It starts with an entirely gratuitous scene of what can only be described as soft, soft core porn as the lead actress (someone or other) strips down to her panties, helpfully bends over to turn on the shower with her bottom pointed at the camera, and then treats us to an extended but steamed over view of her body naked under the faucet.

Then the movie starts.

I guessed the bad guy within a minute of his appearance on screen – both of them.  The main cop figure has (of course) a chip on her shoulder which causes her to freak out if she thinks anyone is questioning her ability.  The fights in the snow are hard to follow.  The ending is so anticlimactic you probably shouldn’t even call it a climax.  And, strangest of all, despite a crazed axe murderer being loose in the tiny, claustrophobic setting of a research station on Antarctica, all the staff except the protagonist and maybe two other people are in major party mode because they are about to cut it really close to an incoming storm that might stop them from evacuating the continent before winter sets in.  Um… okay.

So, I must say that I liked the movie much more this time through.  And my harsh judgments of it are significantly lessened.  In fact I am not entirely sure what pushed my buttons so hard during the first viewing – only my analyst could say for sure.  In any case I would now say that though I probably won’t care to see it again, it wasn’t as bad as I initially thought and I even enjoyed it.

I love sci-fi and I love it gritty, so really, I was totally ready to love this movie.  And when I am ready to love  I pretty much just go ahead and love, so it’s saying something that I will never watch this movie again, despite my great tolerance for repetition and sci -fi that is gritty.

Here is why:

1. Every person in this movie is an asshole.  They are all loathsome, selfish pricks.  Actually, the wife wasn’t a prick, she was an oblivious, whiny cryer.  I revise my opinion: no human in this movie is even remotely likable and so at many points I found myself bored because really, who gives a shit what happens to all these people I can’t stand?

It is not plausible that everyone you run into is a one dimensional shit head, but that is the only type of person represented in this movie (plus one whiny cryer).  I can get behind the occasional stereotyped bad guy or overly pure hero, but if you can’t identify with or understand at least one person, you won’t care about the movie.

3. The aliens are badly written.  Sometimes they are incapable of deception or even the most basic of social nuances (even though they can communicate easily with English speakers), yet at other times they can haggle with the gangsters over resources, use human weapons to commit crimes, and the like.  Even the protagonist alien, who is actually sort of likable, is not consistently portrayed.  He has a Huge Important Crucial Vital secret in his shack and yet defies and provokes the authorities into (predictably) raiding his shack – but he also tells his kid to hide, knows to keep his activities secret, and has an extended sneaking scene early in the movie.  And this alien is clearly put to the viewer as the sympathetic character, who is very human-like in his caring for others and so on.  So which is it – is he socially sophisticated and clever, or is he oblivious and naive?  The writers want it both ways and it doesn’t work.

4. This thing watches like a fourteen year old boy’s fantasy about what adults are like.  The doctors are remorseless torturers… the head army guy is a vicious, unstoppable bully… the head of the Nigerians is a power hungry tyrant.  This isn’t what adults are like, this is a twisted fantasy of unlimited power attached to a sci-fi storyline.  Which probably explains…

5. The human protagonist was psychologically implausible.  The beginning of the movie establishes him as a cruel social climber, and throughout most of the rest of the movie we see him over and over making deeply, catastrophically selfish choices without the slightest consideration for anyone else.  For example he’s known all along that District 10 is a concentration camp that will be even worse than District 9.*  Yet this twat is also supposedly in a loving and gentle marriage… because uncaring, self absorbed social climbers always end up in great relationships!  Also, though transformation and near vivisection don’t bring him any sympathy with the aliens, he somehow morphs into a martyr at the end.  Um, really?

So, the good parts were the effects and the filming, which I thought were excellent.  The storyline was also really cool but the execution was just… ugh.  This is mainly a movie about a selfish and immature man, when it could have been a movie about racism (er, speciesism) and what happens when people (and aliens) are placed in a frightening, uncertain environment.  To the extent that this movie was about those better things, it was great.  To the extent that it focussed on perfectly horrid individuals, it stank.  Alas, the horrids got most of the screen time.

*This also seriously undermines his credibility in the scene where Dad Alien discovers the medical experiments but the human protagonist insists with shock that he had no idea the Big Bad Corporation was doing such nasty things.  Experiments are beyond the pale but concentration camps are okay?  Maybe he didn’t know about the experiments – he’s still a concentration camp-supporting motherfucker.

I will say that I had forgotten that my very first celebrity crush was Spock, and the new guy playing him was so very, very Spock-like that I am a dizzy schoolgirl in love all over again.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the stern, intense types – which perhaps explains Husband rather well!

Anyway, I will probably go see it again and I think you should see it too.  Very enjoyable!

It’s been… what… a long time since Husband and I got rid of satellite.  And basically it was a good thing.  I got off the TV teat and did a lot more other things.  I stopped feeling like a pimped out commercial watcher.  And most of the time I don’t miss it.  But yesterday I hung out at Mel’s house and we just loafed on the couch watching reality TV and it was AWESOME.  Of course I can’t just sign up for Mel to be streamed into my house at all times so the replication won’t be quite right but I can get satellite back.  Do you know how many cooking shows are on TV?  Also the loads of reality shows that provide endless opportunity to analyze the participants, psychology-wise?  And the crime shows, my god, the crime shows!

I am considering it.

Also, we are celebrating easter by eating milk chocolate.  I know!  It’s totally not vegan!  But do you know how disappointing vegan chocolate is when you’re after an easter bunny?  I figure one or two days a year of chocolate indulgence isn’t a big deal.  I had some Toblerone at Christmas too.  It’s not  like it undoes all the vegan eating of the last 15 months.  We do a pretty good job of staying strictly vegan, but recognize it’s not fully possible.  And everybody eats chocolate at this time of year.  (This is pathetic, who rationalizes like this?)

Anyway I am having Mr Solid for breakfast and loving it.  Huzzah!

Also our landlord was here yesterday.  He is very responsive and when I told him the grout is melting out of the shower stall in the main bathroom he got a tile guy here in short order.  Naturally I enlisted Husband’s help and we cleaned the apartment to sparkling as part of my ongoing (though probably futile) effort to convince him that we are so clean and so responsible that it is nothing short of malicious to prevent us from getting a pet.  So far he seems unmoved, but he did ask what we thought could be done to update and modernize the apartment so it doesn’t look dated when he ultimately sells.  I suggested an OVEN for crying out loud BUY US AN OVEN but he just reiterated his position about the advantages of extra storage space in the kitchen, at which point I gave my oft-rehearsed speech about how anyone who cares enough about cooking to need extra space certainly needs an oven more, and anyone who doesn’t want to use it could store things in it… but we’ll see.  I’m not hopeful.

And I finally bought new canvas runners.  And little tank tops that were on sale for five bucks each.  And one of those plastic things that holds your book up and open on the kitchen counter so you can read your recipe without having to weigh the book pages open with buckets of change and vitamin bottles, which inevitably results in the jar getting knocked over and pennies getting into the dough.  And a book about polygamists, who could resist that?  So now I am going to read.  Enjoy your easter!

Other than that, I’ve been busy with work and sickness.  Yesterday I spent most of the day barfing and groaning on the couch, too sick to read but happily not too sick to watch Inspector Morse.  I had a fevery day a couple days ago and apparently that was just the appetizer for yesterday’s full meal deal.  What a day!  Yeesh!

Today my plan is to recuperate further, and perhaps take a little drive with Husband in honour of the crisp, sunny weather.

The other thing I thought I’d mention is a great little talk I saw on Edge today.  (I’m sorry, the link leads only to the introduction.  You have to scroll down past another little article to get to the actual video of his talk.  Sorry.  Edge has weird navigation.)  The speaker is a professer called Clay Shirkey, and he talks about how people like to produce and share in addition to merely consume, using Wikipedia and television watching as examples.  It’s really interesting for many reasons, but the one that stood out for me was the shocking, enormous volume of hours people waste watching TV every year.

I think TV is an enormous waste of time, 99% of the time.  Of course I find paying to be pandered to with advertisements unpalatable.  (Really television networks are selling audiences to advertisers, not shows to audiences.  The shows are merely hooks.)  Most shows are crap anyway, even so-called news or educational material.  There is almost nothing on TV you couldn’t learn better with the internet or a library card.  Or a phone and a bus pass if you’re gutsy enough to go meet someone who knows about the field you’re interested in.  And entertainment shows are worse – if aliens come to earth with a cosmic death ray and use TV programs as the criteria by which to judge our societies, we’d have no grounds for complaint if they blast us to mist.  There’s no way around it – most shows are mind bogglingly stupid.

But whatever, sometimes people just want to veg out or be mindlessly entertained, and I guess that’s okay.  I do that too.  What gets me is the amount.  Watching TV all night is such a disservice to yourself!  Watching TV all night, every night, and on weekends?  My god!  Think of all the things we could accomplish as a race if we didn’t spend sixty hours a week in front of the tube or using the computer as a TV analogue.  If we tried to learn, or do projects, or spend time with other humans in collective endeavours. Or if we relaxed by taking a walk with a friend?

I mean, what is your life for if you spend half if it in a state of passive reception for American Idol and its spiritual siblings?  Why are you here?  What will be your legacy to humanity? “Here Lies Bill: He Sure Liked CSI.”  Even if you are a talentless nobody who will never create beautiful music or art or cure cancer or anything of lage scale value, isn’t it better for you to engage with your life than drool onto the couch cushions every night?  Great societal outcomes are great, sure, but on the intrapersonal scale it’s your effort to be and to engage that engenders personal greatness.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be written about in history books.  Lord knows no one would ever buy a painting I made.  But it’s really important to me to live my life in an active way.  That precludes spending five hours a night watching TV.  And that’s okay!  Crowding out TV to read and quilt and spend time talking with my husband is exactly the point!  (If you find this paragraph interesting, this is a neat book to start thinking more about related issues.)

Anyway.  It would certainly be a massive improvement if we all worked on projects like Wikipedia rather than spent all night watching TV.

And that’s what I think about that.

Where can I watch Olympic coverage online that doesn’t totally suck?

Football season is starting.

Holy cats!  I sat up in the tub with alarm!

We don’t have TV any more.  This means we have to go out to watch a game, and the only place “out” where games exist is pubs.  Pubs don’t like it when you show up and don’t order food and drink.  But I can’t miss games!  What’s the point of having time off school if I can’t waste it watching football?  My two football instructors are potentials here, since both have enormous TV’s and cable – though Esan has a proper job and a new bride, which probably makes Monday night football at his house a no-go.  Z is the other choice, but he doesn’t like to let me come over lest I be shocked at his bachelorly housekeeping standards.  I keep telling him about my colony of pink mold in the bathroom but it doesn’t change his mind.

Still, it’s only one month.  This is not a forever change – surely at some point I will go back to restaurants.  (Though as I have said, it is a disturbing trend that whenever we’ve eaten at a vegetarian restaurant the food is inferior to that which I make at home.  This was never a problem when I ate meat.  Just sayin’.)

If you ever get the chance, you owe it to yourself to check out this show.