So, I went ahead, after writing my blog for yesterday, and put SAN ANDREAS back on. My friend Mick, back in Los Angeles, loved disaster movies (especially the disaster movies of the Seventies), and he would tell me all about the ones he remembered, especially the bad ones. And this movie made me want to give Mick a call and ask if he'd seen it, and how much he laughed throughout.
I was surprised at how eye-bulgingly bad it all was, even by disaster movie standards. I guess I stopped watching these things around the time of the dueling asteroid movies in 1998, but I don't remember them being this stupid (okay, except for ARMAGEDDON, which millions of folks frankly loved). The Rock is actually pretty good, and a sizable chunk of the film is taken by highlighting Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario's cleavage, but yikes, I kept thinking I was watching one of those parody movies like they used to make, with "movie" in the title.*
I saw RAMPAGE a couple of years ago, in the theater for Bossk's sake, and about halfway through I realized it had become a really, really stupid movie. But this one made RAMPAGE look above-average. Just wanted to say that.
But here's the thing: it was still very, very enjoyable, even if the "oh, please" moments were in the double digits. I'm glad I had you there with me to make fun of the movie with.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In September: 2662
I took my nephews to the park at the bottom of the hill this afternoon. It's the one with the little, filthy pond, and I ostensibly did it so they could catch some minnows to feed to their frogs**, but also so I could open my laptop and write for a stretch, without any distractions. I ended up doing pretty well, but the kids didn't manage to catch any minnows (I gotta wonder how hard they tried, because I caught two just randomly scooping a net into the murky brown water, and those were the only two we took home). My nine year old nephew did manage to catch a duckling, though, and that was pretty neat.
He said he wanted to take it to his grandpa's house (to join the menagerie there, which includes geese, horses, cows, chickens, rabbits, dogs, macaws, goldfish, and an emu), but we worried that it would die (I don't know how ducks work), so he let it go.
Push-ups Today: 41
Push-ups In September: 633
I sat down tonight to start recording my next audio project (probably the novel I wrote last year--though the file wasn't novel-length, which either means it was NEVER a novel, or the file's incomplete), but all I managed was the author's note on the last project. Instead, I went out on the couch and watched ANNIHILATION, the 2018 Sci-Fi movie with Natalie Portman. It was alright. I didn't really get it, but I was also super sleepy toward the end.
I wonder who the target audience for this movie was. It starts out as a bit of a mystery, with a Sci-Fi twist, but becomes a super-freaky horror flick by the end, and had shockingly-graphic violence straight out of a Paul Verhoeven movie.
I did like the bit with the mutated bear that somehow screamed in the voice of their dead team member. That was upsetting.
Words Today: 1070
Words In September: 19,587
*I'm sure this does not compare to one of those cinematic abortions, because I just remembered that they were all about saying, "You remember that part in another movie? Yeah, we saw it too!" with no jokes, over and over. And Paul Giamatti was good in this too.
**My twelve year old nephew told me today that the bullfrog I kept as a pet, having raised it from a tadpole, died today, and that he buried it in the garden. That bummed me out a bit, but he's had it in his room for months now, so it already felt long gone to me.
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