From sikhs@Kabob.com Thu Jul 16 04:41:58 1998

Newsgroups: alt.slack

Subject: Sort of a Movie Review

From: sikhs@Kabob.com (yard man)

Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 11:41:58 GMT

nuthing else to write about. Don't care if anybody reads it or not.

Actually prefer if nobody did.

Nothing to do last Saturday. Was nothing much showing at the local

Multi-Screen Hick-o-Plex except the latest big budget crapola. Wife

wanted to go to town and see some sort of GIRLY film, but her perusal

of the tabloid entertainment insert stuffed into the local propaganda

rag falied (luckily or unluckily) to turn up any

tribute-to-the-human-spirit movies featuring crampy, pissy hags on the

cusp-of-something-or-the-other sitting around a vein-stripping clinic

and whining wistfully about how life done passed them by, cracking

rotten, cutesy jokes about their neanderthally oafish ex-husbands and

whimpering and hugging each other and offering some kinda message that

some people might find useful, but I really wouldn't know, because the

one time I got hornswaggled into going to see a film that pukey I got

up and left halfway through and went to radio shack and the wife

sulked all the way home and said that wasn't fair because the week

before she sat through some art-porn with me that I had to admit was

pretty fucking boring, too, but at least it had some dago tits and ass

in it, but my pointing that out to her didn't seem to strengthen my

position any, at least as far as she was concerned, so I had to take

her to dinner at a place WITHOUT a drive-thru window.

Anyway, last week we couldn't find any art-porn or girly shit to

torture the other one with, so we decided on what we thought was a

fair compromise, a film that would make us BOTH sick, but hopefully

would have some SO-FUCKING-BAD-IT'S-HYSTERICALLY-FUNNY high points. So

we went to see Armageddon.

It sucked. I mean it REALLY sucked. What's amazing is that it could

suck to the extent that it did and NOT provide any of the

unitentionally snort-producing camp that some of the previous all-time

Stinkers like "Steel" and "Zandalee" and "Waterworld" did. But it

didn't. It JUST sucked. Leapfrogged right over all the GOOD that can

sometimes come from BAD shit and landed squarely in the

super-suck-plane. And that's where it stayed. I know, I know. What did

I expect? Goddam Bruce Willis movie, but hey, Die Hard II is one of

the all-time great rotten films, the Fifth Element was lousy enough to

be funny, and 12 Monkeys was a stunningly UGLY film that beat a

long-dead horse with a total lack of panache and humor, so I figured

there was a CHANCE I'd despise this film in the right way. But I

didn't. Some parts actually made me downright queasy.

In fact, ALL the romantic stuff between the gawky looking overracting

pneumatic-lipped no-talent bimbo and the OBVIOUSLY pea-brained

young-Mr-Green-Jeans looking oaf made me sick, especially the

strained, putrid, genuinely nauseating pre-launch hootenanny. But I

DID manage, in the middle of that, to get a swat from the wife, as

well as get to put my thumb to my nose and go pffffffrrrrrr at a bunch

of barely-illuminated buggy-eyed dirty-looking heads attached to the

heaps of local lard that stopped chomping their salt and grease and

sugared rat pellets and turned around in unison because I blurted: "I

think I'm gonna fucking vomit," so it wasn't a TOTAL loss. Damned

close, though.

Anyway, I could tell you lots more, but suffice it to say the jokes

suck, the cast is predictably stereotypical and poke-a-platypus-belly

cutesy (especially the rooskie guy. JEEEZUS), the chick is ugly and

they don't show her naked, and while they blow up tons of shit and I

guess the special effects are good, you can only really enjoy them if

you don't mind all sorts of loud noises in space and a disregard for

mathematical and astrophysical principles so complete and profound

that it makes Buck Rogers' scooting around in a spark-spewing finned

dildo look like realtime footage of an Apollo mission by comparison.

Anyway, I was a ashamed I stayed till the end, but at LEAST I got a

half a laugh from the hideously contrived, predictable tear-jerkoff

finale, but by then I was rooting for the rock, anyway. Sorta still

am. Upright apes that can't think up anything better to do with 170

million bucks than crank out this shit OUGHTA be given the cosmic-mop

treatment so the small stuff that can hide in holes can have another

chance to evolve into something intelligent.

Ah fuck it. Go on and waste yer dough if you want. Been warned.