Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by a mini ice-age, known by scientists as the Younger Dryas, and nicknamed the ‘Big Freeze’, which lasted around 1300 years. Geological evidence shows that the Big Freeze was brought about by a sudden influx of freshwater, when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks and poured into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. This vast pulse, a greater volume than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined, diluted the North Atlantic conveyor belt and brought it to a halt.

…

Previous evidence from Greenland ice cores has indicated that this sudden change in climate occurred over the space of a decade or so. Now new data shows that the change was amazingly abrupt, taking place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most. (via)

Sunday was Post-Apocalyptic Movie Day.

After lunch, we decided to watch “The Day After Tomorrow”. We’d already seen this in the movie house before. I remember liking it, and I remember being fascinated by this theory of how the human race ends.

I did like it again.

Aside from liking Dennis Quaid, I have a fascination for the different scientific explanations and theories that revolve around the principle of Global Warming. In fact, someday I think I will put together a summary of all the different fiction materials (on books, movies, comic books) with the different theories on Global Warming.

That aside, imagine if a super storm did hit the entire world… and how timely, considering all the freak storms that hit various parts of the world this year. A super storm like Ondoy which in a few hours was able to bury most of the city in deep water. Only, this super storm in the movie brought not only flood but below freezing weather in the eye of the storm, enough to freeze anything moving in open air within just a few seconds.

Yes, the human race ends with the coming of another ice age.

After “Day After Tomorrow”, we hopped over to our next door neighbor to catch “2012″.

This time, the world ends a little bit differently than “Day After Tomorrow”. The story is a little bit different too..

(Spoiler alert!)

This time, the world ends because the earth’s core gets too hot. The balance of forces in the world has been massively disturbed throughout all these centuries and lifetimes. Somehow, the world now needs to correct itself and restore balance to itself.

So volcanoes erupt. Massive earthquakes split the ground open and swallow cities, skyscrapers, bridges and everything else in its path. Giant tsunamis devour everything else that the earthquake doesn’t destroy.

And when the earth’s land masses begin to break up, the earth’s continents, islands and countries move and shift. Suddenly, what used to be the North Pole is now Central America. What used to be the Siberian mountains is now China. And of course, being the nerd that I am, I found it fascinating once more.

Before watching this movie, I’d already heard mixed reviews about it. But I liked it. An original premise, brilliant acting by John Cusack and the hilarious Woody Harrelson. Awesome screenwriting (seriously, this is the only Post-Apocalyptic movie that made me laugh uproariously many times over).

—

I like watching movies like these simply for the entertainment value. I’m also a fan of science fiction, especially when the science fiction is more science than it is fiction.

The end of the world to me has always been a vague notion  of something that either physically happens sometime in this world’s lifetime… or happens in the metaphorical sense of death and spiritual rebirth.

For believers, many fear this day of reckoning when the world turns to black, and calamity befalls the earth in succeeding bursts, enough to wipe out most of the human race.

But to me, I’ve always felt that if the world ended today, it would be a fate that’s far too kind for mankind and all its imperfections. (But this sentiment is one which comes from a person who believes that in death is where we will receive our reward of light, love, hope and peace from a life well-lived and well-loved.)

Hence, I’ve never believed the world will end in the physical, literal sense that we think… not in this lifetime. Which is why I was a bit taken aback when someone asked me,  “do you believe 2012 is gonna happen?“

I first answered by saying, “who knows?” And I think moments after pondering the best way to answer this question – that’s the response I still have and will stay with.

Who knows? Who knows really how the world ends? Who knows how the human race faces extinction? Or if it will ever will? Who knows, maybe by the time our physical earth falls apart, space travel would already have been made possible, and other planets and galaxies would already be inhabitable by the human race? Who knows, really?

No one.

That’s why if there is a lesson to learn from Post-Apocalyptic pieces of fiction such as these… it’s simply to keep living each day as though it were your last. You’ll never know what comes tomorrow… if it will even come.

Sage wisdom through the ages. Works everytime.

Lear’s Fool had it right.  I woke to rain this morning – again – and thought fearfully of our friends in Cockermouth with their baby twins, and my family driving to work across the flood plains of Gloucester.  I love rain usually, but our bedroom is starting to smell of mould and the puddles on the pavements are permanent and getting bigger…

Difficult not to get all apocalyptic…and why oh why have our TV channels been baton-passing The Day After Tomorrow from schedule to schedule recently?  If I see Dennis Quaid looking resolute one more time I’m going to start building an Ark.

An incredible revelation

I’ve been watching the news unfold about the E-mails and documents that were somehow pilfered (or leaked) from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week.  I have been reading everything that I can find on the internet about the subject, including the E-mails themselves and some of the programmer comments embedded in the CRU software.

I have been stunned.

So it appears that either a) the science behind anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is dubious, or b) the entire global warming panic has been an outright fraud perpetrated by politically-motivated scientists against an unsuspecting, and largely gullible, world population.  I tend to believe the latter.

Not only am I stunned, I’m also livid.  At the same time, however, I’m also relieved that the priests of global warming now have serious reasons to be worried…if not afraid.  And now I hope the Senate will have more reason to look at the pending cap and trade debate with more skepticism.  Given the current–and very real–economic crisis, we don’t need Congress levying additional taxes with the intent of thwarting a crisis that doesn’t even exist.

Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong

I am an AGW denier.  I have always been a denier.  I am proud of the fact that I never fell for what, in my mind at least, always came across as being specious bullshit.  I’m so, so grateful that I’m not among the millions and millions of gullible idiots who took the bait hook line and sinker.

Up until now the term “denier” has been used as a pejorative by global warming adherents to describe skeptics.  But now one is led to ask the question: Who exactly are the real deniers?  Those of us who refuse to believe alarmist prognostications of imminent climatic doom, or those who refuse to recognize and consider evidence that sits before their very eyes?  Again I say the latter.  They are the ones in a deep state of denial, after all.  But why?

Because (probably subconsciously) they simply cannot bring themselves to admit that they have been wrong all along…they cannot admit that they have allowed themselves to be duped.  They have been fooled by perhaps the most outrageous con job of all time, and they cannot bear to face up to that single, pitiful, ignominious truth.  They are sheep, pure and simple.

Case in point: Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post:

Stop hyperventilating, all you climate change deniers. The purloined e-mail correspondence published by skeptics last week — portraying some leading climate researchers as petty, vindictive and tremendously eager to make their data fit accepted theories — does not prove that global warming is a fraud.

If I’m wrong, somebody ought to tell the polar ice caps that they’re free to stop melting.

That said, the e-mail episode is more than a major embarrassment for the scientists involved. Most Americans are convinced that climate change is real — a necessary prerequisite for the kinds of huge economic and behavioral adjustments we would have to make to begin seriously limiting carbon emissions. But consensus on the nature and scope of the problem will dissipate, and fast, if experts try to obscure the fact that there’s much about the climate they still don’t know.

[Goes on to outline the UEACRU E-mail hacking scandal in some detail.]

It would be great if this were all a big misunderstanding. But we know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and we know the planet is hotter than it was a century ago. The skeptics might have convinced each other, but so far they haven’t gotten through to the vanishing polar ice.

Yep.  There’s that “denier” word again coming from the mouth of a denier.  It doesn’t get funnier than that.  And you’ve got to love Mr. Robinson’s flippant comment about melting polar ice caps.  This is especially humorous since researchers have shown that the volume of the polar ice caps stabilized in 2007 and has  been expanding ever since.  In his opinion piece, Mr. Robinson also declares that “climate science is fiendishly hard” to study.  Well, no kidding.  But unicorn science is fiendishly hard to study, too…BECAUSE UNICORNS DON’T EXIST ANY MORE THAN ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING DOES!

Yes, it’s problematic to study something that simply isn’t there, isn’t it?

But let’s name a few of the other dupes that got sucked into believing the AGW myth, shall we?

• Barack Obama
• Just about all of the members of the Obama administration (most notably the eco-fascist Carol Browner)
• Gordon Brown
• Tony Blair
• Angela Merkel
• Nicolas Sarkozy
• The European Union
• The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Many members of the U.S. House of Representatives
• Many members of the U.S. Senate (to include John McCain)
• ABC
• NBC (see: General Electric)
• CBS
• MSNBC (see: General Electric)
• CNN
• BBC
• PBS
• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• The Los Angeles Times
• Too many other U.S. newspapers to count
• Too many U.S. corporations to enumerate

I didn’t mention Al Gore because he’s among the “dupers,” not among the ”dupes.”  He’s just one of the dudes making hundreds of millions of dollars off of the global warming hysteria scam.

Actually, the list of dupes goes on and on and on and I don’t have time to list them all.  But the scariest dupes of all are the ones who are supposed to report the news and keep the public informed (see all of the television networks and newspapers above).  Most of the news sources listed above are being notoriously silent about the ClimateGate scandal.  This in itself is terribly insidious, given the fact that the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress seem intent on foisting a cap and tax scheme on the American people that will greatly damage businesses in the United States and increase energy costs for all.

Yet, the mainstream media, cognizant of its humiliatingly supine complicity in an apparent world-wide con scheme, remains silent.  They are worthless now.  They have been worthless.

And now we hear that President Obama, despite the revelation of the UEACRU E-mail and document disclosure, intends to attend next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen anyway, where he intends to promise that he will commit America to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time forfeiting transferring billions of American taxpayer dollars to an apparently fraudulent international carbon blackmail tax scheme.

Good luck, Mr. Obama.  We’re watching you.

The American public is watching you.

As an aside, I wonder if Mr. Obama and his family will watch “The Day After Tomorrow” on DVD this weekend.  Maybe it will help build up his courage to travel to Denmark and betray the American people.

Note

Some of the bloggers at the Telegraph have, indeed, been covering the CRU E-mail story.  Here’s Gerald Warner:

At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

Good to see a Brit taking a position on this travesty.  James Delingpole (from the same paper) has been doing superb work, too (actually, it’s been Delingbore–as some of Delingpoles’s detractors call him–who has done the yeoman’s work on this story at the Telegraph).  Well done, Sir!

Just a few minutes ago I read a blog about the 2012 Mayan prophecy about our soon coming doom, or decline if you wish to call it such. Again, people are certain we humans will stop existing, cease to be. Wether or not that’s true, it is a nice thing to think about. Because how would this affect us?

How will our end take place, in the first place? Are we going to follow our dinosaurs predecessors, and a comet will come crashing down, obliterating all life in promity, and blocking out te sun to make sure the survivors will die after all? Well, placing a little faith in science, if there were to be a comet headed towards us, we’d know. So, option A is false. Will we, a la The Day After Tomorrow or the recent 2012, have the elements turndd against us, flooding the Himalaya and other Hollywood imaginations? It’s a nice dramatic way to go, but to my liking a bit too close to human imagination. Because, well, we’re humans. We’ve done great things, invented the wheel, build religions inspired and brought to us by our God and created weapons capable of destroying millions with the ease even a 2 year old could work with. But what do we really know? Again, it’s nice we can do all these things, but what do we know? Philosophers back in the Old Greece are not much behind to where we stand now. Our comprehension hasn’t improved with our technological advance. Just our factual knowledge. So, can we know how our end will be like? We humans can’t even fully understand deities who are a part of our everyday life, so how can we know something that hasn’t even happened yet? Something we just can not grasp. So, I’m not going to try to pose you an answer.

But, if our end was imminent and rapidly approaching, what things will humanity keep doing? I believe the populas would probably be left unaware, granting millions of life a normal last time. But what if intellctuals did know? For example, I’m a theatre student, and my entire reason for studying is to leave an etch on the Stick of Life and History. To leave something behind for the many amateurs (as in lovers of) of theatre that are to come. But if I knew that in 2012 all would end? It’s 2-3 years away from now, so it’s to early to start the chaos and last pleasures. But would making art still mean anything? For who would I be making it? In other words, why would I even bother?

Is that’s all there is to life and art then? Leaving stuff behind? Then why do I even bother now? Even assuming my spirit does live on in a life beyond life, what good does it do for me to be mentioned in a course book, a lexicon or a critical reader? Should I make art for another reason? Should I live with other goals? Perhaps bothering has become overrated, and we should just live. Experience. Think. As I said, live.

Recently, some cool nerd hacked into a system mainframe and nicked a stack of e-mails from a flock of crazy warmist scientists exposing them as frauds perpetuating a dirty lie.

Amusingly, this fiasco has been dubbed as “Climategate”, I just love that suffix, but there’s nothing funny about what these unethical eggheads tried to pull off. Here’s a whole list of media sources that have covered this feral cat that’s been pulled from the bag.

Apparently, these scientists were caught trying to manipulate data, and shutting out and aggressively discrediting anyone who disagreed with them, a well-known fascist tactic employed by those who are thin-skinned and serve a pre-determined agenda for control over others by silencing opposition. Also, according the Washington Post, some even had delusions of inflicting physical harm on climate change skeptics. These boffins are madder than Mad-Eye Moody when he hasn’t taken his Polyjuice Potion – just as two-faced, too.

Naturally, this comes as a huge blow to warmist alarmists and their plans to use this fake junk science as an excuse to dominate the planet with a global government, funded by a cap and tax scam system. However, they haven’t given up on their goals, so naturally they’ll just search for some other invented ecological problem to exaggerate and whinge about, and implement it into government policy so as to rein people in and “mould the world to their heart’s desire”, as the Fabians usually like to put it.

What’s next for the globalist elite who wish to exploit our collective naiveté? United Earth presidential hopeful Al Gore will perhaps realize that his claims of global warming have been exposed as fraudulent (evidently, he already has because he’s too chicken to debate with Lord Christopher Monkton on the subject), so either he or another Madison Ave. frontman will ride the waves like an eco-messiah brat with a god-complex and assert claims of some other form of environmental extremist pseudoscience. Perhaps the next one will be that the earth is running out of oxygen and we need to stop burning things or otherwise Mother Gaia will be deeply upset and inflict revenge upon us all like in Roland Emmerich’s 2004 crapfest The Day After Tomorrow.

Not only that, everything that gets burnt will need to be taxed under a centralized global system that overrides national sovereignty, with new laws that infringe on people’s individual rights and personal freedoms, like breathing for instance. They’ll force you to pay, because bureaucrats love twisting people by the balls and pretending money is no object to anyone. That’ll teach ya, you filthy human carbon emitters. By the way, I hear even trees hate CO2 now, amazing.

Regardless of this major exposé on the corrupt side of the scientific community, which rocks the foundation of the argument that these new draconian government policies are based on, you’ll still see idiots like Kevin Rudd drumming up even more fear mongering because he’s too stubborn to accept defeat like the dogmatic extremist that he is.

Unfortunately, this news story will probably just irritate the crazy warmists who have a foothold on governments and mainstream media and it’ll just make them angrier and more dangerous. Only a small portion of the mainstream media has had the balls to pick this up, and the Crappy News Network (CNN) has decided to ignore it altogether (great journalism there, folks!), but Moonraking Drax has it covered.

Just watch out, these nuts never give up.

i’m a little late getting this review out.  but hey, i been busy.  i just now got around to seeing this film and i can honestly say it didn’t suck.  it’s way better than the day after tomorrow.  which did suck and was the last movie by director roland emmerich.  wait, i take that back.  his last movie was 10,000 BC.  which also sucked.  but anyway…

they should have named this film 20012: an apocaliptic odyssy.

this thing is not really strong in the story department, but these catastrophe films rarely are.  not enough time for any good plot when all you are doing is trying to run from the destruction of the earth.  the special effects are what this film is all about.  but you also have some very likeable actors to make this thing run along quite smoothly.

who doesn’t love john cusack?  and everyone loves danny glover.  amanda peete is great.  the chick that plays danny glover’s first daughter is super hot and reminds me of thandie newton.  oh wait, that’s because it is thandie newton.  and even though i can’t pronounce his name, chiwetel ejiofor is one of my favs.  he plays the role of the scientist.

and it is great to look at.  watching the ocean roll over the himilayas is pretty awesome.  as is all the destruction.

bottom line this is a big budget hollywood blockbuster type of disaster film.  with a special appearance by woody harrelson.  and it flows along nicely as i’ve just said.  it doesn’t seem near as long as it’s 2 hour and 45 minute run time.  just go easy on the large soda or you might miss seeing hawaii as a giant volcano.

i’m probably not going to run out and buy this when it comes out on dvd like i did star trek last week, but this is a very enjoyable movie perfect for the big screen.

three popcorn tubs out of five.

The Movie Overdose attempts to contain the apocalypse with a review of Roland Emmerich’s 2012. We chat about how we would change Eddie Murphy for the better, what kind of sequel we want for Star Trek and whether we are glad to see Sean Connery coming back, if only in voice form. Tom slightly dampens the praise given to An Education and Sam revels in the madness of Running Scared and the flawed ambition of Dogma. The conclusion involves a discussion of actors that, no matter what, we always look forward to seeing on screen.

Download The Movie Overdose Episode 42

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Solitamente i titoli e le copertine dei volumi hanno una certa attinenza, nel caso de “Il mondo senza di noi” edito da Einaudi la statua della libertà coperta dalle nevi vale più di mille parole e richiama il cinema in stile R. Hemmerich, una lunga sequela di costose catastrofi da “Indipendence day” al neonato “2012″ ma soprattutto “The day after tomorrow”che con il libro ci si aspetta abbia molta attinenza: ed è qui il problema.

Il libro di Weisman, uno dei più clamorosi successi degli ultimi anni nel settore della saggistica, promette di guidare il lettore in un futuro in cui la natura si riprende ciò ch’è suo e che le è stato espropriato senza mezzi termini da un mammifero troppo intraprendente e superficiale: l’uomo. L’idea di un mondo rinselvatichito, in cui le città, prima agglomerati rumorosi e frenetici, divengono deserti mausolei di un mondo che non c’è più, monumenti fatiscenti alla gloria di passati dominatori del mondo, ha un fortissimo fascino. Si pensi a film come “Io sono leggenda” ad esempio, in cui, soprattutto nel caso della versione Hollywodiana con Will Smith, l’ambientazione da sola vale tutta la pellicola.

Dal libro di Weisman mi aspettavo proprio questo: una minuziosa, certosina, magari anche pedante in alcuni casi, spiegazione, narrazione, della lenta riconquista a partire dall’istante zero attraverso i secoli. Un film mentale permeato solo di silenzio e rumori come il crepitio dell’asfalto che si rompe sotto l’attenzione di radici troppo curiose ed impietose per non ferirlo o il canto degli uccelli che hanno nidificato sugli scheletri dei grattacieli, oramai vuote scatole di metallo e calcestruzzo.

Il libro di Weisman però non è questo, o lo è solo in parte, difatti la narrazione, che è comunque gradevole, ballonzola tra l’ecologia e l’antropologia, in prevalenza, usando solo come intermezzo d’effetto gli scenari di un futuro derelitto, specifico per l’argomento trattato. Ad esempio se la narrazione verte sulle condizione perimetrale di alcune riserve naturali africani, in chiusura o in parallelo, Weisman sfrutta il connubio tra immaginazione e dati scientifici per ipotizzare cosa succedere in quella determinata zona se di colpo scomparisse il genere umano.

Il libro ha quindi una sua ciclicità narrativa fatta di:una determinata sequenza di fasi: introduzione alla zona geografica; impatto antropico su di essa; problematiche attuali; scenario futuro senza il fattore antropico. Questo metodo ha grosso pregio se applicato ad alcuni scenari straordinari come la fascia demilitarizzata tra le due Coree o l’area petrolchimica texana, ma perde molto quando si parla di aree meno interessanti come i bordi delle riserve naturali africane o gli atolli del pacifico.

Fantastica è la parte inerente Varosha, una sorta di Las Vegas cipriota abbonata dai greci e mai colonizzata dai turchi dopo la guerra che tutt’ora separa l’isola. La descrizione di una realtà come quella in cui un solo uomo cammina tra i grandi alberghi vuoti, in cui il manto stradale è andato lentamente coprendosi di fiori ed erbe, il tutto immerso nel silenzio era quello che mi aspettavo permeasse il volume e che solo in parte, memorabile anche il capitolo inerente l’energia nucleare che consiglierei di leggere a chi è a favore del piano energetico dell’attuale governo, con l’immancabile richiamo alla suggestiva vicenda di Chernobyl, purtroppo è stata realizzata. Molto spesso l’autore, al contrario, si abbandona a lunghe digressioni di antropo/ecologia di riconosciuto valore didattico ma che smorzano di molto l’eccitazione di chi legge. In più nel testo edito da Eiunaudi v’è un grossolano errore di traduzione: silicon in inglese è silicio e non silicone. Non si capirebbe altrimenti perché nella silicon valley si trovino moltissimi ingegneri elettronici e pochissime maggiorate.

In conclusione il libro di Weisman è decisamente interessante, scordatevi però l’idea di leggere di ipotetiche Tokyo silenziose, New York rinselvatichite e Venezie sommerse, scenari decisamente fantastici e suggestivi ma forse troppo astratti per un saggio con le aspirazioni, forse, del romanzo di fantascienza, ma che saggio è, e resta comunque.

I’m not sure exactly how many films I’ve seen in my lifetime.

It is probably over a thousand, the list below barely scratches the surface of all the films I’ve seen and it was surprisingly easy to come up with. Rather than systematically list films by era or genre I got my brother’s girlfriend Dawn to call out any films she could think of.

I thought of this idea about five minutes before I began typing and Dawn rattled off films as they came to her while I typed out brief verdicts for each one. I initially intended to create a system for rating but found it too restrictive so I just wrote a brief instinctual verdict for each one.

I have included a link to Rotten Tomatoes and the score of each film, I haven’t seen some of these movies in a very long time…

NOTE: The percentages at the end are not my scores but the percentage of positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

1. Men in Black (1997) – meh (91% – seriously?!)
2. Fight Club (1999) – brilliant (80%)
3. Unforgiven (1992) – immense (96%)
4. Shaun of the Dead (2004) – decent (gets worse every time I watch it)
5. Memento (2001) – pretty good (93%)
6. The Departed (2006) – good (92%)
7. Aliens (1986) – the best sequel ever made (100%)
8. Reservoir Dogs (1992) – great characters and dialogue (95%)
9. American Beauty (1999) – uplifting, brilliant (the stupid bag scene apart) (89%)
10. Goodfellas (1990) – excellent (96%)
11. Predator (1987) – one of Arnie’s best (76%)
12. 12 Angry Men (1957) – captivating (100%)
13. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) – meh (78%)
14. Shawshank Redemption (1994) – really, really good (88%)
15. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) – better than I expected (90%)
16. Sin City (2005) – flashy trash (78%)
17. Toy Story 2 (1999) – yep, it’s good (100%)
18. Bambi (1942) – I remember it being good (much to the amusement of Dawn and Sean, many gay jokes followed) (89%)
19. Final Destination (2000) -guff (30%)
20. Edward Scissorhands (1990) – pretentious crap (90%)
21. Stranger than Fiction (2006) – Surprisingly good (72%)
22. Shallow Grave (1995) – okay (71%)
23. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1996) – facepalm (49%)
24. Man on Fire (2004) – underwhelming (39%)
25. Ocean’s Eleven (2001) – meh (81%)
26. 28 Days Later (2003) – meh (88%)
27. Casino Royale (2006) – surprisingly really good (94%)
28. Psycho (1960) – I was expecting it to be better (98%)
29. The Flintstones (1994) – Jesus wept (18%)
30. Aladdin (1992) – good (92%)
31. Jackass: The Movie (2002) – hard to class as a film really, hit and miss(48%)
32. E.T (1982) – good (98%)
33. Independence Day (1996) – a glorified B movie (61%)
34. Titanic (1997)  – Good (81%)
35. Ring (2002) – fairly decent (71%)
36. Pulp Fiction (1994) – Tarantino’s best film by a long way (97%)
37. Hot Fuzz (2007) – fun (90%)
38. Monty Python: Holy Grail (1975) – classic (94%)
39. Good Will Hunting (1997) – good (97%)
40. Heat (1995) – pretty good, not great (89%)
41. Zodiac (2007) – boring (87%)
42. Little Mermaid (1989) – decent (90%)
43. Ghost (1987) – crap (80%)
44. Dirty Dancing (1987) – utter shit – that women like this film makes me wonder if they actually deserve equal rights (67%)
45. The Terminator (1984) – the best Terminator (100%)
46. Bean (1998) – a test of mental endurance, awful (41%)
47. The Mask (1994) – rubbish (76%)
48. Frailty (2002) – ridiculous (74%)
49. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) – shite
50. Donnie Darko (2001) – overrated pish (84%)
51. Apollo 13 (1995)– crap (96%)
52. Deep Impact (1998)– more crap (46%)
53. Volcano (1997) – even more crap (40%)
54. I know what you did last summer (1997)– yet more crap (36%)
55. The Matrix (1999) – first half decent rest shite (86%)
56. Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (2002)– boring (96%)
57. Addams Family Values (1994) – some good moments (74%)
58. Nightmare before Christmas (1993) – overrated, largely guff (97%)
59. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) – (see earlier blog) (75%)
60. Three Men and a Baby (1987) – sickening  (78%)
61. Transformers: The Movie (1986) – decent (haven’t seen it in 10 years) (50%)
62. Cruel Intentions (1999) – trash (47%)
63. Lock Stock and Two Smoking barrels (1998) – good if a little overrated (71%)
64. Clerks II (2006) – absolutely fucking diabolical (62%, seriously what the fuck?)
65. Baby’s Day Out (1994) – horrific (23%)
66. Home Alone 2 (1992) – decent (17% – that seems harsh!)
67. Liar Liar (1997) – pretty bad (84%)
68. Babe (1995) – Jesus wept (98%)
69. The Simpsons Movie (2007) – unfunny crap from a show that is a pale shadow of what it used to be (90%)
70. Mr Nanny (1993) – a holocaust of a film (7%)
71. The Thing (1980) – really tense, really good (80%)
72. Blair Witch Project (1999) – doing something different doesn’t make it good (85%)
73. Run Lola Run (1999) – see above (92%)
74. The Santa Clause (1994) – crap (Dawn: “What’s the film with Tim Allen dressed as Santa Claus?”) (79%)
75. Silence of the Lambs (1990) – they really should have just stopped at this one, a fine film (96%)
76. Matilda (1996) – another crap Dahl adaptation (89%)
77. A Bridge too Far (1977) – the quintessential war movie (67%)
78. Rocky V (1990) – laughable (21%)
79. The Sting (1973) – really good (91%)
80. The Sword in the Stone (1963) – good (73%)
81. The Witches (1990) – crap (100%, what the fuck?)
82. Starship Troopers (1997) – entertaining trash (60%)
83. Love Actually(2003)  – hated it (63%)
84. White men can’t jump (1992) – I liked it despite itself (78%)
85. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1999)– a pointless sequel (48%)
86. A Bug’s Life (1998) – meh (91%)
87. Hollow man (2000)– hollow is an appropriate adjective (but I like Bacon’s character) (27%)
88. Jaws (1975) – good but overrated (100%)
89. Jerry Maguire (1996)– oh Christ (84%)
90. Dawn of the Dead (1978)– awesome (95%)
91. Drop Dead Fred (1991)– mindless crap (still haunted by my little sister’s repeat viewing of this monstrosity) (9%)
92. Braveheart (1995) – good (it’s a movie, not a history lesson) (76%)
93. Saw II (2005) – crap (35%)
94. Mouse Hunt (1997)– hated it (really wanted the mouse to die) (44%)
95. The Mummy (1999)– didn’t like it (54%)
96. George of the Jungle (1997)– crap (53%)
97. Leon (1994) – ludicrous garbage (74%)
98. Death becomes her (1993)– had its moments (56%)
99. Meet Joe Black (1998) – meh (49%)
100. Dog Soldiers (2002) – entertaining (79%)
101. Cool Hand Luke (1967) – the best film ever (100%)

You’ve never seen destruction like this. Roland Emmerich apparently decided in reading about the Mayan calendar doomsday conspiracies that his previous armageddon films, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, were far too subtle. This is the type of film where the scope of the effects work and the imagination behind the mayhem glue you to your seat. The beauty behind 2012 is that it takes disaster movie elements and cranks them up to the nth degree. Seen tsunamis bury skyscrapers? Here they bury mountain ranges. Seen volcanoes rain lava and ash on our heroes? Here a super-volcano sends off an atom bomb of lava and makes ash rain thousands of miles away. Seen buildings destroyed? Here you have entire continents destroyed. Emmerich gives us perhaps the most impressive effects sequence of the year… and then tops it… and then tops it again. This is the daddy of all disaster films, and easily the pinnacle of Emmerich’s career to date.

In 2009, massive solar flares alert a select number of scientists, including Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), that the Earth’s core is rapidly heating up as a result. Dr. Helmsley reports this to Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt), who sets in motion a plan to save humanity– we see the Mona Lisa replaced by a forgery, so the original can be carefully stored, and we see plans for a secretive dam being built in China that we suspect is not a dam at all. Flash forward to 2012, where one-time author/current limo driver Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) is late picking up his kids (Morgan Lily and Liam James) for a camping trip to Yellowstone. His ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and her new boyfriend Gordon (Tom McCarthy) eye him with scorn before they depart. While in Yellowstone, Curtis sees dried-up lakes and new government testing facilities. He also meets a conspiracy-filled radio host, Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), who tell Curtis the end of the world is coming due to the Earth’s crust being displaced, which will set off massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and super-volcanoes. He also claims to have a map to the place where the government is building ships to save those rich enough to buy a ticket for survival.

Now don’t get me wrong– this is not a “good” movie. The characters are all very familiar, the speeches we’ve heard a hundred times, and the Russians are the fat bulbous detestable cliches that we’ve seen since the Cold War. I don’t mean for this review to convert those who know that they hate disaster movies. I’m not saying this is the disaster movies that will sway you on the ability of disaster movies to entertain. However, if you find enjoyment in the specific entertainment value that disaster movies provide (which I do), then get ready for two and a half hours of bliss. The special effects are among the best of the year– unlike Michael Bay, Emmerich gets off on the long shot, where instead of editing an action sequence to pieces, he lets the shot be packed with special effects without cutting, totally absorbing you into the suspense. The limo racing away from the splitting crust as the freeway crumbles, raining cars into the family’s path, is as intense and joyous a silly action sequence as I’ve seen since Live Free or Die Hard– in fact, it’s better than that. This is the moment where you either buy the movie in its entirety or check out early.

Emmerich also picked some terrific character actors to lead the way. Cusack brings his particular brand of barely likable schmo charm to Jackson– he’s believable as both a jaded writer and impatient limo driver. Chiwetel Ojiefor is one of the best young actors in Hollywood, and while he doesn’t have anything in terms of character (he’s the noble government worker who believes in humanity over the power of the almighty dollar), he delivers his speeches passionately and earnestly. Oliver Platt is a national treasure when it comes to playing smarmy villains; he fully embraces everything ugly about his chief of staff, yet manages to give him shades of dimension in between the dialogue. Danny Glover mostly sits and looks grim, but his mere presence provides some dignity to the proceedings. Amanda Peet is fairly worthless as Cusack’s ex-wife– far better is Tom McCarthy, as the nice guy boyfriend who Jackson’s kids like but who we know from past film experiences will be very very lucky if he survives. He manages to toe the line between the obnoxious new love interest stereotype and the harmless better-option new love interest stereotype… unlike in other films, where you can’t wait for that character to die, I rooted for his survival. Finally, there’s Woody Harrelson as the conspiratorial radio host, who joyously chews the scenery. Every disaster movie needs a shameless ham, and Harrelson not only embraces the ham, he bathes in it.

Why was this movie not released in IMAX? It’s easily the “biggest” movie in recent memory. Shockingly, it’s all based on a real theory– when Harrelson spouts off about Hapgood’s crust displacement theory, and that Einstein believed it was true, he’s not lying. Now, the movie loses steam in the last half-hour… the chaos has mostly ended, and the action moves inside the ships, and the sheer epic nature of the film hits a roadbump. However, when they look outside, and see an ocean covering the Himalayas, where only Mount Everest and K2 are large enough to peek out as islands, we get the full vision of how BIG a scale Emmerich wanted to operate on. This isn’t a film where you feel the effort to entertain– this is a labor of love for Emmerich, filling every corner of the film with every disaster movie cliche that he truly and earnestly loves. I love them too, and even with its flaws, I loved this movie. And yes, just as in every other Emmerich film, the cute little dog survives.

Ce-am învăţat din filmu’ ăsta:

1. Abia în 2012 or să ajungă americanii să aibă drumuri ca ale noastre. Consider totuşi că au cam exagerat metafora cu gropile din asfalt.
2. John Cusack seamănă cu Meme Stoica când îi ud fleşcă. Cusack ud fleaşcă. Meme tre’ să fie doar… Meme.
3. Barrack Obama îmbătrâneşte foarte mult în 2 ani.
4. V8-urile sună demenţial! Acoperă chiar sunetul unor coşmelii de 40 de etaje ce se dărâmă.
5. John F. Kennedy se întoarce la Casa Albă. Ofcors, în 2012. Stay tuned.
6. Leonardo di Caprio ştie să se “ducă la fund” mai dramatic decât Blu Mankuma.

Concluzia: 2012 o luat The day after tomorrow-ul, Independence Day-ul, Deep Impact-ul şi Titanic-ul şi le-o băgat în buzunarul din spate de la blugi, după care o băgat blugii la spălat. Ce să mai? Douămiidoişpe e “Chuck Norris”-ul filmelor cu dezastre. Parol.

Concluzia concluziei: Pfai, cât mi-o plăcut!

- 2012 – 2009 – ♥♥♥ e 1\2 -

di

Roland Emmerich

Il film nuovo di Emmerich, il regista tedesco naturalizzato in America che ha trovato il successo con film della portata di Independence Day e L’alba del giorno dopo, promette come dice lo stesso autore che dopo questa fatica apocalittica sarà impossibile fare di meglio nel genere catastrofico. Il motivo si intuisce immediatamente in quanto il film è venuto a costare 260 milioni di dollari e molti di quei soldi sono stati spesi nella produzione degli infiniti effetti speciali di 2012. La storia, tanto per mettere in chiaro, parte da una serie di premesse scientificamente infondate quali irradiazioni solari capaci di innescare nella Terra un istinto tellurico così potente da far crollare tutto ciò che l’uomo vi ha costruito sopra, dunque città, monumenti, simboli di potere e i loro rispettivi regni. I governi però, in vista di qualcosa che si sperava non accadesse, hanno dato anni addietro l’OK all’idea di un consorzio globale segreto per costruire in Tibet delle navi gigantesche che offriranno alla popolazione mondiale che “vale” un salvataggio sicuro (ma poi vedremo che niente è sicuro) in caso di diluvio universale, cosa che accadrà a causa di giganteschi tsunami. Il tutto è raccontato dal punto di vista della famiglia di Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), scrittore di un romanzo di fantascienza politica venduto in pochissime copie, disgregata, separata fisicamente anche dalla terra che trema sotto i loro piedi mentre tentano la fuga. Scappano dal pericolo e dalla morte, come è negli ingranaggi canonici del genere, svariate volte e trovano il tempo, insieme ad altri personaggi secondari come quello di Danny Glover che interpreta il presidente nero Wilson (evidente richiamo ad Obama, anche se più vecchio), di scegliere di morire da eroi oppure di affondare letteralmente insieme alla propria metaforica nave che è il proprio governo… Vedere anche la terribile ma anche appagante scena del crollo del Vaticano mentre il premier italiano insieme ai fedeli della Chiesa pregano invano un Dio che evidentemente li ignora o semplicemente non esiste. I ritmi di 2012, stimando le dovute pause, sono inverosimilmente travolgenti e da tachicardia. Le distruzioni infernali e imponenti, l’azione da mozzare il fiato. Tutti elementi da film che sbanca di certo al botteghino ci sono e anche amalgamati con ammirevole bravura – al di là degli incassi già enormi, il film quasi più da noi e nel resto dell’Europa che in America sta letteralmente creando scene di ressa e situazioni di insufficienza di posto nelle sale -, ma c’è al di là di questo trionfo spettacolarizzante che fa parte delle origini del cinema una qualche sostanza e poesia? Se in The Day After Tomorrow la catastrofe era il maltempo e la glaciazione e gli attori e i personaggi avevano più tempo per essere approfonditi ed emergere e aprire i loro cuori magari anche al più freddo degli spettatori, in 2012 se si prova a vedere con occhio diverso tutto l’atto finale che fra le tante cita alla stragrande Titanic, troviamo il pensiero che è stato capace di rendere tutto questo assurdo incubo una qualcosa di filosoficamente valido. Quando una civiltà si appoggia su dei principi insozzati alla base dai soldi, dal potere e dalla cecità che questi portano, allora tanto vale fare tabula rasa, e a ciò non ci pensano certo i Maya (che semplicemente nel 2012 segnavano la fine del calendario detto Lungo computo) o altre divinità o alieni… Ci pensa la natura che è cattiva e che, ironia della sorte, alla fine, con la inquadratura finale, mostra i continenti riunitisi come erano originariamente in era primitiva nella cosiddetta Pangea e offre agli uomini una possibilità che probabilmente – ma questa è un’altra storia che rimane da immaginarsi o forse realizzare in una serie alla Lost?, così vociferano – sapranno giocarsi malamente come è semplicemente loro natura. Come dice il personaggio del folle Charlie Frost – interpretato da un geniale e comico Woody Harrelson – Emmerich sa farci divertire e allo stesso tempo ci dà da pensare.

(La scena comica in cui Charlie il pazzo profeta Woody Harrelson 

illustra le sue idee sull'apocalisse alquanto confuse)

(La scena in cui l'oceano nella sua devastazione trascina con sè il cargo 

aereomilitare John F. Kennedy che schiaccia provvidenzialmente la Casa Bianca)

2012 is one of the blockbuster movies of the year which you must watch! Raking in the most money one the first week since it open which surprising not anticipated by anyone or any other directors.  The 3 hours long movie is interested and full of actions and rarely has much space for filming errors.

Director Roland Emmerich who is famous for his world catastrophe movies (Independence Day & The Day After Tomorrow) is back with a new exciting idea full with actions with the clock ticking down on dooms day. His latest movie 2012 begins in the year 2009 when an American scientist, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) travels to India to meet his friend Satnam (Jimi Mistry) who informed and showed him that the Earth’s core temperature is rapidly increasing at an alarming rate.

Adrian immediately flew back to Washington DC an interrupted a high profile charity function to informed Chief of Staff – Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) on the situation. Adrian immediately got promoted and they went to see the President of USA, Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover) of the situation.

The movie then fast forward to the year 2012. During the 36^th G8 Summit meeting, the President informed the leaders of the summit of the situation and their preparation for the world ending. Billionaires are allowed a seat on the ark by paying a billion Euros for a seat to fund the project.

Meanwhile in another scene (yes, there is 2 scenes), Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who is a writer who sold 400+ copies of his book and also a divorced father of 2 children; promised to bring his children for a camping trip at the Yellowstone National Park. His ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and their children Noah who hated his father (Liam James) and Lily who loves his father (Morgan Lily) is currently staying with their mother’s new boyfriend, Gordon (Thomas McCarthy) whose profession is a plastic surgeon. Jackson picked up his children and headed to Yellowstone.

Upon arrival, he found out that the previous spot he used camp with his wife while dating last time is now a restricted area. They climb over the fence and went to the lake anyway but were being surrounded by the Government military forces shortly. They were asked to leave the area as they are investigating the area (the lake dried up) and Jackson found something amiss. Upon leaving, he was being halted by Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) who is a radio show host who is kind of bonkers in a way explained to Jackson that the Mayan’s prediction of world ending is coming true.

The apocalypse begins! (I’m not elaborating in full details much as it will be hard to do so and it will spoil your fun watching the movie) From here on, the world is being hit by various disasters and the Earth’s coordinates has shifted (or spun) making the North Pole becoming South Pole. Earthquake, tsunami and volcano eruption taking place at various countries killing millions of people around the world.

The movie also shows all kind of human’s attitude ranging from humanitarian to those who are selfish and hungry for power. It also show a chaotic situation when the news broke out and everyone is trying to save themselves from the disaster. It’s quite touching and it shows the reality of the situation if it really would have taken place in real life.

Towards the end, a minority of humans manage to life on. They now reside at a new world in Africa and they are now heading to Good Hope as it now became the highest continent in the world. Anyway, the world now basically only has Africa as all the other parts of the world are being swallowed by the sea (no more 7 seas).

I highly recommend this movie but do not watch the midnight show as it is 3 hours long. I came out of the cinema at 4 a.m. =.= It’s exciting and the storyline is interesting as all sorts of factors are taken into consideration. Rich buying their seats, human with caliber are given a seat, animal are begin taken into consideration, loves affair, hunger for power, wrong judgment, humanitarian values and etc … I personally believe that this will happen someday in real life. Whether or not some one discovers it and even if they do, will we be informed? The world will be in chaos if let known but if they keep quiet about it, who will be saved?

We were warned! The world is coming to an end!

selamat pagi. selamat pagi.

sepertinya saya harus memanfaatkan booming film 2012 nih. mumpung masih hangat

tulisan kali ini sedikit tidak fokus dan gado-gado. harap maklum, dan selamat menikmati

[ 1 ]
jadi begini ceritanya, saya teringat sekitar lebih dari 1 tahun yang lalu, saya dapat SMS dari saudara saya. waktu itu dia sedang ada di toko buku, isi SMS itu begini: “wah. ada buku yang bilang kiamat tahun 2012″.

lalu saya balas SMS itu dengan kata-kata: “wah. begitu ya. semoga sebelum kiamat ceritanya One Piece udah tamat”

One Piece adalah komik Jepang favorit saya. hingga saat ini ceritanya masih berjalan secara mingguan. dan akan sangat nggak asyik kalau lagi enak-enaknya mengikuti alur cerita One Piece, eh kiamat datang. nanggung banget kan ??

[ 2 ]
kembali ke masalah film 2012 yang sukses besar sebagai box office.

saya barusan baca di vivanews, sepertinya orang orang Hollywood memang penuh dengan siasat dan taktis yang cerdik. isu diedarkan, film dibuat, uang didapat. briliant.

masih ingat kan ?? saat berita “global warming” beredar menggemparkan. muncullah film “the day after tomorrow”, yang kisahnya kutub utara mencair dan patung liberty jadi kelelep air. film itu pun juga sukses jadi boxoffice.

film 2012 ini pun juga serupa dengan film patung liberty kelelep itu. sukses besar. pertanda kalau orang-orang pada suka melihat dunia berpesta porak poranda. haha.

[ 3 ]
saya nggak begitu peduli dengan ramalan bangsa maya itu. mending ngelihatin fotonya Luna Maya. mending baca One Piece yang total dalam berimajinasi. lebih mantab.

sebagai penutup..
saya mungkin bukan orang yang taat beragama, tapi saya berpendapat bahwa: nggak asyik kalau KIAMAT itu udah bocor jadwalnya. bukan KEJUTAN lagi namanya.

[ mungkin anda punya tanggapan ]

Well… I mean… This is a really stupid movie.

As Printed in The Lumberjack on Nov. 19, 2009

by Gary Sundt

Director Roland Emmerich’s latest end-of-days blockbuster, 2012, is the very definition of huge. The film has a colossal $260 million budget, which was spent on special effects pieces that are dumbfounding in their enormity. The cast is huge, not only in size, but in caliber of actor (John Cusack is no slouch). The film’s length is no less than two hours and 38 minutes, which follows the recent trend of filmmakers who specialize in the stupid bringing us said idiocy at longer lengths than ever before (see Michael Bay’s Transformers 2 for an example of this).

The only thing not large about 2012 is the movie’s apparent numerical IQ, which is somewhere in the vicinity of borderline retardation. But for a movie based on something as silly as the 2012 conspiracy, it sure could have been worse. Emmerich is the man behind the good Independence Day, the bad Godzilla, the stupid The Day After Tomorrow, and the really, really stupid 10,000 BC. When it comes to destroying the world, this is the guy audiences flock to for the goods.

2012 is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. The film features a good preliminary 30 minutes of what movies and comic books refer to as “junk science,” which is the medium’s attempt to convince the viewer/reader that any of this is possible using fake technical explanations. But soon the time for talk is over, and the CGI kicks into the highest gear I’ve seen since, well, forever.

The plot is quite simply that the popular conspiracy (in which the world is most certainly coming to an end in December of the year 2012) ends up panning out, and God works his ways to kill humanity really good. The movie follows a few individuals that fight to survive the rather realistic earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, clouds of volcanic ash, tsunamis, tidal waves, and the like, and among those people are struggling author Jackson Curtis (Cusack) and his estranged family.

We know the film’s clichés all too well, and the script by Emmerich and Harald Kloser ticks through them like a checklist. We have the beleaguered scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who saw all this coming and tried to warn everybody; the President of the United States (Danny Glover), who ponders dramatically over the situation because he is, after all, the only world leader who can do anything about this; the conspiracy nut who turned out to be right (Woody Harrelson); the divorced husband and wife (Cusack and Amanda Peet) who have to struggle to protect their children in all this disaster; the government tool who can’t help himself but to be a complete asshole (Oliver Platt).

If you know these actors well enough, you can admire what Emmerich has tried to do here. In the same vein as his better disaster pictures, he has enlisted several talented individuals in the roles of his cookie-cutter characters, which helps pass the long running time when most of the dialogue is something to the effect of “Oh God!” or “Look Out!”

The tagline for 2012 reads, “We were warned.” Allow me to warn you, the potential viewer. Know that 2012 is as big and as stupid as they come. Know that it is overly long and will grate on your nerves after a while. Know that it is tailor made to hit every emotional button while it inundates you with CGI and clichéd moments of human triumph.

But damn if it isn’t kind of fun to watch.

Weekend-ul asta am ajuns prin Bucuresti (am sa va povestesc intr-un post viitor ce am mai facut p’acolo) si cum vremea nu a fost tocmai excelenta pentru plimbari prin parc, am zis sa mergem la film. Dupa o scurta discutie preliminara am ales 2012 - cel mai asteptat film al anului asta.

Toate “indiciile” ma trimeteau la ideea ca va fi un film bun, sau cel putin peste medie, iar eu, ca mare cinefil, mi-am zis ca merita sa dau banii pe biletul de cinematograf. Un film sub regia lui Roland Emmerich ce este “parintele” unor “succesuri” rasunatoare precum:

• 10.000 B.C.
• The Day After Tomorrow
• The Patriot
• Godzilla
• Independence Day

nu avea cum sa fie unul chiar prost.

Ca fapt divers, eu ma ghidez dupa o clasificare foarte simpla: exista 2 tipuri de filme: BUNE si PROASTE. Alea bune sunt si ele de doua mari tipuri: bune de vazut in cinema si bune de vazut acasa. Stiu ca pare cam drastica si rigida impartirea asta dar simplifica cu mult situatia.

Ei bine… chiar a meritat, este un film bun. Nu exceleaza prin profunzimea scenariului si nici prin complexitatea personajelor (John Cusack interpreteaza un rol chiar facil/usor in comparatie cu talentul sau actoricesc – lipsa de complexitate ce se vede si in conturarea celorlalte personaje) – prin urmare nu o sa vedem vreun Oscar pentru cel mai bun actor intr-un rol principal, cum nu o sa-l vedem nici pentru cel mai bun scenariu; in schimb, mai mult ca sigur, il vom vedea nominalizat pentru filmul cu cele mai bune efecte speciale.

Desi plin de mici “erori” si cu un story-line destul de superficial, 2012 este un block-buster (no doubt about it). Efectele speciale sunt de domeniul fantasticului si te tin cu ochii lipiti de ecran pentru mai mult de 2 h. Filmul abuzeaza de “scapari la limita” si de scene supra-realiste (totul se duce de rapa numai personajele  principale scapa de fiecare data), ii lipseste realismul si “neasteptatul“, dar compenseaza din plin prin monumentalitatea scenelor apocaliptice. De la Titanic incoace dramatismul nu a fost in acest mod exprimat.

Filmul este o Apocalipsa continua ce se plaseaza in momentul 21.12.2012. Desi cu final predictibil, desi liniar, desi lipsit de realism ori de interpretari magistrale, 2012 este un film excelent ce merita vazut pe marile ecrane. In plus exista o doza de umor Hollywoodian ce prasara intreg filmul, facand din el un S.F. “monumentalo-apocaliptic” dar comic (way above average pentru acest stil de film – undeva aproape de Independence Day, poate chiar mai bun).

Acum partea mai dificila, notarea:

Stil: S.F.  apocaliptic cu nuante comice

Scenariu & story: catelus

Interpretare: gaina de curte

Efecte speciale: Zeu

TOTAL: 6,5 / 10

Va adaug si trailerul cu recomandarea sa-l vedeti totusi in cinematografe (in digital daca va tine portmoneul):

For some unknown reasons, I had this adrenalin rush over the weekends for couching out on movies that I watched like, six of them! Goshz, I couldn’t believe it myself man!

So, in no particular order of merit or whatsoever, here are they!

1. Wanted (2008)
2. Paranormal Activity (2009)
3. Surrogates (2009)
4. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
5. Wall-E (2008)
6. I Love You, Man (2009)

Pretty recent movies, except The Day After Tomorrow, which I thought I’d like to watch again. And if you ask me, I probably would give a big thumb-up to Wanted and I Love You, Man. A bit of a disappointment for both Wall-E and Paranormal Activity though, and I’m glad I didn’t waste my time at the theater for them. Hahaha…! =P

Wanted, starring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman & Angelina Jolie

I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel & Rashida Jones

Efter mänsklighetens mångåriga exploatering av jordens tillgångar börjar här moder jord slå tillbaka. Den globala uppvärmningen leder till tornados, flodvågor, översvämningar och superstormar med extremt kyla som leder till skapandet av en ny istid. Vi får i filmen följa en forskare (Dennis Quaid) vars utskrattade teori blir verklighet, men inte ens han hade kunnat förespå förloppets hastighet. Samtidigt som norra delen av jordens befolkning fryser ihjäl befinner sig hans son (Jake Gyllenhaal) i New York tillsammans med några kamrater. Isolerade på biblioteket gör de sitt bästa för att hålla sig varma och försöker hålla sig vid liv till räddningen förhoppningsvis når fram.

Roland Emmerich är inte känd för att spara på krutet i sina filmer och här har effektmakarna fått jobba hårt för att iscensätta diverse katastrofer. Det är onekligen snyggt gjort även om det idag kommer så mycket liknande scener att man blir snudd på blasé. Handlingen är inte direkt trovärdig och definitivt inte de strapatser huvudrollskaraktärerna företar sig och lyckas överleva. Här handlar det främst om att göra en blockbuster och där använder man miljön som medel, snarare än att man försöker upplysa och utbilda. Det är häftig action och helt klart en underhållande storfilm, men samtidigt störs jag på att medan halva jordens befolkning dör väljer man att ensidigt fokusera på endast en handfull amerikaner.

Betyg: 3

2012 is an action/disaster film which is based on the 2012 phenomenon. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich (10,000 BC, the day after tomorrow, the Patriot). The film has a cast which includes John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt and Woody Harrelson.

John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a science fiction book writer who also works as a limousine driver. The film is very impressive in terms of its special effects- there are lots of long disaster scenes including meteors, tidal waves and earthquakes. The film has a very similar plot to that of the story of Noah’s Ark.

Although the film was visually brilliant it was slightly to long- around 2 and a half hours long. Some parts of the film felt very generic and predictable.Also at points the action becomes a bit ridiculous and becomes unbelievable.

Overall apart from being too long i did enjoy it and it’s definitely worth going to see if you like disaster films such as The Day After Tomorrow and the effects are visually amazing.

Film Rating: 7/10

It’s not that I’m an idiot (although, in the spirit of full disclosure, I sometimes am), it’s that I’m sometimes clueless. Or, forgetful. Or, mentally misplaced. You see, there’s a lot of shit floating around in my cranium. Some numbers, some interesting data, some bullshit ephemera about what episode of what season in what obscure TV show a character walked down the wrong hallway to go to the bathroom, tons of music, a few memorized beautiful things I’ve seen in my days, some horrors I’ve always memorized, and a collection of all the breasts I’ve come across and been mesmerized. Yeah, there’s a pun there. A bad one, at that.

This morning, I woke up and smiled that kind of smile that only happens on a day off. I got up, stretched, did the various things I do when I wake up alone, the scratching of places and releasing of certain human fluids, then went to the internet and began absorbing facts. A typical day. There’s “significant amounts” of water on the mother fucking moon!

from here.

And I was reading some stuff about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I knew I was a few days late to, but it’s still fascinating, right?

I even put on some music as I did this. Made myself a little playlist in my music player and put it on random/shuffle, and you know what song came on several times? My favorite song by the Cure, that’s what. This one:

That’s “The 13th,” and I just adore it. Not the video so much, but the song, definitely.

There was a commercial on TV for a Friday The 13th marathon. And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Thought about 2012, the batshit crazy stupid but fun looking Roland Emmerich movie that came on today that I’ll probably see tomorrow with Conrad Noir, who tells me he’s not all that interested because he was let down by The Day After Tomorrow. Well, no shit you were let down by The Day After Tomorrow, right? Anyway, that’s most likely on tomorrow’s agenda.

Long story short, it took me until like noon or later to actually fucking realize that it was Friday the 13th. I probably shouldn’t be bragging about that.

It happened at some local coffee shop that I went to, and, well, it was embarassing, but interesting. I live in a small town, the kind where it’s hard to not get to know everyone and their quaint little stories. And all the Southern gothic ghost stories that goes along with it. So I do my best to avoid people as best I can, but today I felt like getting out of the domecile for a bit and going for a run and experimenting with various Pandora stations on my smart brilliant phone.

The search for the perfect Pandora station is man’s constant crawl towards enlightenment, nirvana, and the fingerbanging of God. The pleasure is in the quest, not the capturing because the goal is unreachable, but we still try. That’s the beauty of the humans, or something. Regardless, I’ve been bouncing back and forth, trying to find a good station while running/walking, and I took a chance on an 80s station.

Not bad, but you know what? As great as they can be, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood and “The Safety Dance” just felt a little too gay for this job. I needed something less festive, so I figured I’d shift a decade forward and did a search for an appropriate 90s station. Came up mostly zero, no joke, except for a fascinating station that played 80s music stars trying to make a comeback in the 90s:

Okay, that’s the lovely Bryan Adams song from the Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves soundtrack, which is fantastic all on it’s own (except when it’s used for a Dawson’s Creek fanvid, sorry), but in actuality, the first song that came on that station was Adams’ “Run To You,” which isn’t bad. And following that was some Tom Petty, which is always good in my book, and some Bon Jovi, which is atrocious (though old Bon Jobi works appropiately in some bar settings, I’m loathe to admit), and a whole fucking lot of Guns N’ Roses. It was weird, but I guess it did the trick, workout-wise.

Then I got to the coffee shop, got something to eat, something to drink, and meant to hide myself in the corner with some headphones and devour my meal and some more internet on my phone. Also with me were some printouts of various things I needed to revise and a copy of Warren Ellis’ new POD book, Shivering Sands, which had just come in the mail today. I feel like I’ve read most of it previously (it’s a collection of various writings of his from the internet of the past few years), but still, I was excited.

But as it sometimes can be when interesting people are in the vicinity, and frightfully true when there’s less than interesting people buzzing around you, I got sucked into some conversation. Found out it was 13th day of the month coinciding with the fact that it was also a Friday. Also absorbed some recent gossip. And, because of the recent anniversary, got involved with a conversation about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

You see, the conversation got even more interesting when it turned out that one of the women there was German, a former resident of East Berlin, who had been 18 when the wall came down, and moved to America shortly after. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with Germans in the past (and no, I’m not referring to World War II, though that was no picnic either, ha ha!), but every once in a while, I have a good experience with their women.

The woman and I talked for some time about the Berlin Wall, and primarily what it was like for her growing up in East Berlin. Essentially, it was bleak, but fascinating. And we had one of those conversations that always pop where she mentions that she was feeling uneasy today because she had left her cell phone at home and she just feels like she’s naked and out of touch, but growing up poor in Germany, they didn’t even have a phone in their house til she was 16. “How did we live in that ancient, strange world?” she asked with a laugh.

She had just seen The Lives Of Others a few weeks ago, she told me, and we talked about the movie, which is really quite good if you haven’t seen it yet, and about the Stasi in general. She told me that the movie scares her because back then, when she was growing up, you just always knew you were being watched, being monitored. You always suspected who was a Stasi man, but you never really knew for sure. And it didn’t hit you until later that it wasn’t so much agents of the Stasi you had to worry about, but those around you because everyone was informing on each other to get ahead.

Could’ve been worse. He could’ve thrown up in her lap.

From there we went into little aspects of German history, talking about “The Iron Chancellor” and how the Prussians united the country a hundred years before the Wall fell, and we even talked a little about Merkel, or “Angie,” as she called her, and told me what a fan she is, being that they’re both East German girls. She told me how it was so weird for her to come to America in her twenties and get a more full view of her own little world up til then and to compare it to growing up in communist Germany, where history was repainted with a propaganda slant. She mentioned that as a teen they were never allowed to refer to the Wall as just “the Wall,” it was always as the “tool for anti-fascist defense” or something like that.

She told me how when she was in school, it was a mandatory field trip for the kids to be taken to the concentration camps and shown all the gross details, the rooms with human remains permanently staining the walls, with the empty shoes of little babies that were turned to dust, the lampshades made out of flayed skin featuring Jewish tattoos. She told me how the physical evidence of the darkest corners of history would never leave her mind and part of her was glad that she was forced to see that shameful part of her country’s past, but that it’s something she knows kids don’t go to see anymore.

I don’t want to use the word “fascinating” again in this post, but that’s what it was. A fascinating conversation, and a fantastic one, informative and insightful. I thanked her for her time and being so patient with my curiousity, and of course for letting me know that it was actually Friday the 13th. Then I left, since I had been there for quite some time and it was starting to look like it might rain. I wasn’t interesting in listening to sad old men with hair plugs crooning bar anthems into my ear, so I just walked in silence, my head heavy with thoughts about everything we discussed.

“Komm rüber!” Hans Conrad Schumann defects, from here.

It did start raining before I got back to my front door, of course, but my mind was elsewhere and I didn’t actually realize it until I was pulling my key out to let myself back in and realized I was shivering there as the water dripped off of me.

And how did you spend your Friday the 13th?

Viernes 13 del 2009.- Siglos atrás, los Mayas nos dejaron su calendario con una clara fecha de terminación y todo lo que ésta implica.  Desde entonces, los astrólogos han descubierto esto e incluso los científicos gubernamentales no pueden negar que un cataclismo de proporciones épicas espera a la Tierra en 2012.  Una profecía que se inició con los Mayas ahora ha sido bien documentada, analizada, separada y examinada.  Para 2012, sabremos que fuimos advertidos.

Todo esto lo podrás ver en 2012, a partir de hoy viernes 13 (será casualidad??), donde Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) descubre justo a tiempo que el mundo tal como lo conocemos está por cambiar; ya que habrá un desplazamiento de corteza terrestre, dejando todo bajo agua!!!!

Comentarios PINK: Lo bueno de la pelí es que muestra una realidad no tan lejana a la que estamos viviendo, además de manejar un tono sarcástico que entra en el momento oportuno. Lo malo es que, al haber ya tantas pelís del fin del mundo, puede caer en una más.

The ancient Mayan calender, with its supposed prediction of a December 21, 2012 apocalypse, has long fascinated assorted fringe scholars, doomsday fetishists and George Noory acolytes. In 2012, the audacious new disaster epic from director Roland Emmerich (10,000 B.C., The Day After Tomorrow), it provides the inspiration for a $250 million orgy of destruction, the likes of which has never been seen on the big screen.

Give the Mayans credit: their chosen method for the planet’s demise in 2012 is anything if not imaginative. The earth’s core, we’re told, is being heated to the point of instability by mutant neutrinos emitted by an increasingly malevolent sun. (The Mayans, a civilization that had little use for the wheel, having apparently identified the subatomic particle several millennia prior to the advent of quantum physics.) The initial signs of this phenomenon — sudden fissures on Earth’s surface triggered by ruptures in its crust — are casually dismissed as harmless earthquakes by government officials.

Ahh, but they know better. In fact, the President (portrayed without a hint of irony by Danny Glover) and his advisers became hip to this neutrino business years ago, but chose not to inform the public for fear of the panic that might ensue. What they fail to realize, despite the pleadings of the film’s requisite Lone Voice in the Wilderness (Chiwetel Ejiofor, bringing kind of a sad dignity to the proceedings), is that the lethal process is accelerating far faster than anyone could have predicted. Personifying the government’s pompous intransigence in the face of obvious calamity is Oliver Platt, who plays the President’s Secretary of Douchebaggery.

And what a gorgeous calamity it is. First come the super-earthquakes, which send Los Angeles plummeting into the ocean. Then the volcano beneath Yellowstone Park erupts in spectacular fashion, blanketing North America with a massive cloud of poisonous ash. Not to be left out of the eco-gangbang, killer tsunamis join the party, bombarding much of Asia and the Indian subcontinent with tidal waves the size of Mt. Everest. Emmerich’s breathless CGI onslaught is truly unprecedented in its scope.

Beyond the awe-inspiring carnage, however, there’s precious little to distinguish 2012. John Cusack leads a bloated cast that largely phones in a succession of forgettable roles. The conspiracy-themed script is painfully trite, rife with cliches and devoid of any and all subtlety. Its heavy-handed message, urging unity across class and cultural lines, feels superficial and soulless. Even the film’s visual effects — doubtlessly 2012’s greatest asset — occasionally come off as distractingly fake. The film even feigns a gallingly faux subversiveness, toppling Christian landmarks like the Vatican and the Christ the Redeemer statue in spectacular fashion, while avoiding Islamic monuments entirely. (We brought it up in our interview with Emmerich — click to hear his eye-opening response.)

All of this clocks in at a bewildering two hours and forty minutes, well beyond the acceptable length for such an empty-headed disaster flick.