category seven - the end of my pride

I just saw the worst movie ever. I remember laughing about it when I saw previews for it a few months ago, never thinking that I might actually have the opportunity to see it in all of its moronic glory. The movie I am referencing is, of course, 'Category 7: The End of the World', which started its inglorious life as a miniseries in the US. Now, in a sign that the world is embracing all of the worst aspects of American 'culture', the miniseries was aired in its entirety on a British/Irish tv station this evening. And I, being the sucker that I am for disaster movies, got sucked in to the point that I couldn't turn it off even when I realized that I was in for a three and a half hour ordeal.

The movie is a blatant rip-off of 'The Day After Tomorrow', which is itself a movie that should not have been made, let alone poorly copied. I think the worst part about this movie, though, was that the camerawork was *terrible*--way too much ineffective slow-motion, way too little attempt to make all of the computer effects fit in with the humans who were doing something that they thought might pass as acting. However, don't be fooled into thinking that it was easy to pick a 'worst part' of the movie. There were so many options that it makes my head spin. One option, for example, would be the way that the storms in the movie were supposedly fueled. In 'The Day After Tomorrow', if I recall correctly, the storms were massive supercells created because the earth's temperature had gotten so high (due to global warming) that it caused some reaction with the mesosphere (the highest part of the atmosphere) that led to extremely low-pressure eyes to form, sucking down all of the cold air from the mesosphere that resulted in instant ice age (and lots of nice scenes of people running away from cold air). In 'Category Seven', the heat from all of our industry and power grids was causing giant heat plumes to rise from cities, which causes a reaction with the mesosphere--but in this case, they kept saying that 'chunks' of the mesosphere were falling, and when the chunks fell into one of these heat plumes, it caused a thermal reaction that led to city-destroying storms. You have to give them points for attempting to come up with another plausible way for a massive storm to develop; but since 'Day After Tomorrow' had already taken the best ideas from the kookiest scientists, 'Category Seven' scriptwriters were left to make up a storm with the possibility that chunks of atmosphere could ever fall anywhere. Ha!

To make it even better, they got Randy Quaid involved, presumably to lend some credibility to the 'end of the world' half of the movie title. He had a great role in 'Independence Day', and there was an identical role in this movie too--but he didn't get to be the washed-up pilot who gets one last, self-sacrificial chance at redemption; that part went to the dude from 'Picket Fences'. Instead, Randy Quaid played a tornado chaser who had a mystical experience when he miraculously survived a previous tornado (hmmm...does his craziness here sound anything like his character's opinions of the aliens who supposedly kidnapped him in 'Independence Day'?). In perhaps the weirdest twist in the whole film, he actually ends up kissing Shannon Doherty, who he had teamed up with to shoot rockets into the storms in an attempt to gather data about how the storms were forming. I can't think of a single time in the last decade where Randy Quaid has gotten to have a love interest, and the fact that it was Shannon Doherty says a lot about her career after 'Beverly Hills 90210'.

The one thing that truly disappointed me was that the kids (because of course the kids of the main characters have to be in danger--but rather than just being trapped someplace, they were kidnapped by a religious zealot who was intent on fulfilling the 'killing of the firstborn' in an attempt to bring on the end of days...even though everyone knows that that will only result in Passover, and you really need to rebuild the Temple and find the Antichrist and do all sorts of other stuff to bring on the Rapture, just ask the stupid documentaries playing constantly on the History Channel) were only in danger of getting shot. In fact, the people who were holding them were retarded, since they were more worried about guarding the kids than the fact that they were sitting in an abandoned (and therefore unsafe) factory while a gigantic storm was bearing down upon them. Anyway, I was disappointed that even though this movie had a) a perilous trek across a destroyed landscape to find the kids (but this time in a stationwagon rather than on snowshoes), b) a ubiquitous shot of the Statue of Liberty being destroyed (this time sans ice), and c) a ubiquitous shot of the White House being destroyed (this time sans aliens), the kids were at no point in danger of being killed by ravaging wolves on a grounded Russian battleship. The best part of all of 'Day After Tomorrow' is when the kids go to the battleship, try to recover medicines, and almost end up being eaten by the wolves that escaped from the zoo. The fact that 'Category Seven' managed to copy the entire rest of the plot but didn't think to bring the wolves along was unforgiveable.

Anyway, nothing to report here--I went out last night, which is why I didn't blog. A few pints of Guinness later, I was quite happy and relaxed, and topped it all off with fish and chips from the latenight fish-and-chips place nearby. Mmm. Today, I slept in, then spent the rest of the day working on my project, which was completely awful. I realized today that my idea of 'work/life balance' is wearing an old Stanford sweatshirt and ripped-up jeans when working. Clearly, something needs to change. Now, though, I need to work on restoring my wake/sleep balance. Goodnight!