Fast times at Chez Bean

This week, BB and I are having one last wild fling before my semester starts next week. You know what that means ... film festival!

The Day After Tomorrow - Never saw it before. It was excellently done. No surprises whatsoever, which is unusual in the action/adventure genre, but I still highly recommend it.

I did think it was supposed to be a disaster movie. Didn't you hear it was a disaster movie? Odd. Because in disaster movies, you usually worry about the people, the situation, all the way through. But all I did was cheer. Yaaaay, ice age! Go, weather, go, cover England and all of New York with salty ice! Turn L.A. into a pile of matchsticks!

In spite of the fact that I'm sure my own family and I would not have the wherewithall to get out of the way of a global disaster, and would undoubtably wind up some archaeologist's frozen discovery in 10,000 years, I think it would be outrageously cool to have another ice age hit this planet, right about now.

Maybe it's the semester talking.

This evening I met up with my fellow students at the start of term pizza party. Just like last year, the "party" wound up being a lot of pizza boxes on one picnic table, and all of us milling around eating off of greasy napkins, tucking our water bottles under our arms. Scandalous. We're policy majors, for corn's sake. Big-picture people. Aren't we supposed to show up better prepared than this? The department chair is not setting a good example. You'd better believe this is going in his end of term evaluation. :-)

I was reunited with an old friend from my prereq days. Joyce had sat next to me in econ at the community college, about 2 years ago. We were both trying to get into the same graduate program. Each of us took a unique path through the stats prerequisite! But she's finally starting the program this year. It was nice to catch up.

And I met a professor whose writings I had read extensively during my econ midterm last semester. I had looked forward to meeting him - but he turns out to be, well, quite a bore in person. Oh well, maybe he's still a good prof.

Comments

[Anthony]

Considering the maybe not-so-vaguely right-wing flavor Roland Emmerich's movies contain (or at least so hoity-toity left-wing film critics have claimed) I find it funny--if ultimately predictable--that the biggest flack of his career came in the shape of oh-so-upset conservatives breathlessly aghast that RE had made a movie that MADE FUN OF DICK CHENEY, the PEDDLED LIBERAL PROPAGANDA ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING!
Day After Tommorow is an improbable but fun little piece of cinema, not all that well-written but filled with enough wierdly enjoyable apocalyptic moments--the tornado storm in LA, the No Tea Leoni Allowed Tidal Wave, the surreal landscape of snow-covered New York and best of all: AMERICANS FLEEING INTO MEXICO--that at times makes me think that RE had watched Starship Troopers many times and got the point clearly: Americans have no sense of irony and likely no sense of humor and therefore are fair game.
And really, trecking across the snows with the manly Dennis Quaid isn't the worst thing that could happen to one, global ice age or not (in a Viking kind of way, of course)!

[maya]

I was going to tell you that I think The Day After Tomorrow is Nature's Perfect Movie, actually.

What movie with Jake Gyllenhaal isn't?

[BB]

I really like DAT. I loved the Cheny jabs, global warming theme, and fleeing Americans cutting fences to get into Mexico.

[ricky]

I thought the special effect were awesome. You know, the big waves, the ocean rising, the huge storms!

How much fun was that!

I mean, I thought that stuff was terrifying! I mean, really, it was scary!

But a lot of it was about as stupid as you could get.

My favorite stupid moment was when Quaid came up with the great idea that the president had to issue an order to evacuate the northern half of the United States. NOW!

I laughed so hard when I heard that. Never mind fleeing an ice age bringing, super hurricane. Jesus, have you have ever been on the Long Island Expressway on Thanksgiving? It takes about six hours to go four miles.

But New York could totally flee south, when facing imminent destruction.

What a hoot.

My take on the movie was:

http://bottleofblog.typepad.com/bottleofblog/2005/05/more_liberal_ho.html

Though, I also left out how goofy it was to portray the United States, after the northern half of it was completely iced over, as still a dominant political force.

All these South American countries, which the United States has been--come on!--been bullying for the last two hundred years are super happy to accept a FLOOD of Americans fleeing the ice age.

Because we all know how receptive to South Americans fleeing their countries the United States has been! We love millions of Mexicans in Texas or California!

Why wouldn't they love millions of Americans?

But, again, aside from that, at the end of the movie, there's the Dick Cheney type guy and he's giving orders and he's still talking like the United States is the United States--with tons of money and a lethal military.

But, really, if half the United States--and that would be the smart, money making half, the BLUE half--had just been iced over, the United States would be like, I don't know, Colombia or something.

Even if the South Americans would happily accept tens of millions of American refugees, the exiled government wouldn't have the money or the resources to keep on acting or behaving like the United States acts now.

I know. I know. I'm thinking too hard about crappy movies. But I thought the ending sort of reveals a subconscious stupidity Americans have about how the world works. As if, no matter what happens to America, Americans will always be rich and powerful because, hey, we're Americans.

Goofy.