I don’t particularly feel like doing a book review tonight.  I’ve had a lot of other things going on and thoughts running through my head about stuff so decided to run with that.  Let’s begin with movies I’ve seen lately…

 

The Host

Color me underwhelmed.  I read the book and quite enjoyed it.  Twilight was always a guilty pleasure, like a soap opera, for me.  You know that it’s awful and ridiculous but you can’t help but reading it anyway.  I found The Host highly superior to Twilight and loved the “bigger picture” aspect to the plot.  Unfortunately the movie came off as cheesy, corny, and nothing more than a teenage love flick.  The conversations with Melanie and Wanderer made me do a snortgiggle with how silly they sounded.  The plot was glossed over and it was all about how the alien finds penises that she likes and suddenly her entire existence makes sense.  Um, really?  That’s all you took from the book?  Because that’s sure as hell all that came across in the movie.

 

Warm Bodies

I am 50/50 on this one.  I haven’t read the book and perhaps that was part of the problem, I can’t be sure.  Some parts of it were very funny and I really enjoyed it.  But it had a few sticking points that I couldn’t quite get past.  For example, R kills her boyfriend.  No I meant that literally, he ate his face off in front of her.  R tells her this and she just shrugs and says “well, I suppose you’re a zombie and so it makes sense.”  Wait…what?  He ate your boyfriend’s face, you brush it off and then start falling for him?!  What is wrong with you!  I also had a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but since it’s part of a series I suppose that’s the reason.  At the end, this was entertaining and a decent use of my time but nothing amazing.

 

Chernobyl Diaries

I should have known.  Please, everyone who warned me, feel free to scream “told you so!’ from the nearest building you can find.  This one isn’t new, but I wanted to see it and saw it on a movie channel recently and decided to give it a shot.  What the fuck was this piece of garbage?  Sometimes, I can look past factual inaccuracies for the sake of a story.  Unfortunately for this movie, there was no story so nothing was preventing me from laughing at the absurdity.  Here’s the problem.  I watched a show about Chernobyl that was filmed in 2009-2010 (around the same time as the film) and discussed all the things that have to be done to prevent danger to visiting people.  This film ignored all of those.  Let’s just take a look here:

1. The area around Chernobyl is set in rings that are fenced, locked, and guarded 24/7 by military personnel.  You have to show signed forms proving that you have permission to pass and, even then, if the guards there don’t like it then they can refuse you entry for any reason.  In this film, these tourists just hired someone to take them to the site and they just drove right into town.  Uh huh, okay.

2. After passing the final checkpoint, everyone is required to wear a head to toe radiation suit in order to protect them from the radiation unless you will be there less than a few hours.  Even this suit is not 100% and you are only allowed to stay for a certain time until the radiation saturation in your body starts to rise too much and then you have to leave or risk radiation poisoning.  Workers who are trying to restore the area are only allowed to work 5 hours a day for a month before they have to take 2 weeks off.  In the film, everyone was there in their street clothes for over 24 hours (maybe closer to 48, it was hard to judge) before showing any signs of radiation sickness at all.  In fact none of them showed any signs of radiation issues until they walked into the reactor itself, which is obviously the most dangerous area.  That’s not even close to being possible.

3. The batteries on any electronic equipment will be substantially impacted and their batteries drain much more quickly.   Not in this film!  In this film they all had cell phones that were fully functional the entire time…did I mention this was like 24-48 hours?

4. While some animals do live in the area surrounding Chernobyl, they are usually affected by the radiation and rarely do they live in the actual city since there’s not much there.  According to this crappy movie, bears wander in and out of buildings all the time, and there’s a pack of dogs that are in the city full time attacking people.

So those are my factual problems.  But the story just sucked apart from that.  Apparently they are attacked by radioactive people who are now…cannibals I guess?  I’m not sure if they were supposed to be workers who died there or tourists who’d died…I just don’t know and I don’t care.  Here’s the reasons I should have known better:

1. It’s from the same people that brought us the demon chicken of Paranormal Activity.

2. It’s from the same people that brought us the “all male characters are narcissistic dicks who really need to die” of Paranormal Activity 2.

3. It’s from the same people that brought us “we can’t even bother to read a plot summary of our two previous films so we’ll just make it up as we go” of Paranormal Activity 3.

4. They are also the same people who brought us “we don’t really have a story but we want your money” of Paranormal Activity 4.

5. Oh and it’s the same people responsible for that horrendously bad TV show The River (ripped off Destination Truth frame for frame in the series premiere).

6. It’s the same people that gave us “worst ending ever” Insidious.

7. And of course its the same people that tortured us with “even the preacher wasn’t this preachy on Sunday” Area 51.

I am disgusted with myself, I admit it.

 

Now on to weird stuff….

So I was listening to The MVP podcast today, old episodes but I heard this ad for a different podcast.  It’s tagline was something to the effect of:

Mermaids, vampires, werewolves.  What if those mythical creatures were not only real but were one creature?

Um….okay.  If I read that on a book cover I’d probably start giggling and put it back down.

 

And in TV news….

I finally brought myself to watch the series finale of Fringe.  I wanted to shake all tv and movie execs (and maybe a few authors too) who screw up endings and go “THIS IS HOW YOU END A FUCKING SERIES!”  It was so great, I laughed and I cried and I was surprised and then I cried because it was over.  I absolutely loved it.  They couldn’t have ended the series better in my opinion.  The way they take you to that scene that we’ve seen so many times over the course of a season and you are hoping and praying that it ends differently.  And finally, after so much agony, you see Peter’s daughter land in his arms and then….*sniff* oh man, here go the tears again.  *wipes eyes* I think I should stop talking about it now, I’ll start ugly crying soon.  You know, the kind of crying where your nose runs down your face and the neighbors can hear you two buildings away and you just don’t give a damn.