Monday, June 30, 2008

Wall.E - 5 Tubs

When someone says to me, "I've got good news and bad news, which do you want first?" I'll always say, "Give me the bad news first." I like happy endings. So let me start this review by giving you the bad news first.

Wall.E is a story about an Earth that has been destroyed by humans who have all left to live on a space platform, leaving behind a single robot to clean it up before the humans can return. Wall.E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth class) goes around and sweeps up all the trash and debris and stores it in huge landfills. Useful items he warehouses for later use. Basically, Wall.E assumes the stewardship of the Earth that God created man to perform. The bad news is that the brats and sperm and egg donors who created them didn't learn anything from watching the movie. They treated my theater the way the humans treated the Earth. Like Wall.E, I clean up behind human pigs disguised as movie goers. Unlike Wall.E who does his job without complaining, I take upon myself the huge burden of being the conscience of humankind. Despite many claims to the contrary, I've found that most movie goers are not only slovenly, they're liars too. Everyone I've met says that they always take their trash with them: blacks, whites, Asians, maybe Hispanics - I can't tell because they don't speak English. But somebody is leaving the mountains of trash I have to haul out of the theater after every showing. So, as your conscience, stop lying, stop sneaking in outside food and drink because you're cheap and dishonest, and take your stinking trash to the trash receptacles located by the door through which you entered the auditorium.

Now on to the good news. Wall.E is a movie about relationships. Despite being a robot, Wall.E develops a character and personality. He's lonely, inquisitive, nostalgic, romantic. His only companion is a cockroach; one of those creations we wish God had left off the Ark. When another robot lands unexpectedly on Earth, Wall.E falls in love at first sight. Her name is, appropriately, Eve; and Eve at first plays hard to get. Wall.E tries to win the other robot's attention by showing off all the treasures he's salvaged. One of those treasures is a small plant that Wall.E has saved and nurtured in an old boot. When Eve accepts the plant, her systems appear to shut down and Wall.E begins to think that he's the reason she's taken ill. Wall.E uses umbrellas and trash cans to protect Eve from the elements. He puts her in the front of his cart as he paddles through the muck and mire, trying to show show her the grandeur of what used to be. He dresses her with lights at Christmas and sits by her side pining away, longing for the chance to hold her hand.

When a spaceship arrives and loads Eve into the ship, Wall.E rushes to be with her. Unable to get onboard before blast off, Wall.E clings to the outside of the ship, refusing to let go despite being pelted by satellites and other space debris floating in Earth's orbit. Once beyond our gravitational pull, Wall.E marvels at the beauty of Creation in the cosmos. And when the ship arrives at the space station, occupied by obese, spoiled humans, who are pampered and taken care of by armies of robots, Wall.E follows Eve to protect her and to be with her. When Eve is thought to be defective and sent to robot rehab, Wall.E follows and meets other rejects and in his own humanity shows them that they are each special and that they have something to contribute still. This is a movie about selflessness, friendship and love and going to the ends of the universe to be with the person you care about. It's what being human is all about...but we've somehow forgotten as we've learned to put ourselves first rather than others and this beautiful planet we've been given to take care of.

Is there a happy ending? Will the humans get back to Earth and do a better job taking care of her than they did in the beginning? You'll have to watch the movie to find out. And while you're at it, how about having some respect for yourself by not buying more than you can consume; and respect for the ushers who clean up after you by disposing of your trash when you leave the movie?

Thursday, June 19, 2008

The Happening - 3 Tubs

I'm not too disappointed at the condition of the theater after this movie, but I'm very disappointed at the movie itself. The previews looked great; the movie, a waste of nine bucks. After The Village and Lady in the Water, I'd hoped that M. Night Shyamalan would return to his roots and give us a great story with a twist. There was no twist, and the story was boring. The only evil you see is wind blowing through the trees and bushes. People jumping off buildings or laying down in front of lawn mowers, or landscapers hanging from street lights isn't terrifying. The Happening is as much a disappointment as The Strangers - a movie I won't even comment on since no one is coming to see it; and rightfully so.

Shyamalan usually tries to bring out faith and humanity in his movies. Mark Walburg did OK showing emotion in this movie, but his co-star Zooey Deschanel looked straight out of the silent movie era with her forced facial expressions. I suspect that Shyamalan has a thing for her because he loved doing closeups of her face. Night also does his cameo as a dinner date with Zooey's character. Anyway, whatever Shyamalan was trying to accomplish, it didn't work. I wasn't the only one disappointed in the film; most of the people I overhead exiting the auditorium expressed their disappointment as well.

On the positive side, the theater was easy to clean after the movie, except for a couple of fat ladies who struggled but failed at shoving handfulls of popcorn into their mouths. I've seen babboons do the same thing with food. They'll try to get everything in their hands into their mouths. The cheeks will bulge like Jiffy Pop bags about to explode. The babboons do this because they're afraid somethings going to steal their food if they don't consume it immediately. These women each had a tub of popcorn and were in no danger of being poached upon by other movie goers. If they had eaten like humans, there would have been more popcorn in their bellies than on the floor.

The Incredible Hulk - 4 Tubs

This is an adult children's movie, thus the trash is like that you'd find at a Disney movie, with the addition of wine and vodka bottles. As with Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk attracts freaks, geeks, and rednecks; many of whom have to raise the arm rests on either side of their seats in order to park their oversized butts...or to make room for the tub of popcorn, which will usually tip over and spill behind the seats providing a feast for the roaches and ants that frequent our fine theater. Here's a hint - there are no sneak previews at the end of the credits in this movie like there was in Iron Man. The sneak peak comes at the end of the movie where it belongs where Tony Stark approaches a drunken William Hurt to discuss putting a team together.
It is pitiful that grown children will sit watching credits and seriously discuss fiction disguised as science, like the Hulk's regenerative DNA and the effect of gamma radiation in his blood when it comes in contact with the DNA of a foreign host. Folks, the stuff you read in those comic books isn't science, it's fiction! That's the beauty of fiction - you can write what you want and it doesn't have to be believable or even make sense.

Along the same lines, there are no rogue generals in our military who is capable of building a tactical team with the latest and greatest toys and who can work outside the sytem in order to create chaos and mayhem on our citizens. As a 24 year member of the military, I can assure you that all that manpower and equipment comes at a cost and that the purse strings are controlled by civilians. A general might get a $400 toilet seat or a $2,000 wrench through the logistical system, but not futuristic equipment like sound cannons and some of the other military equipment you see in the movie. Remember, this stuff was built by Stark Industries, another Marvel enterprise. The military hasn't perfected an armored flying suit for their soldiers either.

Come on, if your education in science comes from a comic book - you're pitiful. Put down the comics and spend the time at your local community college getting a reality check. Watch Fox news and intelligently discuss politics with your liberal friends. Heck, take your wife out to dinner and try having an intelligent conversation with her for a change.

I enjoyed The Hulk - much better than the last one. It's great to see Marvel include the original stars in their movies: Lou Ferigno - who again plays a security guard and provides the voice of The Hulk; and Bill Bixby who appears in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father". I wasn't paying enough attention to notice where Stan Lee was in the movie. Ed Norton did a great job as David Banner. I did a fantastic job taking my trash out when the movie ended...and I didn't stay to watch the stupid credits - wait for the DVD if you really need to know that information.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Another Look at Horton Hears a Who

I didn't particularly care for this movie, especially because the kids trashed my theater and took years off the usefulness of my poor aching feet. However, there is a sort of spiritual side to the movie that deserves another look.

Here is the synopsis of the movie: "An imaginative elephant named Horton hears a faint cry for help coming from a tiny speck of dust floating through the air. Although Horton doesn’t know it yet, that speck houses an entire city named Who-ville, inhabited by the microscopic Whos, led by the Mayor. Despite being ridiculed and threatened by his neighbors, who think he has lost his mind, Horton is determined to save the particle--because “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” Horton’s eight-word explanation for his actions embodies an idea both simple and profound, and which means so much, to so many. Horton explains to his skeptical friends: “If you were way out in space, and you looked down at where we live, we would look like a speck.” Then there’s Horton’s code--his motto--that, “an elephant’s faithful 100 percent”--pointing to his honesty and determination to never abandon his mission to find a new home for the speck that houses the incredible world of Who-ville." (taken from Hollywood.com)

Imagine if the Earth were that speck of dust, trapped inside a solar system which is a tiny part of a galaxy of stars, one of hundreds of billions of stars in the cosmos. That is our reality. We live on a beautiful blue marble, the only inhabited rock in our solar system. We're not the center of Creation. We're not even the center of our solar system. If we were able to look at the Milky Way, the Earth would be a tiny speck in one of the outer bands of the swirling mass. Scientists tell us that the universe - the millions of galaxies in the entire cosmos is 10 billion lightyears in radius. But even then this is only an estimation based on how long it takes for the light to reach us from the oldest known stars. To give you a perspective of how tiny we are in the universe we live in, it would take 980,000 earths to fit inside our sun. The light from our sun only takes 8 minutes to reach us. The Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. If we were going to drive to the sun, we'd have to drive at 93 miles per hour for one million hours (about 115 years factoring in bathroom breaks). Now imagine our solar system about 80% away from the center of our galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter and about 1,000 light years thick. There are about 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone. This gives you a perspective as to how similar the Earth is to Who-ville!

We're really impressed with the vastness and the beauty of Creation. In fact, man devotes a lot of research and money at understanding our place in the cosmos. But most of us spend our time looking down at the earth beneath our feet. We're focussed on our own dreams and challenges. We worry about our future and expend most of our energy attempting to control our own little portion of our world.

I'm not trying to make you think we're small. We are small. We are but a mote of dust in all of God's Creation. The thing is, we matter to Him. But unlike Horton who can only hear the cries of help from the citizens of Who-ville, God is with us. The star-breathing God who created everything that is, took the time to knit each and every one of us so that no two of us are exactly alike. He talks to us, if we will listen. He shows us how much He loves us in the beauty of nature. He will even live inside us if we ask Him. But most of the time we're only interested in His helping hand to get us out of our messes.

Only by viewing ourselves in the vastness of Creation can we truly understand our need for someone who's big enough to handle things that are beyond our control. Thank God there is a God we can depend on 100% of the time, who is willing to go to extraordinary lengths on our behalf. We should all be as appreciative of God as the citizens of Who-ville were of Horton once they learned there was someone bigger than they were.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Sluts And the City - 5 Tubs

Did I say that? OK, I get it that millions of SATC fans are going to get mad at me, but this is my blog and I'm just reporting the facts; this chick flick attracts pigs and - according to my theater manager, bitches. I didn't personally run into any bitches, but I did bitch about the mess the women made in my theater.

The funny thing about SATC is that it attracted groups of women - a girls-night-out kind of thing. And these girls came dressed to party. Each woman had to look better than the rest of the girls she was coming with. And they brought their cute little wine bottles and sipped from theater courtesy cups...and left the bottles under their seats. There were 25 bottles under seven seats. I hope they brought a designated driver.

Like the women in the movie, most of the women coming to see SATC are less than attractive and only sexy because men will sleep with anything that will lie still long enough. None of the actresses in this movie are sexy - least of all Sarah Jessica Parker. She bears a strong resemblance to the witch that was crushed under the house in the Wizard of Oz. But Hollywood is great at creating fiction and getting people to accept it as fact. What is a fact is that the SATC fans left a lot of trash in my theater, on purpose of course. It used to be that 'chick-flicks' were relatively clean because women would only buy a small popcorn and a bottle of water. Now they're buying the large combos and supplementing them with a little wine and a bag of candy from Target next door.

One of the managers, a devout Muslim, shook his head in disgust upon seeing so many women lined up at the concession stand. "These women," he whispered to me, 'these women - they are liberal women! They don't care how they look in public! They dress like sluts! They should name this movie "Sluts And the City"." When he helped us clean the theater after these liberal women left, his opinion was only reinforced. "Why are American women such bitches!?" I laughed and told him that he ought to have to clean the women's bathroom. The mere thought of sanitary napkins overflowing the trash cans caused him to pull out his prayer mat.