Oh, Come ON!

I watched a terrible movie this past weekend. I did not watch the entire thing but I watched enough of it to know that it was a shitty one. The film in question was 2012 which came out last year and I distinctly remember saying to myself "Well, there's another movie I'll never ever watch." I spoke too soon apparently. The Wiff had recorded it off of HBO and it had been sitting on the DVR like a turd for a couple of weeks. Yesterday after she got back from running errands and doing some work she announced that she was "going to watch a movie". I understood that as "I want to be alone now. Go upstairs and let me watch this dumb movie in peace." See, it's not that I mean to ruin her viewing of horribly stupid candy-movies/TV shows, it's just that I can't help myself. I have to make comments and poke fun at the plot, characters, special effects, what-have-you in said movie/TV show. I don't WANT to, I HAVE to. I am compelled. It's a sickness.

So I went upstairs and let her be. But I got bored upstairs. When you don't have anything you really want to do, the internets can get dull super fast. I poked around on Hulu looking for a show I wanted to watch but got distracted by a game of Snood instead. After a couple of games I went on to YouTube to watch people falling off of things. That got old faster than anticipated. I made my way back downstairs and ignored the look that the Wiff gave me. I noticed it, I just ignored it. She was camped out on the couch and 2012 was stinking up the TV. I sat down and tried to keep my comments to myself. I didn't last very long. "Oh, come on man...they're on a huge, cavernous cargo plane and it's quiet enough to have a whispered conversation? So they're saying our car is louder than that plane?" Eye rolls from the Wiff. There was one scene later on with John Cusak doing his best Shelley Winters impersonation except he must have the lung capacity of an orca because he is under water for waaaaaay longer than humanly possible and when he finally comes up, he's not even tired. This is the same guy who needed a tiny French chick to help him rebuild a Camaro. Amazing.

The movie also suffers from the problem of computers not behaving like computers. Computers in movies make all kinds of extraneous bleeps, bloops, and whizzing noises. The graphics are always too flashy (especially for government computers) and although the operators have access to amazing amounts of information, they can never accurately predict anything. They can't even do a countdown properly. I know I'm supposed to suspend reality for the sake of entertainment but shouldn't the concept of time passing be the same? The movie did blow shit up nicely I must admit. The shiny-shiny-ness was palatable but the scale of some of the disasters seemed awkward, like a cut scene from a crappy video game. Plus, the whole planet is blowing the fuck up right? How come John Cusak gets to keep his entire family together throughout this shit storm? He even gets to hook up with his ex-wife after her boyfriend bites it in a rather nasty fashion. Can I just say that I don't like Amanda Peet? She always looks angry. Lighten up lady, you're in a movie.

There is so much dumb shit going on in this movie that it stopped being worth wasting my witty remarks on it, much to the Wiff's chagrin I'm sure. After John Cusak gives the Mayan's the middle finger and survives what I estimate to be a hundred different attempts to kill him and his family (did you know you could out-run an explosion? or drive through a building that's collapsing, popping out the other side unscathed? or you can sit in the bed of a pick-up truck as it drives through the goddamn Himalayas in WINTER and be perfectly cozy in just a suit jacket?), they are on the deck of one of the arks that were built in China (sure, they all survive the floods but they end up with lead poisoning) months after the disaster when his semi-retarded daughter says "Daddy? When can we go home?" Hey kid, did you not pay attention to when everything ON THE PLANET got fucked over? Hmmm? Did you miss all that? D'ya think that your McMansion on the fucking cul-de-sac survived? *Smack!* At least that's what he should have done. The need to put a pretty little bow on the end of this movie really just didn't make any sense. If the writers had made the ending dark and brooding (a la Battlestar Galactica for instance) I'd have a smidgen of respect for them.

I have a benchmark for shitty movies like this one. That standard is the movie "Volcano" starring Tommy Lee Jones at his robotic best and Anne Heche (before she went crazy). Volcano did what any movie that is this poorly written, acted, directed and filmed should do. It ramped up the crazy and unbelievable scenarios and became, in my opinion, a comedy. If you have never seen Volcano, rent it and enjoy (geologists straddling a super-hot fissure? Sure, why not. A guy melting in lava? Of course. A lava floe stopped by cramming a bunch of jersey barriers into a horseshoe shape? You betcha). I suggest that you watch it while drinking. As a matter of fact, you can do the Volcano Drinking Game. Every time someone dies while just standing still and screaming, take a shot. Every time someone does NOT die even though lava is pretty goddamn hot, take a shot. You could take a shot every time the laws of physics are ignored but you'd be shitfaced by the end of the first 30 minutes.

Since Volcano is so bad that it's good I have devised a rating system based on it. If you have a movie that is rated as 1 Volcano, it's a bad movie but you could watch it all the way through without saying "Oh, come ON!" more than twice. A movie that is rated 5 Volcanos is, well, Volcano. It's a pretty high standard of awful. This movie, 2012, I will give 3.5 Volcanos. I was going to just go with a rating of 3 Volcanos but since 2012 runs 2 and a half hours long, that makes it extra tough to take. A while back the Wiff and I tried having a "Bad Movie Night" and have some friends over to watch dumb movies and make fun of them. It kind of fizzled out after a couple attempts but I think we have to bring this back. Ooooh, maybe the first movie for BMN can be Taken. That stinker rates a solid 3 Volcanos easily.