. When I mentioned the suit and tie requirement, he seemed unfazed, which is odd because he’s rarely seen in something so formal as khaki pants, let alone a suit and tie. So we’ll see how that goes.

Hope everyone else has a great weekend.

Olympic observations

- The opening ceremonies was one of the most amazing events I’ve seen in a long time. My jaw dropped several times just watching the sheer amount of imagination and technical precision that went into its staging. The organizers of the 2012 games in London will have a very tough act to follow.

- Best event so far: the men’s 4 X 100m freestyle relay (swimming). That had an amazing finish as the American team’s anchor leg swam a blistering (I’m sure a better word could be used to describe a feat done in the water) split to catch the French swimmer in the last 25 meters of the race and beat him to the wall by a split second after being behind by a whole body length for much of his turn. Had they finished 2nd, everyone’s most vivid memory of the race would have been the fact that the U.S. relay team included a black swimmer. First time I can remember seeing a non-white, non-Asian swimmer in the Olympics. I think I actually did a double take when he dove into the water on his leg of the relay. And they say black people don’t swim, or help set world swimming records. There goes that stereotype.

- Most random commentary so far: NBC swimming commentator (and 1984 Olympic gold medalist) Rowdy Gaines getting all botanical in describing the smooth backstroke of Zimbabwean swimmer Kirsty Coventry, saying, “She’s like a piece of balsa wood in the water.”

- I was in my car after lunch today and heard Rush Limbaugh suggest that NBC had hired “a bunch of female directors and camera people” to work on the Olympics broadcast, because “during the events featuring female competitors, we’re not getting the same camera angles that we used to always get.” I haven’t noticed much of a difference in placement of cameras or the angles of their shots, but he may be right. For obvious reasons, Michael Phelps has gotten a lot of coverage so far, but if anything might back up Limbaugh’s (possibly facetious) assertion, it’s the fact that at some point before or after all of Phelps’ races that I’ve seen, they’ve shown a gratuitous shot of his abs that lingered a little longer than it needed to. Yep, must be those female directors. Although whoever produced the feature on him that they showed tonight had good taste, as they played Coldplay’s “Life in Technicolor” in the background.

- Earlier tonight I watched a beach volleyball match pitting the American duo of Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers against an Argentinian duo. The Americans won the match convincingly, but more striking to me was Phil Dalhausser’s resemblance to Smashing Pumpkins/Zwan leader Billy Corgan. Take a look below and see if you agree.

Phil Dalhausser

Billy Corgan

- Commercial from the past week that rates highest on the WTF? Scale:

- As a special bonus, I give you a classic David Letterman Top Ten, from a show that originally aired on June 24, 1996, about a month before the Atlanta games.

Top Ten Signs You Won’t Be Qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Team
10. Keep accidentally burning your wrestling opponents with your cigarette.
9. You need an advanced pulley system to get over the high hurdles.
8. When you hear the starters pistol, you ball up like a frightened armadillo.
7. To get you to the trials, firemen had to remove the side of your house.
6. When you started running the 100-meter dash, Bob Dole was still in high school. [Shows how dated this list is, it goes back to the year of the Clinton-Dole Presidential race]
5. Boxing opponents get their gloves caught in your stomach.
4. You train by standing in front of mirror, trying to smile like Mary Lou Retton.
3. Being 35 and still living at home with your parents not yet an Olympic sport.
2. When your relay partner tries to take the baton, you shout, “Screw you — get your own damn stick!”
1. Can’t get your a** through the parallel bars.

The Implausibility Scale

I’ve had the idea for this list for a few months now, and over that time I’ve thought of new examples, added to the list, and rearranged the order. Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general has produced decades worth of far-fetched plot twists, action scenes, and character changes, but the past few years have seen some exceptional examples, and a few films and TV series have practically turned implausibility into an art form.

I’ll admit a certain amount of inspiration for the concept came from sportswriter Bill Simmons’ Unintentional Comedy Scale. This isn’t supposed to be a conclusive or exclusive list; it’s more of a guideline about where I would rate certain scenes or sequences. The scale rates as high as 100, with the list getting steadily more implausible as it goes, and the tip top most implausible example or examples rating a 100. Ideally, such a list would work so that you would read #65 and say, “now that’s implausible, but I’d believe it before I’d believe #66″ and so on, though a lot of it is just for fun and the list doesn’t strictly follow that formula. Hope you’re entertained, and feel free to add your own examples and where you think they should rate.

I should also note that I’m picking and choosing my implausibilities here, as I’m including, for the most part, only examples that I’ve actually seen, and examples of scenes or sequences that defied logic and/or reason. Because of this I don’t include scenes from sci-fi or fantasy type movies like The Matrix, which has some far-out action scenes, but which take place in a reality not governed by normal laws of physics, and thus they make sense within the movie’s own internal logic (until the whole plot jumped the shark in the 3rd film, but that’s another topic).

I’m beginning the list at #60 and moving on from there. Fair warning: a few of the examples cited here may be plot spoilers to those who haven’t seen those films or TV shows.

——–

60: TV personality Katherine Heigl sleeping with, getting pregnant by, and ultimately deciding to have the baby of immature and unemployed pothead slob Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. Two of those three might happen, all three happening would be very unlikely.

61: Rachael Leigh Cook as the average, un-pretty girl in She’s All That.

62: Kenan Thompson scoring a goal on a lengh-of-the-ice “knucklepuck” shot at the end of the Junior Goodwill Games championship hockey game to tie the score and force overtime in D2: The Mighty Ducks. No way the shot would have flown that straight or that far, or that they could have gotten away with having him secretly change into another player’s jersey. And the Icelandic coach’s reaction is priceless (“The goalie! Nooooo!”)

63: Joshua Jackson’s character arc in the Mighty Ducks movies. In D2, he’s team-oriented and unselfish to the point of giving up his spot on the team right before the championship game to make room on the roster for a teammate who has just recovered from an injury. In D3, he’s selfish and arrogant, only wants to play as a scorer and yells at his coach who wants him to play defense.

64: Anakin Skywalker’s character arc in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I didn’t believe it for one second.

65: The dialogue in any radio ad for Just Brakes.

female caller – “Wow, you repair disc pads and brake shoes and inspect and rotate the balance on all four wheels?! That’s an even better deal than when I bought my car new!! Why do you do it, Just Brakes?”

Just Brakes repair guy – “Because at Just Brakes, we really do care.”

66: The dialogue in any radio ad for Ovaltine. (“MORE OVALTINE, PLEASE!!”)

67: 5’7” Tom Cruise as a star defensive back on his high school football team, and getting recruited by several major colleges in All The Right Moves.

68: 5’9” Jamie Foxx as an NFL quarterback in Any Given Sunday. That’s a good 3-5 inches shorter than any pro team would want their quarterback to be.

69: Sarah Jessica Parker falling for Dennis Quaid in Smart People; Amidala falling for Anakin in the Star Wars prequels; and Maggie Gyllenhaal falling for Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction.

70: Luke Wilson actually being a bestselling author in Alex & Emma. In real life, the story he and Kate Hudson come up with in the movie wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a junior college writing course, let alone a six-figure advance.

71: “Tool Time” actually being a popular show on Home Improvement. In real life it probably would have been cancelled in under a month.

72: The impossible aerial maneuver James Franco pulls with his World War I-era fighter plane to slip behind and shoot down the plane of his ace German archenemy in Flyboys, a maneuver right out of Top Gun, I might add.

73: The Middle Eastern villains in season four of 24 conveniently speaking English when counter-terrorist agents manage to listen in on their cell phone conversations. That series could fill a list like this on its own, but I’ll be nice and only include this one example.

74: The end of the $500,000 poker tournament in the movie Maverick, where on the final hand, with the three remaining players betting all their chips, they show hands with four 8’s, a straight flush, and a royal flush, respectively. There’s no way all three of those happen at the same time, the odds are too astronomical. But I’d believe that before I’d believe…

75: Estella Warren’s improbably nice skin, hair, and makeup in the 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. Humans have been enslaved for hundreds of years and the women still have a hidden supply of lipstick? Sure…

I might also add the three-day stubble Martin Henderson sports for all of his scenes throughout the length of Flyboys. He has one of those razors that only exist in the movies, one that allows characters to always look like they haven’t shaved in a few days.

76: President Andrew Shepard’s (Michael Douglas) speech during a press conference at the end of The American President, which is full of combative and hokey dialogue no President would ever say, and even has Shepard utter the line: “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”

No President in his right mind would make such a statement publicly, and any who did would have next to no chance of being re-elected (at least one would hope). Also, I think the movie’s screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) missed the irony in the President promising to “go door to door if I have to” in order to “get the guns” just minutes after praising the ACLU and calling it “an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights”, because apparently his copy of the Bill of Rights doesn’t include the 2nd Amendment. (Note: The scene is hokey, self-congratulatory, and emotionally exploitative enough on its own, but when you add the music in the background and the serious, uncritical looks on the faces of the reporters as he’s talking, it’s almost comedic).

77: Orlando Bloom’s “Who has claim? No one has claim” speech before the siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, which is only slightly more historically improbable than Leonidas’ “an age of freedom” speech in 300, or Joely Richardson’s “It’s a free country. Or at least it will be” line in The Patriot.

78: The boxing arena spectators in Cold War-era Moscow chanting American Rocky Balboa’s name as he fights against the Russian giant Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. A rough equivalent might be a baseball movie set in Boston where Red Sox fans chant Derek Jeter’s name.

79: Pretty much any episode of CSI (including both spin-off series).

80: Any movie where a character gets a few simple lessons or pointers on fencing or swordplay, and then becomes a near master swordsman in about 5 minutes of screen time (see: The Mask of Zorro, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Samurai, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.)

81: The end of Alien vs. Predator where the Predator saves Sanaa Lathan’s life and essentially joins forces with her for a short while, which goes against everything previously known about the Predators.

82: The endings of The Fast and the Furious and the 2007 version of 3:10 To Yuma.

83: Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander (she’s just under a year older than him).

84: Any McDonald’s TV ad that portrays the employees as young, clean cut, good-looking, always smiling, and nearly always white or black. Have the producers of those commercials ever been inside a McDonald’s?

85: Nicholas Cage and John Travolta being able to shoot and hit people or airborne objects from long distances, but frequently being unable to shoot each other even when they’re 5 feet apart in Face/Off.

86: The plot of National Treasure.

87: The plot of National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

88: Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl turning the ship completely upside down by running back and forth across the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (There’s also the para-sailing bit near the end of the movie, which might rate slightly lower).

89: The action sequence in Live Free or Die Hard that immediately precedes this line: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!“

90: The long jungle sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that includes: A. Mutt (Shia Lebouf) swinging on vines through the trees following a pack of monkeys, B. Marion Ravenwood driving a Jeep off the edge of a cliff and onto the branches of a tree, which gently lowers the vehicle onto the river below before swinging back and swatting some Russians who are climbing down the cliff, C. the Jeep (and its 5 passengers) going over 3 large waterfalls in succession without anyone falling out of the car or getting any scrapes, bruises, or concussions, and D. Indiana Jones never once losing his hat the whole time. The quantity of implausibilities in those 10 minutes piles up high enough to make it among the most implausible things ever put on film, but to save room I’ll mention them all together and take the rough average of their implausibility scale rating.

91: The Tom Cruise-Dougray Scott motorcycle joust/beach fight sequence in Mission: Impossible II. Neither character should have been able to walk (if they were even still alive) after a collision like that, which you can see at the end of this video clip.

92: In Transporter 2, Jason Statham driving up the levels of a parking garage, crashing his car through a short concrete wall at the edge of the roof, then still having the inertia to fly well over 100 feet forward through the air and land on an upper floor of a nearby building under construction. You can see it at the 4:40 mark of this video clip.

93: The scene in the 2005 King Kong remake just before Kong goes unconscious after having bottles of chloroform thrown at him. Just before this, there’s a shot of lots of men throwing ropes and a net over Kong and actually holding him down, which would seem more than a little unlikely since earlier in the film Kong had picked up and thrown a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur that weighed between 7 and 8 tons.

94: The bus in Speed hopping and flying over a long gap on an unfinished highway overpass and landing safely on the other side, with the speedometer somehow staying above 50 mph the whole time. The jump occurs just before the 4:00 mark in this video (warning: contains some R-rated language).

95: The entire plot of Flightplan. The villains would have needed psychic powers or a crystal ball for their plan to have worked the way it did. I’ve never seen any other movie be so interesting and then completely fall apart in the third act the way that movie did when the plot was revealed.

96: Jeff Goldblum hacking and sending a computer virus to an alien computer system from an earth-based computer system in Independence Day. Apparently, those aliens can manufacture fighter ships armed with laser guns and deflector shields and can communicate telepathically, but they can’t be bothered to update their anti-virus software.

97: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt surviving an F5 tornado without a scratch by tying themselves to the pipes of a water well just before it passes right over them at the end of Twister.

98: In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the title character surviving a nuclear bomb blast by shutting himself inside a 1950s-era refrigerator, feeling no ill effects from the fridge being blown hundreds of feet away by the force of the blast, and not getting radiation poisoning when he climbs out of it and stands directly under a mushroom cloud and breathes the air. Who does he think he is, Chuck Norris?

99: In Wanted, the scene where James McAvoy is supposed to kill a guy in a limousine as he drives along the side of it, but finds the limo has bulletproof windows. So Angelina Jolie, working with him, drives her sports car toward McAvoy’s, then hits the brakes just as they’re about to meet, and an invisible ramp allows McAvoy’s car to shoot up off her car’s hood, fly up into the air, and flip over the limousine where an open sunroof gives McAvoy a clear shot at the guy (which he takes) before his car harmlessly lands back onto the street and he drives away. In real life, this would result in a fiery crash and the guy in the limo would speed away from the scene laughing. You can see an edited part of this scene at about the 2:00 mark of the movie’s third trailer.

100: The sequence in Transporter 2 described here by Roger Ebert:

“Seeing the reflection of a bomb in a pool of liquid under his car, and knowing that the bad guys will not explode it while they’re standing right next to it, the hero races the car out of a garage and up an incline, spinning the car neatly through the air, so that it makes one complete rotation and the bomb is pulled off by a hook on a crane, exploding harmlessly as the car lands safely. Uh, huh.
I could observe that this is preposterous, but the fact is, I laughed aloud.”

So did I, as I’d never seen anything so outlandish before. The scene is so ridiculous (and also fun in its own way) that not even comic books or video games would try something like it. On the Implausibility Scale, I don’t think it will ever be topped by any movie that takes itself the least bit seriously.

*101: I’m adding one extra example to the list, a clip from the 1985 Indian movie Adavi Donga, starring Indian movie icon Chiranjeevi. I’m putting an asterisk on it and not putting it with the others because it was probably designed as a parody, though without seeing it in its full context it’s hard to know. I saw this clip over the weekend (and posted it in a previous blog) and decided that parody or not, it completely shattered the Implausibility Scale. The brief clip involves a horse skidding underneath a large trailer (with its rider still on it) and a pursuing Jeep leaping over that same trailer at its driver’s command (apparently, vehicles in India can jump when their driver stands up slightly in the driver’s seat). It truly has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

Comments and additions are encouraged.

my running diary of the 2008 All-Star Game

The 2008 Major League Baseball All-Star Game is, for the eighth straight year, being broadcast on Fox with Joe Buck doing play-by-play duties and the increasingly useless (or if you prefer, decreasingly useful) Tim McCarver doing color commentary. Overall, this is Joe Buck’s tenth and McCarver’s seventeenth turn at filling those respective roles for an All-Star Game broadcast (McCarver also served as a field reporter for the 1984 game). According to Wikipedia, the 1980 and 1982 All-Star Game broadcasts featured play-by-play from Al Michaels and Keith Jackson, with Howard Cosell and Don Drysdale doing color commentary. Somebody needs to show those broadcasts on ESPN Classic because that would have been a lineup guaranteed to produce its share of comedy, both intentional and unintentional.

The game is being played at Yankee Stadium for the first time since 1977, and much has been made of this because of 2008 being the Yankees’ final season to play at Yankee Stadium before they move into their new $1.3 billion stadium next year. I tried to keep a running diary as it went along, and just like most of my blogs, it went longer than I intended, but in this case it wasn’t my fault, since the game went 15 innings. All times listed for the entries are Central Time.

7:44 – The first of probably several TV spots for Fringe. Out of the blurbs thrown into the ad, I’m about 10x more encouraged by seeing “from the creator of Lost” than I am about something that’s “from the writers of Transformers“. But it does answer the question, “What has Joshua Jackson been up to lately?”

7:46 – Warming up: our American League starter, Cliff Lee of the Cleveland Indians.

7:47 – First pitch to leadoff hitter Hanley Ramirez of the Florida Marlins: a fouled off fastball for strike one. Here we go!

7:48 – Ramirez strikes out on an 85 mph slider for the game’s first out.

7:50 – Philadelphia’s Chase Utley strikes out looking for the second out.

7:51 – Out number three as Houston’s Lance Berkman flies out to last night’s Home Run Derby hero Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers.

7:52 – Is any non-Universal Studios employee excited about The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor? Me neither.

7:54 – NL starter Ben Sheets of Milwaukee gets the first out on a fly ball, now facing hometown hero Derek Jeter of the Yankees, with Josh Hamilton (who hopefully will be Ben Sheets’s teammate next season) on deck.

7:57 – Hamilton strikes out on three pitches, but Jeter steals 2nd base during the at-bat.

7:59 – New York Yankee third baseman and Madonna’s alleged new main squeeze Alex Rodriguez pops out to end the inning. Speaking of the Alex and Cynthia Rodriguez saga… Do you have any idea how hot it’s been lately? It’s so hot Cynthia Rodriguez left Lenny Kravitz and has now been seen hanging out with Ice Cube.

8:06 – Cliff Lee strikes out Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun to end the 2nd inning. Lee’s line for the night: 2 innings, 1 hit, 0 runs, and 3 strikeouts..

8:13 – Tim McCarver just said Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis got the best ovation of any Red Sox player so far. Not sure if he meant that sarcastically, as all I heard on the TV was some hearty booing. Sheets strikes him out to bring up Minnesota catcher Joe Mauer with two outs and Texas Ranger Milton Bradley on second base.

8:19 – After Mauer walks, Boston second baseman Dustin Pedroia comes up to bat. McCarver says, “there is no hotter hitter in baseball right now than Dustin Pedroia”, apparently forgetting about Texas second baseman Ian Kinsler, who goes into the All-Star break with a 25 game hitting streak (the best in the majors this year), during which time he has hit .425 with a .717 slugging percentage. Kinsler has been better than Pedroia in practically every offensive category and should by all rights be starting tonight, but the fans (read: Boston Red Sox fans) voted in Pedroia as the starter. Pedroia flies out to end the 2nd inning.

8:35 – I’ve never seen a single episode of The X Files all the way through, and I didn’t watch the first X Files movie when it came out 10 years ago, but The X Files: I Want To Believe actually looks interesting based on the trailers now in rotation.

8:37 – Boring game thus far. Three innings, no runs by either side, four hits between the two teams but non longer than a single. Toronto’s Roy Halladay now pitching for the American League. He’s another ace pitcher who would be perfect for the Rangers, though they’d have to give up an emperor’s ransom in prospects to even have a hope of trading for him.

8:53 – Colorado’s Matt Holiday homers off Anaheim’s Ervin Santana for the first run of the game to lead off the top of the 5th inning. 1-0 National League.

9:10 – Derek Jeter comes to bat with runners on 1st and 2nd and two outs, works the count full on Arizona pitcher Dan Haren, but grounds out harmlessly back to Haren, who throws to 1st to end the 5th inning.

9:28 – Josh Hamilton singles to lead off the bottom of the 6th inning. This gives Joe Buck yet another opportunity to spend two minutes talking about Hamilton’s comeback from drug addiction. Meanwhile, the score is 2-0 National League.

9:31 – Hamilton steals 2nd base for the American League’s fourth steal of the game. He is stranded at 2nd though, as Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore strikes out looking on a full count and Texas’ Milton Bradley flies out to center field to end the 6th inning. This game is actually kinda boring (I know, I said that an hour ago) but we’ve seen some All Star-quality pitching.

9:41 – Joshua Winslow Groban comes out during the 7th inning stretch to sing “God Bless America”. He does a good job, of course.

9:46 – Former Ranger and current Reds pitcher Edinson Volquez takes the mound for the NL in the 7th inning, allows a quick double to Joe Mauer, then gets an even quicker groundout from former teammate Ian Kinsler. Tampa Bay’s Dioner Navarro follows with a strikeout looking.

9:53 – Boston’s J.D. Drew homers into the right field seats to tie the score at 2-2. Anaheim’s Francisco Rodriguez is warming up to pitch the 8th inning. He’s on pace to break the all-time single season saves record (he has 38 already and the record is 57), but he was pretty shaky last week during the Angels series with the Rangers.

9:59 – Oops, instead Boston’s Jonathan Papelbon comes out to pitch the top of the 8th inning. He gets some jeers from the New York crowd for his saying earlier in the week that he wanted to be the game’s closer, and not hometown favorite Mariano Rivera. Papelbon gives up a leadoff single to Houston’s Miguel Tejada and receives chants of “overrated!” He responds by striking out Florida’s Dan Uggla.

10:02 – With former Ranger and current San Diego Padre Adrian Gonzalez at bat, Tejada steals 2nd base and advances to 3rd on an errant throw. Gonzalez hits a long fly ball for an out but Tejada tags up and scores on the play to give the National League a 3-2 lead.

10:04 – Papelbon strikes out New York Met David Wright to end the top of the 8th inning. Due up for the AL are White Sox Carlos Quentin and Joe Crede, followed by Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore.

10:19 – Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria doubles off of New York Met Billy Wagner to drive in Sizemore and tie the game at 3. Up to that point, the two teams were hitting a combined 1-14 with runners in scoring position. Home Run Derby winner Justin Morneau of Minnesota comes up but grounds out to end the inning. We’re going to the 9th!

10:25 – Francisco Rodriguez walks the National League’s leadoff hitter in the top of the 9th inning. This is pretty typical of his recent 9th inning performances.

10:32 – The top of the 9th ends with Mariano Rivera striking out St. Louis Cardinal Ryan Ludwick and Cristian Guzman is thrown out while trying to steal 2nd base. Rivera relieved Rodriguez with one out in the inning to a huge hometown ovation.

10:35 – Texas Ranger Ian Kinsler leads off the bottom of the 9th inning.

10:37 – Kinsler strikes out on a breaking ball from Chicago Cubs reliever Ryan Dempster, yet another player who was formerly in the Rangers organization (they drafted him out of high school but later traded him to Florida while he was still in the minor leagues.)

10:40 – Dioner Navarro strikes out for the 2nd time, and we’re one out away from sending the game to extra innings.

10:42 – Dempster K’s J.D. Drew to strike out the side and send the game to the 10th inning, leaving Texas Ranger Michael Young, the hero of the 2006 All-Star Game, waiting on deck.

10:52 – Dodgers catcher Russell Martin works a long at-bat before singling past Ian Kinsler. Miguel Tejada singles up the middle to send Martin to 3rd base, putting two men on with only one out.

10:53 – Dan Uggla grounds into a double play to end the inning. Uggla has stranded three runners in his two at-bats. Due up in the bottom of the 10th: Michael Young, Carlos Quentin, and Carlos Guillen.

10:56 – Colorado Rockies pitcher Aaron Cook comes in to pitch for the National League. Young hits the first pitch he sees up the middle, where Dan Uggla promptly bungles it, allowing Young to reach safely.

10:57 – Quentin moves Young to 3rd base, and does himself reach 1st base on yet another error by Uggla, who is having a nightmare of an All-Star weekend, if such a thing is possible.

10:59 – Carlos Guillen is intentionally walked to load the bases for a potential force out at any base, and with no outs, Grady Sizemore is now up.

11:01 – Sizemore grounds to Uggla, who throws to home for the out, but Sizemore beats the throw to 1st base. One out, bases still loaded, and rookie Evan Longoria up.

11:03 – Longoria hits a perfect grounder to 3rd base, Cristian Guzman throws to home for the second out of the inning. Bases still loaded with 2 outs and our Home Run Derby champ Justin Morneau is up once again.

11:04 – Morneau hits a dribbler to shortstop Miguel Tejada, who scoops it and barely gets Morneau out at 1st base for the third out. That was an amazing pitching and fielding sequence by the National League

11:07 – We’re going to the 11th inning. Joakim Soria of the Kansas City Royals will pitch for the AL. He may be their last available pitcher so hopefully the game will end soon.

11:11 – I feel this is a good time to mention umpire Darrel Cousins has had a pretty big strike zone tonight. He just gave Soria two gift called strikes on consecutive low fastballs to Cristian Guzman that would probably have been called balls by any other umpire.

11:13 – Corey Hart flies out to end the inning, and we’re off to the bottom of the 11th inning. Due up: Ian Kinsler, Dioner Navarro, and J.D. Drew, the same trio Ryan Dempster struck out to send the game into extra innings.

11:16 – Kinsler gets a hit to lead off the inning.

11:18 – Kinsler tries to steal 2nd base and is called out on a phantom tag by Miguel Tejada. This is the second missed call tonight on a play at 2nd base; earlier Albert Pujols was called out trying to stretch a single into a double after Ichiro Suzuki made a great throw to second. Replays showed Pujols barely beat the tag but was called out.

11:21 – Michael Young is at bat with the winning run at second base (Dioner Navarro) and J.D. Drew on first base.

11:22 – Young hits a grounder up the middle and Navarro tries to score the winning run, but he’s gunned down on a perfect throw to the plate by Pittsburgh centerfielder Nate McLouth. Two out with two runners on base.

11:24 – Carlos Quentin grounds out to end the 11th inning. Ludwick, McLouth, and Martin (the latter two being responsible for that game-saving tag out at home plate) due up in the top of the 12th.

11:28 – After Ludwick walks, McLouth bunts and beats out Morneau’s throw to Ian Kinsler, who was covering first base. Two men on and no outs.

11:29 – Morneau fields a ball that would have gone foul had he not touched it. He gets Martin out at first base, but the other two runners advance.

11:31 – Tejada is intentionally walked to bring up the game’s official goat Dan Uggla with the bases loaded and one out.

11:32 – Uggla strikes out on a nasty curveball from Joakim Soria for the second out. Uggla’s line for the night: 2 fielding errors, 2 at bats ending with strikeouts, one double play hit into, and 6 runners stranded. Ex-Ranger Adrian Gonzalez is now up and Baltimore Oriole closer George Sherrill is coming in to pitch.

11:36 – Sherrill strikes out Gonzalez on three pitches to end the inning. Due up for the American League in the bottom of the 12th: Guillen, Sizemore, and Longoria, who are a combined 2-6 with one walk, one run, and one RBI thus far.

11:39 – Carlos Guillen doubles off the left field wall on the first pitch Aaron Cook throws him. Winning run on second base with no outs.

11:40 – Uggla nearly commits his third error, but recovers to throw out Sizemore, while Guillen advances to third base. One out.

11:43 – Longoria strikes out swinging on a sinking fastball inside. Morneau is intentionally walked to bring up Ian Kinsler with two outs and runners at 1st and 3rd base.

11:45 – Cristian Guzman makes yet another flawless play at 3rd base, fielding a Kinsler grounder and throwing him out at 1st to end the inning. This may be a good time to mention that Guzman has never played a position other than shortstop in his professional career.

11:49 – David Wright shatters hit bat on a bloop single to right-center field. Guzman is now up to bat. I’m calling it: Guzman will double to give the NL the lead.

11:51 – Okay, not quite. Guzman lays down a terrible bunt straight back to George Sherrill on the mound, and Wright is thrown out at 2nd base. Corey Hart is now up with Guzman at 1st base. I’m impressed with how Sherrill is pitching.

11:53 – Hart strikes out swinging on a high fastball. Ludwick is coming up to bat. I feel now is a good time to mention that tonight’s contest features no less than TEN current and former Texas Rangers players, Ludwick being one of them. (The others are current Rangers Young, Hamilton, Bradley, and Kinsler, and former Rangers Alex Rodriguez, Edinson Volquez, Adrian Gonzalez, Justin Duchscherer, and Ryan Dempster, and you can add to that Alfonso Soriano, who was voted to the team but was injured and not able to play.) Texas traded Ludwick to Cleveland five years ago this week, when he was only 31 games into his Rangers career. After a few very mediocre seasons with Cleveland and one year spent on Detroit’s AAA squad, he signed with St. Louis in 2007 and has hit 35 home runs and driven in 117 runs in 207 games over a season and a half. Ludwick popped out as I was typing this.

11:58 – Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Marmol is now in to face J.D. Drew after getting Navarro to ground out to begin the inning. Drew homered six innings ago to tie the game.

12:00 – After working a full count, Drew grounds to 2nd base, where, yes, Dan Uggla bobbles it for his third error of the night. Michael Young is up with one out.

12:03 – On a full count, Young strikes out looking and J.D. Drew, running on the pitch, steals 2nd base. Carlos Quentin is up with two outs and Drew representing the winning run. It’s a White Sox vs. Cubs matchup to possibly decide the All-Star Game!

12:05 – And… Quentin strikes out on an 83 mph offspeed pitch to send the game to a 14th inning. I need sleep soon, and it’s already 1am in New York. Just amazing pitching performances overall tonight. 16 strikeouts for the AL pitchers so far, 15 for the NL pitchers.

12:07 – McLouth gives the AL a scare with a long fly ball but it dies near the warning track in right field and is caught by Drew. Sherrill is still pitching and AL manager Terry Francona (Boston Red Sox) is desperate to avoid using Tampa Bay ace Scott Kazmir for pitching duty, as he started and threw over 100 pitches on Sunday, a fact Joe Buck has reminded us of about six times now.

12:11 – Sherrill finishes the inning unscathed. Guillen, Sizemore, and Longoria are due up. I’m calling it: the game ends this inning. Guillen is a pro, Sizemore (who is less than two months older than me) is one of the best young players in the game, and Longoria will make Tampa Bay proud.

12:18 – Arizona Diamondbacks ace Brandon Webb strikes out Longoria on a low curveball to end the 14th inning. He struck out Sizemore on an identical pitch just before that.

12:19 – They’re showing another one of those DirecTV ads with actors being plugged into scenes from past movie roles. In the past they’ve used William Shatner in a scene from a Star Trek movie, Charlie Sheen in Major League, Jessica Simpson in the Dukes of Hazard, and now we have Robert Patrick shilling for DirecTV by reprising his role as the T-1000 in a scene from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It’s hard to believe that movie came out 17 years ago.

12:25 – Scott Kazmir is in the game. He gets the first two batters out, then walks David Wright. He looks just like you’d expect a guy to look if he was two days removed from throwing 104 pitches in a game.

12:26 – Kazmir gets Guzman to ground out to end the top of the 15th inning. I mentioned earlier that there are 10 players in the game tonight who are or were formerly part of the Texas Rangers organization. Kazmir should have been the eleventh member of that group, but the year he was drafted the Rangers management passed him up in favor of Drew Meyer, who six years later has 14 major league at-bats and a career .264 batting average in parts of seven minor league seasons. Kazmir would look really good in Rangers blue right now.

12:31 – After a Justin Morneau single, Kinsler is robbed by Ryan Ludwick on a hard hit ball to shallow left field.

12:33 – Navarro gets a base hit and advances Morneau to second base. Just before this I was about to type a sentence beginning with “the hapless Dioner Navarro”. Since I haven’t been right on any calls so far tonight, I’ll try reverse psychology and say J.D. Drew will choke with the winning run on second.

12:36 – Drew walks to load the bases with one out and Michael Young comes to the plate for his fifth at-bat of the game. Most of the position players currently in the game have played a full nine innings at this point.

12:37 – Young skies a fly ball to right field. Corey Hart catches it but it’s just deep enough for Morneau to tag up and beat Hart’s throw to the plate. GAME OVER!! Final score: American League 4, National League 3. J.D. Drew is awarded the game’s MVP award. Not awarded is Dan Uggla’s richly deserved Least Valuable Player award. He’ll do better though, he’s only 28 and was playing in his first All-Star Game (he was selected to the 2006 game but did not play). He’ll probably be playing in several more of these before his career is over.

Despite not having much offense, it was a great game in the end. See you guys next year at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. And with that, it’s 1:18 a.m. and I’m outta here!

soreness, movies, “nuking the fridge”, and a joke

I helped a certain newly-engaged friend move out of her apartment and back to her parents’ house on Saturday (and may even end up helping again soon, as she’s getting married in a month). My shoulders were very sore on Sunday. I played a few pickup basketball games on Monday night. My lower back and my legs are sore today. It feels good to feel like I’m getting some semblance of a workout, though I sweat like no other. I’ve always been a heavy sweater but it seems to be turned up even more lately for some reason. At one point on Saturday morning between carrying loads down the stairs and into a van or the back of a truck bed, I looked in the mirror and between my absolutely soaked t-shirt and my thoroughly wet hair, one could have been excused for thinking I’d just hopped out of a shower. I don’t remember sweating that much back in my basketball or track days, but maybe it’s just been so long that I’ve forgotten what it was like, either that or I’m sweating more because I’m likely carrying 35-40 more pounds than I was when I last participated in any organized sport (track and field my junior year of high school).

This reminds me of a good quote from Robert Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “Wow, I feel sore. I mean physically, not like a guy who’s angry in a movie in the 1950’s.”

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Joke of the week:
How do you intimidate an agnostic who has moved into your neighborhood?
You burn a wooden question mark on his lawn

I saw that one recently in a review of a book on the history of jokes, although the original version had “unitarian” in place of “agnostic”, but I told the joke to a couple friends at church and they both thought “agnostic” fit better, so I’ll go with that one.

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Overheard at the law library this week…

“I need to go back to criminal defense. This family law stuff is for the birds.”

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Movies I’ve seen lately: Get Smart, Vantage Point, Wanted, WALL-E

Get Smart – I must have missed the boat on this one. I’ve heard a few people I know say they thought it was absolutely hilarious, and one of the funniest things they’d seen in a long time. Me, I chuckled a lot, laughed out loud maybe once or twice, but that’s about it. If you’ve seen Steve Carell in The Office, The 40 Year Old Virgin, or Bruce/Evan Almighty, then he doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen him do before. It has a lot of sight gags, some of them amusing, and three pretty well filmed action scenes, which feel like they belong in a much better movie. Overall, it’s a decent comedy, harmless but largely forgettable, and I doubt anyone will still be talking about this movie 5 years from now. My grade: C+

Vantage Point – An interesting movie to watch, but almost completely forgettable. I appreciate any movie that tries to pull off Rashomon-style multiple perspectives or Memento-like uses of time, but this movie is over almost as soon as it feels like it’s begun, and it leaves a lot unsaid and unexplained, probably because to say or explain those things would only make the plot holes seem bigger. My grade: C-

Wanted – A bloody, violent, vulgar, adrenaline rush of a good time if ever a movie was one. It doesn’t quite pass Transporter 2 as my favorite implausible action movie, but it’s up there. The plot is ludicrous, and I’m afraid for what will happen when somebody inevitably tries to “curve the bullet” like the characters in this movie do, but it’s one of the more original looking pieces of pop action to hit the screen in a while. There’s a big action scene at the end that has parts that reminded me of everything from Equilibrium to The Last of the Mohicans, and finally Swordfish. My grade: B+

WALL-E – I was really excited about seeing this after seeing the trailers a bunch of times on TV and in the theater. I’ve liked everything Pixar has done so far and WALL-E had the look of a movie that I expected to threaten Monsters, Inc.’s place atop my list of favorite Pixar films. But in the end I’ll confess I was mildly disappointed. Any movie with a plot involving robots having human emotions can have its problems if it isn’t done right. The TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation had many interesting episodes centered on the character Data, an android who had much to say about humans and human emotions, and later in the series (and in four movie spin-offs) he was even programmed with a range of emotions. That was a good example.

A bad example was the 2005 animated film Robots. Rather than have robots programmed with or displaying human emotions, the robots in that movie may as well have been metallic humans, as in everything from their character to their anatomy, they seemed to be humanoid first, and robot second. The robots in the movie had hopes, dreams, goals, they were “born” as tiny robots ordered from a store, and steadily they grew as their parent robots ordered them newer and bigger parts, until they grew into adulthood, or whatever stage in robot life it was supposed to be. Humans, as far as I could tell, didn’t exist in that movie’s world, and thus it was hard to figure out where these robots came from, and why they should have been designed as different sexes, or what the point could possibly be of a “male” robot and a “female” robot “marrying”. When two robots are putting together the parts that will become their son, the movie unambiguously says that the baby robot has a male sex organ. Which can only lead one to ask, “Why????” What need could he ever have for it? Why don’t robots just get delivered fully grown? It’s not like it should need parents to teach it, when it can just be programmed with whatever knowledge it needs. The movie didn’t work at all because it made the robots far more human than they needed to be, rather than make them robots first, and emotional second.

WALL-E I largely enjoyed, though I was put off by the cynicism and not-so-veiled environmental message and corporate satire. The movie portrays a future where Earth is uninhabitable because it’s piled sky-high with trash as far as the eye can see, so humans have lived several centuries on ships in space, which are staffed by robots and apparently run by Buy n Large, a satirical take on big corporations that is probably supposed to be a composite of companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks. All the humans are fat and lazy, they get around on floating easy chairs, and they know nothing beyond the messages that Buy n Large broadcasts to them. It’s the sort of dystopian vision that liberal-minded Literature majors will eat up, but I found all the cynicism a bit insulting, and more than a little hypocritical coming from a company like Disney, which has probably done more to over-commercialize all forms of entertainment and merchandising and mold young kids into budding consumerists than Wal-Mart or Starbucks ever have.

The story between WALL-E and EVE was sweet and very enjoyable, but the plot itself and the cynicism lost it some points from me. My grade: B

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I read in the newspaper this morning that the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has inspired the new term, “nuking the fridge”, which is meant to be used in a similar vein as “jumping the shark“. The Urban Dictionary defines “nuke the fridge” as, “A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover.”

My brother told me several weeks ago that he’d seen this term used by people on message boards he frequents, but the apparently it’s just now become big enough for the mainstream media to note it.