Gross Encounters

I missed this movie last November when it came out. I was all set to see it then heard it sucked, calculated the odds of whether I would agree with the reviews and skipped it. Rotten Tomatoes rates is at 16% positive among critics but what do those elitists know? After all, the audience rated it at 19% so I'm sure I'll have too much fun as I do another Liveblog for the science fiction masterpiece Skyline.

0:10:00 -- We're off to a rousing, imaginative start as the movie opens with title card sequences that basically look like someone sneezed on the camera. I see this was directed by Colin and Greg Strause, the guys who gave us Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem. If you've never seen it, it is the worst movie ever in the history of anything. I'm talking "should be encased in cement and dropped to the bottom of the Merianas Trench where it can never hurt anyone again" level of bad. Showgirls and Transformers wish they are as bad as AVP:R. I'm sure the Strause family has learned from the mistakes made in that debacle and are now ready to entertain us with some science fiction that is as thrilling as it is thought provoking. Where were we? Oh, yeah, everything looks like someone sneezed on the camera. We then see the city of Los Angeles, also known as the Big Apple or...something. Actually, it's known as the go-to first stop in any decent alien invasion and the aliens in this movie are no exception as lights drop from the sky. This wakes up two characters named Jarrod and Elaine played by two actors who are sort of/kind of vaguely recognizable television actors named Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson. I know their names because IMDB exists as they are in shows I don't watch. The producers have obviously bought into the myth that movie stars no longer matter and you can see by the movie's stellar $21 million domestic gross how well that idea worked out. Jarrod looks out at the lights and turns all white eyed and veiny but, suddenly, he and Elaine are on a plane and it says "15 hours earlier". I'm not sure what will happen in the next 15 hours that will top "alien invasion" but I trust the Family Strause completely to keep me entertained. They are in L.A. to visit Jarrod's old pal Terry played by another television guy. At least I know this is Donald Faison (Turk from Scrubs). Terry has made it in the music business and I guess he and Jarrod used to be in a band or something but I can't believe any of this will matter once the aliens land so let's move on.

"Who are we? I can't quite place us," they're thinking.

0:30:00 -- Terry wants Jarrod to quit his crap job, whatever the hell it is, and work for him in Los Angeles. From the way he describes his life, Jarrod and Elaine aren't living too far above the poverty line and it turns out they have a baby on the way so, naturally, they're resistant to the idea of moving from whatever shithole, rock-eater infested town they live in to L.A. where they would lead exciting lives on an exorbitant salary. None of this matters, though, because we have reached the 15 hour mark and once again lights are falling from the sky turning people who look at them into white eyed and vein covered zombies who walk into them and disappear. Jarrod and Terry decide to leave the womenfolk behind and go to the roof to investigate. Jarrod brings a camera and Terry brings a gun so decide who you want at your side during the Apocalypse. Jarrod fails to keep the door to the roof open and it locks behind them but, luckily, he brought the camera which is of no use whatsoever in this situation. The gun, however, comes in handy when more lights fall from the sky and we see that they're dropping from alien spaceships. Terry manages to shoot the lock off the door which is great because pregnant Elaine was right on the other side of it but she's fine. Well, except for when she looks into the light and goes all zombie on them.

This and the other picture show Eric Balfour's single, all purpose expression. He has it down though.

0:50:00 -- There's no television or radio and news websites haven't been updated for hours so I must reluctantly applaud the efficiency and competence of the alien invaders. They want people for something or other as they are slurping boatloads of them into their ships but I'm sure they just want to bring us all back to a planet called Happy Funtime Place. Terry has the genius idea that they will be safe on his boat and Jarrod agrees. The women think that's stupid but they have lady parts and icky menstrual cycles so Jarrod and Terry wisely ignore them. Candice (Brittany Daniel), Terry's bitch girlfriend (she gets away with that by looking like this), insists on riding in a separate car because she just found out Terry has been nailing her pretty assistant so Terry and the assistant drive out together and, in an event no one could have foreseen, immediately get attacked by some giant alien robot thing. Terry gets out of the car and back to Jarrod but he gets snatched by an alien tentacle. If only Jarrod had thought to bring his camera, he may have saved Terry but he didn't so Terry got sucked into what looks like a big alien vagina. In fact, all the alien vehicles have a "giant vagina" theme going so I'm guessing the Strause brothers didn't date much during high school. They are saved by Oliver, the building manager (David Zayas, and again, I must thank IMDB for giving me his name though I could have probably just said he plays the detective sergeant in Dexter). They go back to Terry's penthouse none the worse for where save for the fact that two of their friends are now dead.

This should work. Be sure to throw the gun itself when you run out of ammo.

1:12:00 -- For the last 20 minutes, our four survivors have spent the bulk of their time sitting around Terry's luxury apartment and looking bored over the fact that the world was ending. If the goal of the filmmakers was to get me to feel was the characters are feeling, congratulations, you did it. There was a scene where the military nuked one of the ships but it turns out that the aliens were only MOSTLY dead. Meanwhile, Jarrod has this spider web looking pattern growing all over his chest and even manifests super strength when Oliver tries to foil yet another of his genius plans to leave the relative safety of the apartment building and try to gain the attention of some Army snipers stationed on the roof next door. Meanwhile, Candice starts doing the white eyed zombie thing and steps out onto the balcony to be slurped by a pissed off looking alien vagina. Jarrod and Elaine did manage to get the Army guys to call for a rescue chopper but SURPRISE the aliens are knocking it out of the sky. At this point, I'm wondering what sort of lame ass weakness the invaders will turn out to have. Like, maybe they're allergic to zinc so we start throwing bottles of zinc supplements at them. Or maybe Jarrod will be running along, trip over their world wide master control center and hit the OFF switch. The good news is the movie only has 20 minutes left to go so I won't have to wait long.

Blowed it up real good.

1:33:00 -- OK, I was wrong. No zinc allergies. Earth was conquered and everyone died. It turned out the reason they wanted us was to rip the brains out of our heads, inject them with some sort of glowy shit and eat them. Now, Jarrod never struck me as any sort of an Einstein what with just having the one expression which could be described as "always looking like he has to fart" but he was apparently such a brainiac that he took over the alien who ate his brain. He then rescued Elaine and defended her from the alien hordes and, we assume, sent them packing and made the world safe for white, wealthy Christian Americans once again. IMDB tells me there will be a Skyline 2 next year. yay. Will the Krausi learn from their mistakes? Sadly, I fear the place you will find out will be another Liveblog.

Jarrod is finding out that, at some point, every man is brought down by vaginas.

Fuck Yeah!

That's the title I wasn't allowed to use over at Examiner.com. I half expected them to censor the one I did use but, so far, no one has even noticed it's a reference to the F-word.

A Good Man Goes To War

I loved the new Harry Potter film. Find out how much at Examiner.com.

You're Not The Boss Of Me

It's always surprising when a so called "comedy" like Horrible Bosses actually turns out to be funny. Still, I wish it had been about farting penguins but those can't be in every movie.

Lizards Do It At Warp Speed

Yes yes, I know I haven't been paying much attention to you folks lately. Allow me to make it up to you with that thing many of you live for, one of my Liveblogs. Normally, my rule is that the target of the Liveblog be something I haven't seen before but I recently noticed that episodes of Star Trek: Voyager were available on Netflix Instant and sure enough, they had the worst episode of what was the lowest point in Star Trek history until Enterprise premiered. So please sit back and enjoy my takedown of one of television's stupidest moments, an episode called Threshold.

0:05:00 -- It opens with Tom Paris, the second dullest character on the show flying in a shuttle craft while talking to Harry Kim, the dullest character on the show. Sadly, this takes place in season two, before Seven of Nine, the woman whose ability to give men erections back in the 90s was matched only by Viagra, joined the cast which means we'll get little in the way of sex appeal but don't worry. They'll make up for it with loads and loads of bullshit technical jargon. For instance, when Tom says he's having problems with one of the warp nacelles, Harry says, "Try to stabilize your field symmetry." Yeah, what the hell, let's do that. And hey, it worked. Yay! Tom is flying a shuttle craft loaded with some new transwarp drive which, one assumes, does something good but he can't get it to work and it BLOWS UP AAAHHH but don't worry, it was all a dream. Or rather, a holodeck simulation. As I recall, this is the one episode in which the holodeck actually worked and didn't create sentient holograms that tried to take over and/or destroy the ship. You'd think they would have learned to stop using the damn thing after a while but no, it remained the go-to plot device when the writers couldn't think of anything else to do. One important thing you see in the opening credits is the name of the screenplay's writer, Brannon Braga. Braga is, simply, one of the shittiest writers in the history of television who has diminished or destroyed anything to which his name has ever been associated. He and his pal Rick Berman turned Star Trek from a show emphasizing adventure into a melodrama filled with scientific gobbledygook like strengthening your field symmetry or using a duranium alloy or flooding the warp plasma coils with chronoton particles. He went on to produce a dumb alien invasion series (also called Threshold), write for the worst season of 24 and then to make the very lame Flash Forward. This episode, however, is where I first saw, and never forgot, his name.

He who shall not be named. Except in the opening credits, of course.

0:12:48 -- This seems like a good spot to stop as this was where, in the olden days, the first of those quaint things we called "commercials" would have played. Paris, Kim and the half Klingon engineer B'lanna Torres are trying to figure out a way to reach the supposedly impossible speed of warp 10 but they can't do it without their shuttlecraft falling apart. The basic premise of the show is their ship is trapped in the Delta quadrant of our galaxy and it's going to take decades to get home, a problem that could be solved if they can reach warp 10. As the show was in no danger of being cancelled at this point, they should have known it wasn't going to work but they tried anyway. Neelix, an alien they picked up when they got trapped in the Delta quadrant, gave them some homespun wisdom about something or other and, from that, they figured out that...um...something about making sure the ship's hull didn't depolarize. Hell, I could have told them not to let the hull depolarize. That's just common sense. Paris wants to be the one to make this historic flight but Captain Janeway considers grounding him since it turns out he has some sort of enzyme imbalance that could cause him to...you know, they never said why this was bad. Paris manages to convince Janeway to let him make the flight by pleading in a way that made me think he was going to hyperventilate. Dull, melodramatic moments like this are what really set Voyager apart from previous incarnations of Star Trek and were why I never cared for this show. Anyway, Paris manages to pass the warp 10 threshold and disappears off their scanners. So, you know, that's bad. Luckily, Paris is a series regular. Had he been someone we'd never seen before, he'd have been a goner for sure. Star Trek has a history of casually killing off its extras that stretches back to the show's beginnings when Kirk would say, "Scotty, Spock, Bones, Sulu and Checkov, you all come with me. Ensign Smith, go check out behind that rock," and then you'd hear a scream and they'd find poor Ensign Smith with all his minerals drained out of him or something. The good news is that the actor who played Ensign Smith would have a guaranteed lifetime income from Star Trek convention appearance where he'd tell the same story over and over about how William Shatner stole his danish.

Is she upset over Tom Paris or does she just need to fart? Find out after this commercial break.

0:19:07 -- So, Tom Paris has disappeared. Why? We don't know. All the cool stuff is happening off screen and we're only getting reaction shots so we're not exactly getting any Dave-Bowman-entering-the-monolith moments. Suddenly, he reappears and is found sleeping aboard the shuttlecraft. The holographic Doctor wakes him up and he again sounds like he's about to hyperventilate as he tells how he was existing in every point of the universe simultaneously. If it were me, I'd have reentered the universe next to those green Orion slave girls but Paris came back to Voyager. Everything is just great, just spiffy, nothing at all wrong here until Paris suddenly has patterns of veins forming on his head and collapses. So, you know, maybe that whole "enzymatic imbalance" thing turned out to be a valid reason to ground him after all. At least I'm sure he won't be going through any weird transformations.

Has turning all veiny and glassy eyed ever been a good thing?

0:27:25 -- Paris begins undergoing a weird transformation, something no one could have foreseen. Apparently, he's now allergic to water and eventually he can only breathe a combination of nitrogen and acid. He does begin doing some decent acting so I suppose there's a bright side to the fact that all sorts of lesions are now forming on his body. After a while, his cells mutate so much that there's nothing he can do and he dies. But wait, it turns out he was only MOSTLY dead and he wakes up. He easily pulls out a tuft of his hair and whimpers about it which is a pretty pansy ass thing to do considering it's the alternative to death. Oh, he now has two hearts. He'd better not be a Timelord.

I'd forgotten about her. Kes, the space elf. At least they shuffled her off and replaced her with Seven of Nine.

0:36:38 -- Paris continues mutating until he eventually starts looking like a lizard. He says things like, "The present is in the past and the past is in the future," which means that at least part of him is mutating into something that's making him high as a kite. The Doctor thinks they can destroy the mutated DNA with anti-proton bursts cause, you know, why not? Unfortunately, he finally gains some super strength, breaks out of his restraints and begins a rampage through the ship. Oh, one of the crew members is working for the Kazon. Along with Kes, I'd also forgotten about the Kazon, some of the lamest villains in Star Trek history. They're some sort of warrior race like Klingons except that they're also dull as dishwater. They were not missed when they were finally vanquished.

Some topical ointment should clear that right up.

0:45:53 -- And now, the reason I curse Brannon Braga's name. Paris disabled the ship and kidnapped Janeway. He brought her onto the transwarp shuttlecraft, escaped the ship and went to warp 10. Three days later, Voyager tracks them down on some planet somewhere and they're now lizards. The Doctor says this is actually the next 4 million years of human evolution accelerated by crossing the warp 10 threshold which, you know, makes a whole heaping shitload of sense. Get to warp 10, you're a lizard. Stephen Hawking has probably written all about this in his books. Really, you'd be shocked if anything else had happened. While on the planet, Janeway and Paris have hot lizard sex and have some lizard babies and no, I'm not making that up. It turns out that de-lizarding them is fairly easy. They decide to just leave the lizard babies on that planet which denies them an invaluable scientific opportunity as well as violating the Prime Directive but it's hardly the stupidest thing that's happened so fuck it, let's move on. Do they continue to explore the possibilities of using warp 10 to get them home? Nope, that gets dropped even though they now understand the side effects and have a workable method to reverse them. And so, they continue their adventures in the Delta quadrant, blandly going where no one has gone before. I'm really looking forward to Brannon Braga's new show, Terra Nova. You should too as it will almost certainly be the subject of a future Liveblog.

And here it is, the perfectly sensible, logical result of achieving warp 10.

Less Than Meets The Eye

What better way to celebrate the birth of our nation than to read my review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon? If there's a better way, I can't think of it.