Tuesday, May 4, 2010

I Think We're Alone Now (Live Movie Blog)

Alright, it's time.  I know I haven't done a live movie blog in a while, and I figure it's time to break it out again.  I'm sitting here with some Red Stripe and looking for something to watch and it's time to break out the big gun.  Yep, we're going with "Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus."  I've been sitting on this since I Tivo'd it in January because the title is just too perfect and I'm afraid I'm going to be let down.  Then again, with a title like that it might also be the type of flick that doesn't take itself seriously, and that would suck too.  I don't want to rip on self-aware crap movies, I want ones that actually think they're good.  Let's find out what we have here together.

-  Looks like we're getting started in the great frozen north which is where I'm guessing someone is going to thaw out a giant prehistoric shark.  But more importantly, the opening credits inform me that our leads are Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas.  Yes, that Debbie Gibson.  Also yes, that Lorenzo Lamas, but you probably knew that part.

-  They just showed a giant sheath of ice sliding off a glacial wall, which basically guarantees that they are going to end up blaming global warming in some way for this.  Great.  Nothing like getting a political statement from a crappy B movie, especially considering the science they usually use in these is less accurate than your average Delmon Young throw to the plate.

-  On on mother effing cue, they show us a school of Hammerheads allegedly swimming around in Alaskan waters.  God damn it, people.  Hammerheads are tropical.  I'm almost positive they only shark you'd find in Alaskan waters is the Greenland Shark.  Why not just show some Greenland sharks?  Lazy stupid morons.  At least attempt to get it right.  I know I'm a nerd, but even a minimum amount of research would tell you that you would never, ever, ever find a hammerhead anywhere near Alaska.  It just makes me so mad.

-  We're two minutes in.  Two minutes.  And now they show us reef sharks and manta rays.  In Alaska.  Frozen Alaskan waters.  Reef sharks, manta rays, and hammerheads.  How about you just toss in a tropical coral reef or the Loch Ness monster.  At this point you've already destroyed your credibility.  This is almost as bad as that goblin shark movie.

- Huh, Debbie Gibson is actually a halfway decent actress.  She doesn't have much to work with here already.  For example, some army guy dropped some kind of sonar bomb into the alaskan ocean and it's forcing this bunch of whales to start ramming glaciers.  Uh oh and oh noes they rammed so much ice so effectively that they freed both a mega-shark and a giant octopus who were frozen in their endless struggle through eternity.  I am going to go ahead and assume these are the titular creatures.  Heh, titular.

-  Oooh, and right away the giant octopus attacks an oil drilling platform and crushes it to death.  That is a really, really big octopus.  Also to the best of my knowledge no giant octopus like that ever existed.  I can't confirm for sure since I'm just a shark nerd and not an octopus nerd, but based on this movie's complete disregard for factual scientific science I'm going to assume they made that all up.

-  They just found a dead whale basically bitten in half and the guy who is going to turn out to be the stuffy professor who never believes there's a giant shark says it was killed by a boat propeller.  Based on the size of half of the whale, the boat would have had to the size of Rhode Island to have propellers that big.  Also, the whole "it wasn't a shark it was a boating accident" thing was already done by Jaws, and every other shark-related movie since.  At least be original in your crappiness.

-  Debbie Gibson just jedi mind-tricked some security guard so she could get into some random giant tent and examine the dead whale body.  Damn what the rules say!  She's a rebel.  She's also singing to the whale "I Think We're Alone Now."

-   Some asian with glasses is yelling at some other asian with a goatee.

-   Oh for the love of god.  The giant shark just lept out of the ocean to grab and eat a plane.  I don't even know where to start with this.  First, the plane had just broken cloud cover which means the shark jumped a minimum of 5,000 feet in the air.  Second, the shark was at least 5 times longer than the plane, despite the fact that the biggest estimate for a Megalodon would put it at about a quarter of the length of a 747.  Finally, why the hell would a just de-frozen shark jump up in the air and grab a plane when it has had no learnings that plane = food.  Plus, a shark that size wouldn't be interested in people because sharks need to eat high amounts of fat from like whales and seals and stuff, and I am pretty sure metal isn't high in fat content.

-  I take it back.  Debbie Gibson is not a good actress.  She should stick to posing in playboy.  Google is your friend.

-  Now the asian guy with glasses is meeting with Debbie and her mentor science guy who is being played by a guy who reminds me of the guy from Cocktail and has the same accent.  Remember in that movie when Elisabeth Shue took her top off?  She was awesome.

-  So Asian guy thinks the thing killing stuff is an Octopus, while Debbie and Cocktail guy think it's a shark.  OMG THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT!  TWO PRESHISTORIC CREATURES UNLEASHED UPON THE WORLD SIMULTANEOUSLY!!

-  I was going to write about something else that just happened but then, just now as predicted, Debbie gives us this "The Polar Ice Caps are melting so rapidly, maybe this is our comeuppance."  THANK YOU MOVIE!  I WILL NOW REPENT MY LIFE AND BUY AN ELECTRIC SCOOTER AND COOK MEALS OVER AN OPEN FLAME!  YOU HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE!

-  This is a really god-damned stupid movie.

-  The shark just killed a navy battle ship, but they couldn't be bothered to show anything to us because they're stupid and cheap.  Instead it would show the shark swimming, kind of, in some of the worst CGI I've ever seen (comparable to Etch-A-Sketch) and then cut to some army guys in a room that was shaking.  Do that three times, then cut to head army guy yelling "noooooooooooooo" and then fade to black.  Thanks a lot.  That was super entertaining.  I hope Aquaman shows up and kills everybody dead.

-  Asian guy with glasses just now compared the two creatures to Hurricane Katrina.  I can't decide if that's offensive, and since I'm not affiliated with and really wasn't affected by the hurricane, I'm just going to chalk it up as being unfunny instead.  Which once again proves that asians aren't funny.

-  Shocking.  Military guy wants to destroy the creatures, while the Sciencey people want to study them.  Just like every animal destruction movie ever.  And did I really say Debbie Gibson was a good actor, earlier?  I need to be gut-punched.

-  Do you think Wilson Ramos is more like the next Johnny Bench or the next Mickey Cochrane?  Nevermind, I'm being silly.  He's the next Matt Wieters.  Who, by the way, has 3x the home runs of your precious Joe Mauer.  Since HRs are the only really viable way to evaluate a hitter, I'd say it's clear Wieters is tops.  Other than Ramos.

-  Asian guy is now telling some sob story about how he has always wanted to be a marine biologist ever since he saw a dolphin get killed in a net when he was a kid but his family all wanted him to follow in his footsteps.  I didn't catch what it was they wanted him to be, but I'm going to assume ping-pong player.  And now he's humping Debbie Gibson.  Clearly she's pretty easy if that story worked.  Eww Debbie.

-  Since we're talking about studs, guess how many AL third-basemen have a better batting average than Evan Longoria?  Zero.  Guess how many have a better OBP.  Zero.  Guess how many have a better SLG.  Zero.  Plus, he'll steal your girlfriend.  Such a pimp.

-  Some fighter guy like Maverick or Goose just got slapped out of the air by an octopus tentacle, which means I guess nobody learned anything from the plane that got eaten by the shark earlier.  Also, since I'm sure you want to know how awesome it looked, it was a screen of a plane, then a shot of a tentacle, then the guy inside the plane with red flights flashing and him yelling.  Then they cut to the people in the big ship running this whole operation and they were all sad.  This movie rocks.

-  Nice pony-tail, Lamas. 

-  I still don't get the switch from Sci Fi Channel to SyFy Channel.  I mean, you're basically going to get two reactions - either irritation or indifference, so what's the point?  Not really seeing an upside here.  This is the worst marketing decision since they eliminated Crystal Pepsi.

-  For a movie about a giant shark and a giant octopus (which doesn't and never has existed) there has been a stunning lack of footage of said monsters.  And not the good kind of tension building keeping the monster hidden like in Jaws, the bad kind.  Like that one time I accidentally watched a male model show - The girls never came!  The girls never came!

-  They're doing something with pheremones to attract the monsters or something, but for some reason these pheremones are a glowing fluorescent green, like the ooze from TMNT.  Oh my god!  Maybe it is the ooze, and when the octo and shark meet up and fight they'll break the container and the ooze will spill everywhere and create a giant Shark/Octopus hybrid!  That would be the greatest thing ever!  Please let this happen.  Or at least turn Lamas into some human/shark creature.  He'd probably be more articulate.

-  I've never watched a movie that utilized shaky camerawork more often.  It's worse than the Blair Witch Project.  More like if the Blair Witch Project was filmed by Michael J Fox.  Or any movie, really.

-  Sweet jesus.  The shark somehow disappeared from the radar of the navy battleship which is currently attempting to shoot it with torpedos.  We've already established this thing is at least 200 feet long.  Nice radar.  Must be american-made.  Oh, there is is.  It ate the ship, and then it ate the Golden Gate Bridge.  I'm assuming we're not in Alaska anymore, but with the fact-finding and accuracy we've seen in this movie who the hell knows.  I'm guessing it'll go after Big Ben next.  Not Roethlisberger.  He'd probably hump it while it tried to get away.

-  The  new plan is to drop nukes into San Francisco Bay (the shark) and somewhere in Tokyo that I don't remember (the octopus) in order to "avoid a global catastrophe."  I don't even know where to begin.

-  Awesome.  Now they are going to try to get them to fight and kill each other instead, because "Sharks and Octopi are natural enemies."  Good lord.  This seriously puts every other one of these movies to shame, even that one with the Baldwin brother.  Don't worry, I'll be back with another one after this.   I have something called "Mega Piranha" waiting for me.  Hard to get a better title than that.

-  I'm really sick of fantasy baseball.  Our pitchers just keep getting Greinke'd.  First off, we have Greinke, who has a 2.27 ERA and zero wins.  Then tonight, Cole Hamels goes 8 innings, gives up 1 run, no win.  Last night Mike Leake pitched a gem and got nothing.  It's not fair.  We have the best team by far (Wieters AND Longoria) by are just 2-2 because of cheaters and cheating and bad luck.  We should be 5-0, even though it's only been four weeks.  Yep, we're that good.

-  By the way, I really wanted to like V, but I just couldn't get into it.  I feel like I'm insulting my childhood.  Then again, a certain recent remake of a certain awesome classic kind of destroyed it already.  Unfortunately, I can't elaborate.

-  I see Wilson Ramos is 0-3 with a K right now tonight.  I know a little bit of regression to the mean is inevitable, but if he doesn't end up hitting at least .500 this year, I think you have to consider his season a failure.

-  I'm thinking Gardy should have stuck with his unbreakable routine and brought in Rauch to finish the game.  Oops.  (I'm getting back to the movie, I swear).

-  $20 says this movie ends with another message about the evils of global warming.

-  Debbie and Asian guy just had a really touching conversation via video computer phone.  He's apparently in Asian now which I guess makes sense, but they're in love or something which doesn't.  And their romantic talk involved some quote from my guy Julius Caesar, but it was a pretty gay one.  The whole thing was awful.  Kind of gave me a hankerin' for watching Anakin and Padme.

-  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.....Padme.  Remember in the second movie how the somehow manages to rip her shirt just perfectly to get some nice mid-riff action?  I couldn't decide if that was awesome or stupid, and I still can't decide.  I know I didn't complain though.


-  Ok, so if you're going to make a movie with two giant sea creatures, and advertise in your title that you have two giant sea creatures, do me a favor and have some kind of a special effects budget so most of the time you can show the creature instead of just shake a camera and when you do show it it doesn't look like it's out of Super Mario Brothers.  Seriously, the octopus looks just like this:

 -  I quite literally have no idea what is going on anymore, but Debbie Gibson just punched some dude out (unfortunately not Lamas.  or the Asian guy) and then somebody said "Ice Wall!  Right Ahead!" which I think was supposed to be an homage to Titanic.  This is pretty surreal.  But not in a good way in the least.

-  So the Shark and Octopus are fighting, just like in Debbie's master plan (as natural enemies are wont to do), and they're actually showing the fight.  Sort of.  They're also using the shaking camera manuever, and when they do show them it looks like something I could create in the bathtub using Wonderbaby's toys pretty easily.  And she doesn't even have an octopus.

-  How do they keep losing the creatures on their radar?  This is about the fourth or fifth time.  Way to keep going back to the same plot device over and over again.  And, speaking of, we now have more shaking cameras.  I really can't stress enough how prevalent this has been.  This movie is as predictable as a Jesse Crain outing.  As shaky, too.

-  The octopus from Super Mario just squeezed the asian guy in half, but $50 says he shows up again because he and Debbie are in love and we need a happy ending to get us all through the day and our pathetic lives.  Also I'm betting we aren't getting any TMNT ooze ending, which is a total bummer.

-  I think they're looping the footage from the octo/shark fight.

-  And the two creatures actually managed to kill each other, which is obviously super realistic.  And there's asian guy to give us a little more Anakin-level banter in case you needed a little more.  Just fantastic.  I've seen a lot of crappy movies, but this is the worst.  Other than Jumper.

-  And we're set up for a sequel, because some old guy just gave our heros a file and said "here's something else" or some similar line.  They better not be in Piranha.  I can't take it again.

-  Well there you have it.  I hope you enjoyed this, because I sure as hell didn't, and I'm once again questioning why I keep doing this to myself.  It must be for you, because I love you.  Seriously, though, if I have to choose between a Giant Shark and a Giant Octopus, I'm going with crab juice.

-  And just so this night isn't a total loss, here is a picture Snake snapped of a guy who was sitting near us at the Twins game we went to on Monday.  I'm not even going to go with any commentary, I think it speaks for itself.


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