Pseudo-UFOs and Movie Dissatisfaction

I hope everyone had a lovely Memorial Day weekend. Except for those jerks who woke me up Saturday night at 1AM in their airboat with all the searchlights and the stupid droning generator. It was the sort of thing a less intelligent individual might have taken for a UFO landing. It started with hearing the noise in my sleep. Then I began gradually waking up in stages - at first thinking it was just a helicopter going overhead. But once fully awake I realized what was going on. The sweeping lights through the trees that entered my bedroom window were not the spotlights of passing helicopters (military or search and rescue) nor were they the pre-abduction lights of an alien craft. Looking down through the trees to the lake I saw the small boat with its ring of powerful lights - each reflecting off of the water, creating the illusion of a second ring. The boat was nearly on shore and while the sleep-annihilating roar of the airboat motor had ceased, the annoying drone of a generator could still be heard. Over the noise of that, however, I could also hear the guys on the boat chattering to each other. These same characters had been here before - a couple of weeks ago - but with a less noisy motor, no generator, and at 9PM rather than 1AM. I actually considered firing a gun into the air to convince them to leave. But they soon left on their own.

I saw "Terminator Salvation" this weekend. I'm still not quite sure what to think about it. I can't say it was that good, but I'm also not quite ready to say it terrible either. But I have a bad feeling that once the movie-honeymoon wears off (the occasional tendency to give a film a slightly more favorable review due to having wanted the movie to be good in the first place) that I'm going to say it was truly awful.

One aspect I definitely did not like was the ending. I can't really go into detail, because that would mean including spoilers which would be a mean thing to do to my readers. Here is a brief rant about the ending that I wrote elsewhere (contains minor spoilers -- skip if you wish to remain completely spoiler free):


"I found myself actually wanting Connor to die - that's how bland the role of Connor was in the film. And that's not really Bale's fault. Most of the movie involves following Marcus around and he's the one doing most of the fighting. We see Connor get shot down in a helicopter, nearly get owned by a legless T-600, get shot down in ANOTHER helicopter by those hydro-terminators, only to later on get thrashed by the T-800.

The writing and directing basically made Connor out to be Optimus Prime but without all the sentimental feelings the 20-somethings might have about the character. (side note - I guarantee you they kill off Prime in this Transformers...they did it in the cartoon movie...and at the end it'll be "oh no, what do we do! The Decepticons are stronger than ever - Prime is dead! Oh nos!" and they'll fade to black with a scene of the surviving Autobots, Sam, and Megan Genetically-Engineered-By-Movie-Studios Fox looking off into the distance as Linkin Park begins to play. Then we'll find out they plan to "wrap it all up" in a 3rd part and that will be the end because Hollywood can only have frickin' trilogies! Leave it open for more? No, no, no! Let's have a trilogy. And then I die a little inside.....i need some breakfast...."


I had never seen or heard of Sam Worthington before - but he was excellent as Marcus Wright, the hybrid human/cyborg. Last week we were discussing male actors having to win over the male audience -- well, Worthington just did it. His character was FAR more compelling than that of John Connor, plus the script gave Worthington the chance to seemingly act circles around Bale (again, this was due to poor writing and directing).

I'm really tired of these terrible Hollywood directors getting to play amateur hour with all the big movie franchises. Are there even any good, reliable directors left out there? Even the once mighty Spielberg has lost his edge.

In other movie news, I think I actually want to see "The Hangover." The last time I saw a Vegas-bachelor-party-gone-wrong movie was about 10 years ago ("Very Bad Things"), which raised the bar for shocking gross-out comedies. Parts of that movie were quite disturbing - even to myself and my friends who were then crass, un-shockable 18-19 year olds. But by today's standards, most of those elements are found on network tv each night.

Okay, I've grown irritated sitting here trying to find an ending to this blog. But I'm convinced no such ending exists. Rock on, everybody.

One person's rant is another's "freedom fighter"

I've been noticing a lot of military vehicles flying over the house lately. More than usual. Am I being monitored already? (Edit: No seriously. We normally see Apaches, Sukorsky's, transport helicopters, and transport planes around here -- but not at this frequency flying directly overhead. Plus - the other day it was sunny and the sky was perfectly clear. I was outside and heard the sound of a fighter jet approaching swiftly. The sound went directly overhead, but I never saw it. No clouds, no sun in my eyes, just nothing there. Maybe we have a new technology that actually makes the jet invisible. I HOPE so. It would give me at least a little bit of hope for the future of our military and national security.)

So, apparently my health insurance premium is going up another $30 this year! In the past it's gone up around $10 at a time (i don't see why it should be going up this consistently in the first place). In 5 years it has very nearly doubled!!!! This is nuts! How can they justify this? I haven't even been sick in over a year. I'm so annoyed, I'm going to go outside, build a laboratory, and start making my own medicines and vaccines. Heck, maybe I'll start my own medical school...

The other night I saw a little interview with the infamous Billy Mays. The shocking part: He wasn't yelling! In fact, he acknowledged how everyone thinks he's "always yelling," and explained it away as "cutting through the clutter." It actually made sense. We're always being bombarded with noise and ads and stimulation -- if Billy came on the tv and spoke calmly and quietly, no one would listen to him and no one would buy his products. And you know what...during the interview while he was speaking in a normal tone of voice...I actually almost found him likeable.

There's a show on the History Channel called UFO Hunters. Mostly it's a tiresome charade as this group of professed UFO experts visit the sites of encounters and try to investigate whether or not something actually happened. Just like most series nowadays (like the one with the guy who goes looking for monsters/legends), they find some circumstantial and often conspicuous evidence, they hear questionable stories from pseudo-reliable witnesses, and in the end they come up with nothing more than they started with. But the other night they actually managed to hold my attention. They were investigating the stories of secret Nazi projects involving UFOs. Apparently a former Nazi scientist claimed that they had received help from aliens and were trying to make their own flying saucers (and other secret weapons). The Nazis had a vast number of secret projects going on throughout the war and were also considered to be well ahead of the rest of the world in areas of rocketry and propulsion. In the course of the investigation they even found that one Nazi scientist had been conducting human experiments on how the body would be affected by space travel. The most interesting part of the show came when they visited a former secret Nazi bunker in Poland. Supposedly the Nazis had been working on their ultimate weapon there, something called a Reeza (sp?) - or "bell." The artistic interpretation showed a bell-like hovering metal object that had to be chained in place. I think it was supposed to be the engine or power-source for a flying saucer. While people could walk around in the bunker, there was a large section of it that had been sealed off long ago. In this sealed area is where the bell was alleged to have been stored. Upon returning to the US, they found that this bell actually had been found by our military after the war (along with a host of other Nazi projects) and was brought back here. I'm sure it's being studied by "top men." What men? Top men.