Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Despite the fact that no one seems to be heading this way any more (and justifiably; I've been fucking boring of late), I think I'll post something anyway.

Harvest my kidneys, harvest my kidneys, harvest my kidneys. Buy an Xbox.
"The Island" = shit and other observations

Today, mainly because I was obliged to, I spent two hours or so watching Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansonn muck about in the bowls of either LA or some huge machine, bereft of a specific purpose, mostly while wearing Puma-brand tracksuits. Oh yeah, and some football guy got cut open, while conscious, so they could take his liver and put it in the other Some Football Guy. (Why they [those bad guys in the black tracksuits], after so many years of experience and consistent medical breakthroughs, would not be able to administer the appropriate, effective, amount of tranquilizer is fully beyond my comprehension, but that's sort of an aside.) Some lady died after giving birth by being shaken vigorously (I shit you not.) and this grubby-looking fellow with greasy hair got shot for no easily-determined reason.

In fact, just screw easiness in general. Most of The Island is downright ineffable, in that most actions, proclamations, theories, problems, and contraptions are a little vague at best, if not downright iffy.
Okay, fine. I can live with two adults, equip with the mental capacity of eleven-year-olds, minus any form of sex-education or -drive, suddenly becoming irrepressibly horny and banging each other in some Scottish guy they pretty much don't even know's house. It's Holly wood. It's going to feature snogging. I can live with that.
I can live with a giant colony of veritably mindless clones mulling about underground, mere kilometers from downtown, Los Angeles.
Air-ducts big enough for a thirty-year-old man to crawl through? Fine.
Hell, I'll even throw in my willingness to accept the fact they'd clothe that thirty-year-old man, along with all his mulling friends, in nearly-identical tracksuits.
I am OK with these things, even if they aren't what I was raised on. I'm a tolerant person, I like to think.

However, Sean Bean with greasy hair? Fuck no. As soon as I saw that 'do, I had it in for this sorry excuse for a...something flick. (What genre is this movie, anyway? Action? Suspense? Thriller? Some random crap thrown together for no reason? I dunno. I really can't figure out what they were going for here.)
Actually, I lied. It was when I saw the 100% Puma tracksuit wardrobe.

Clones wear Puma all the time, without fail. If you see some guy walking down the street in a white Puma tracksuit, you know he's a clone. It's that simple. Simpler if he looks and sounds just like Ewan McGregor, but with the bitchiest, most unconvincing American accent and is hanging out with some butch-voiced blonde chick whose tracksuit is riding up her ass half the time.

Product-placement just gives subtlety a complete miss in this movie. Upon exiting the theatre, one is left with a stronger mental imprint of the name "NOKIA" (closed-up upon many a time, or whenever some one used a phone) than exactly why the clones need to be repeatedly denied bacon before their hearts can work properly. Or maybe that's just because the whole bit there was left utterly unexplained.
"Just because" is the best explanation you're going to get to do with anything in this film, despite so many obvious questions cropping up every five seconds or at least whenever any one started talking, especially poor Sean Bean. Why does he take on all these shitty roles? First "National Treasure", then "Ewan and Scarlett Run Around For a While". Each one a nail in my coffin. ;_;[/tangent]

The characters' level of awareness/ability to communicate/personalities are rather unstable, to say the least: Ewan goes from cynical and sarcastic to "Are these your friends? Where are their clothes?" in the blink of an eye and Scarlett...all she did was run around and yell a lot, so there wasn't much there to begin with.
Additionally, they go from being sweet-natured little children-in-adult-bodies to cage-fighters without any kind of warning. This whole bit had no real bearing on anything, when you get right down to it. We have some lovely conversation going, then POW!: Xbox logos everywhere. Everything is that ugly Microsoft-green hue.
Xbox, Xbox, Xbox. It's everywhere. One minute of pure Microsoft and then...and then...
It's over. Completely different scene, no one every speaks of poor Bill again.
Well, I lied again, actually: there's a sizable and obvious MSN logo on the side of a phone-booth in one scene. By this point, however, the whole movie is sort of a hazy mush of advertisements, so you don't really notice it that much.
We're treated to zooming-in on truck brand logos, of all things, for about half an hour, along with some delightfully ambiguous footage of things exploding and Scarlett hitting people with stuff.

Oh, and Ewan flies a motorcycle-thing (Sky-do?) through an office building, killing droves of innocent people, all in the name of liberating the clones, who were pretty fucking annoying, anyway.
He and Scarlett then proceed to survive a 70-story plunge, onto scaffolding that wasn't there before and be helped up by a cheerfully unfazed construction worker, who treats us to some vaguely sexist comments involving Jesus name used in a completely random fashion.

Ewan fights it out with Sean, hand-to-hand, then blows up some fans, and all the clones run free, tracksuits glimmering in the sunlight.

Charming.

Now what the fuck did I just spend four dollars for?

At least it was only four dollars, since I didn't feel like going to the Grande and seeing it in a theatre where I didn't have to injure my neck looking up at the screen/over the heads of those Asian guys playing with a cigarette lighter the whole time, while giggling incessantly.


On a completely different note, look at this. I drew it, my friend CGed it. (It was his idea, so he got the hard job. Ha.)
It's part of a short, angry comic strip, in which the guy on the far right (my friend) brutally murders every one, with a South Asian dagger that is based on a real one I've seen a few times.

See if you can tell which figure is me. -_-;

It's 4:30am and I'm not sleepy. But there's no one online right now, so I'm going to call it a morning. (I know people who have to wake up an hour and a half from now to get to work. Losers.)

Last time I stayed up this late early, I woke up at 8am, fully rested. O_o;;

My body clock is one fucked-up little bitch.
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