05.03.04 - 12:42 p.m.

I lurve me some disaster movies. Anything where bloodied and/or otherwise devastated people must crawl through twisted, smoking wreckage and remake a life for themselves in a shattered hell of a landscape appeals to me in the same deep, visceral way it appeals to most people. I like to see things falling, and people screaming, and I like to see them surviving and triumphing over the adversity of having, you know, everything go boom or fall down and hit them in the head or flood or blow up or whatever else our fabulous screenwriters can dig up.

Seriously, I eat that shit up like a cat with cream. It seems to me that it shouldn't be that hard, either, especially today when the stupid special effects are fairly easy to generate with current technology, right? All you have to do is:

1. Come up with a disaster;
2. Come up with a location;
3. Come up with some crappy everyman characters
;
4. Put them through their paces!

Except, it's never that easy. Now, instead of just having disaster movies, we have to have disaster movies where a crazy scientist has all the answers and no one will listen to him or her. It's some variation on our preference for prophets, I think: Elijah, Christ, Cassandra, all those crazy men with bad hair on late night Christian TV. Someone's always got to know, there's always something that can be done.

Now, add to the crazy prophet character (de rigeur and annoying, actually. Not every movie should have one.), we also need A CRAZY-ASS WAY TO STOP IT, preferably involving nuclear warheads. So, in Deep Impact, we have the fabulous people flying up to blow up the asteroid. And, in 10.5...

...well, Christ.

I'm really, really, really irritated with the writers, producers, and so on of 10.5. I don't care that it couldn't ever happen: that's fine with me. I like my disasters at a comfortable distance like that. It's a semi-fantasy epic, something science fictional. I don't care: it MIGHT happen, like a quake along the New Madrid fault might, and mess up the whole middle of the country.

Anyway, 10.5 focuses way too much on their crazy-scientist character spouting really, really, completely horrible pseudo-science they didn't even vet to see if it might be remotely possible or accurate, and way, way too much on the idiotic bureaucrats assuring the press that They Are Dealing With The Tragedy Before Us and way, way too little on what EVERYone freakin' wants in a freakin' disaster movie: disaster porn.

You know, bloody people digging each other out! People falling out of cars! People getting impaled by the space needle spire! People falling from the sky screaming! People hanging on to the side of a cliff that has opened up and trying to pull themselves out! All those extras dying! More mountains falling! Fewer chandeliers!

Even more irritating than the endless pat-pablum "we're going to get through this" bureaucratic crap that the idiots are going through, (as if they were not trying to make a movie, but rather a relentlessly boring lullabye for insomniacs, something you can sell to crazy sleep-deprived people like a drug. Want some sleep? Buy this boring video!) are the annoying heroic shots of Kim Delaney, and even more annoying that that are the interludes before commercials. Instead of, you know, showing disaster porn that I want, they give me teasers of disaster porn just befor ehte commercials, making me think that Someone's Gonna Die Soon, when really, all they mean is tune in Monday for the good shit!

Man. I hope more people die, soon. :(

In the movie, I mean. I don't like dying otherwise!