McCaesar's "Blog"

London

by stevemiedema

I have returned from my 3 week business trip to the UK. We stayed in Chertsey in Surrey during the week, but we got to visit London on the weekends. Take a look at the links for the photo galleries.

Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace
General Sightseeing
Tower of London and Tower Bridge

Some pretty good shots, if I do say so myself.

Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet.

Wow. Ultracrappy. Ultrastupid. Ultrabad.

Seriously, this film sucks. Sucks a lot. Sucks without anything good going for it at all.

Not a good story, not a good director, not a good actor, actress, editor, special effect, musical score, credit sequence. Nothing.

One might think it can't be all bad because you get to watch Milla. One would be wrong.

Milla was filmed, or post-production edited with a very soft focus effect. You don't see her, you see an impression of her.

The plot is incomprehensible. For some reason, a virus affects a portion of the population of the future. It's got something to do with blood. Other than giving them pointy teeth, and making them vaguely vampirish, there don't seem to be any other side effects. For this reason, the uninfected portion of the population has given full control of the their military and government to one man who heads a militant version of the Red Cross or World Health Organization.

The whole situation can be summarized as a "we'll kill them before they kill us" situation. A poor excuse for boring action sequences that are usually over before they start. Milla flips her hair and tilts her neck and a dozen bad guys lay dead.

This clever person has apparently decided the soldier of the future should wear glass armour (yes, glass armor that shatters when Milla kicks them), carry swords (yes, swords) that they're apparently not trained to use, and guns that they're also apparently not trained to use. Honestly, Milla kills dozens and dozens of these poor, stupid soldiers without even a single scratch on her lovely soft-focus skin. In fact, not only does she kill them all, she's very efficient at killing them all while spinning, spinning, jumping, spinning and flipping so they don't even land a blow.

The most effective offense and defense against the soldier of the future is non-stop spinning and jumping.

In my 15+ years of watching 50+ films a year (Math says 750+ films) in the theatre, I've never seen one by myself until tonight. I'm happy none of my friends or family were subjected to the pain and confusion I paid to see tonight.

It's not the worst film I've ever seen but I'm still giving it zero of five rating units.

It's not even worth seeing for camp, or irony. It's just bad. Very bad.

Shark Attack

On Tuesdays, we play NTN at our not-so-local restaurant.

One of the games on the NTN playmaker is called "Shark Attack". It's basically hangman but the Shark eats your points as you get letters wrong instead of a man being assembled on the gallows.

Last night, one of the puzzles in Shark Attack was __W_. The clue was "Movie".

To recap, the game is called "Shark Attack", the clue was "Movie" and the puzzle was "__W_".

I did not get the points.

On a not totally unrelated note, Peter Benchley's death was one of the trivia questions on BrainBuster last night.

Summer Films

There are a few movies I'm looking forward to this summer.

X-Men 3
Superman Returns
Spider-Man 3
Miami Vice

The one movie I'm anticipating the most is the Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder rotoscoped Richard Linklater interpretaion of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" Click that link to watch the trailer.

I read the book a few years ago. A great, original, engaging story that pulls you into it's schizophrenic vision.

One thing that concerns me is the last Richard Linklater rotoscoped film I saw was "Waking Life" That was a steaming pile of regret.

Still, even if the film sucks, I feel confident it can't be as bad as Garfield 2. Garfield 2? Really?