I don’t know what came over me. Weekender’s ennui, perhaps. Deer-in-the-headlights syndrome. Atrophy of the critical organs. I don’t know. But for whatever reason I did something bad. I watched a movie on television.
I watched a movie on television. I watched it all the way through, umpty-million commercials and all. I’m ashamed.
But not all that ashamed. In for a penny, in for a pound. I didn’t watch a movie that qualified as even remotely elevated or sophisticated. Nope. I headed straight for the gutter. My movie was a big-budget special-effects blockbuster that lacked even a fleeting hint of taste or brains. Mindless drivel, dreck dressed up in thick layers of CGI, doo-doo festooned with high-profile Hollywood names. Volcanoes. Tidal waves. Continental plates sliding into the sea. Destruction and mayhem and chaos galore. Lots of stuff going crash and boom and blammie. I suppose it could be viewed as a wry commentary on the futility of human endeavor in the face of nature’s callous indifference. Well, maybe to a prattling pre-teen with a brain full of pimples. Maybe to a moronic mall bimbo who would require sedation should her cell phone go on the fritz. Maybe to a retard whose idea of high culture is popcorn with real butter instead of imitation. Maybe to a gaping redneck slacker whose hero is Bart Simpson.
But for anybody else, it’s the pits, plain and simple. Stupid isn’t the half of it. Stupid is the whole of it. Slicked up and dumbed down, it assumes that I have the IQ of a Hostess Ding-Dong. I can’t remember the last time my dignity and intelligence were so egregiously disregarded. No, wait: I take that back. I do remember the last time my dignity and intelligence were so egregiously disregarded. It was the last time I watched a movie on television.
However, this time around I was intrigued by the movie’s unyielding and Puritanical code of behavior. You sin, you die: simple as that. Justice is meted out with the dynamite accuracy of YAHWEH in the Judaic tribal epics. In catastrophe movies, your lifespan is directly proportional to your onscreen morals.
I started estimating when one particular character was going to buy the farm, based on that character’s ethics or lack of same. It took no great insight to recognize that the obnoxious Russian tycoon would be toast and that his end would be appropriately gruesome. Nor did it take much skill to pick up that his slutty girlfriend was putting out for his studly airplane pilot. The only question was: which one would go first? In this case the pilot got putty-knifed down the side of a mountain while Slutskina got herself a brief reprieve thanks to a fleeting display of compassion for a frou-frou dog and the heroine’s children. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough. She was a slut. Ergo, she drowned, slowly enough to make sure that all the gum-snapping pinheads gaping at the multiplex screen got the message: floozies beware: you fornicate, you die.
Of particular interest was the flawed-but-basically-decent fellow who had the misfortune to be the other guy in the heroine’s life. It wasn’t his fault that she was separated from the movie’s lead actor and that probably even the bacteria in the men’s room knew that a reconciliation was inevitable. That is, once said lead actor shed some of his Peter Pan-ish ways and Learned To Love The Children More Than Himself and Stopped Retreating Into His Own World and Grew A Pair By Saving Everybody From Destruction. You know the guy I mean. He’s the one who is played by Sam Neill and Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise and Jeff Goldblum.
But that poor other guy. What a sap. Athough why he, or the lead actor, would find the wife desirable is beyond me. Even by catastrophe movie standards she was a total stick. But no matter. She was wanted by two men of approximately the same age, hairstyle, and skeletal type. Except that one was being paid a lot more to be in the movie than the other. Alternate hubby had his uses for a while, but he would have been a seriously loose end afterwards. So ‘twas curtains for him, although he got to wait until almost the last possible second. He wasn’t so much ethically challenged as he was merely a second banana. And in a disaster movie, second banana is poisoned fruit, indeed.
Thus, the rules for characters who wish to survive a catastrophe movie:
1. Always try to be the highest-paid actor’s kid. It’s like a ticket to immortality.
2. Don’t be a slut or a greedy sonofabitch. YAHWEH will smite you. Count on it.
3. Don’t be a mystic. You’ll be the first to go.
4. Don’t be a noble type, either, unless you’re really keen on getting the scene with the soft string accompaniment and vaseline on the camera lens while you croak out a loving goodbye.
5. Under no circumstances be in marital or amorous competition with the lead actor. Death awaits.
6. Oddly enough, being an obnoxious and self-serving politician would seem to be a pretty good life insurance policy.
7. If you’re not human, be a kid’s pet. Trust me. They will not kill you. They won’t even let your fur get wet.
But the best survival technique applies to all of us, and not just the lifeless cardboard cutouts up there on the screen. That technique is: don’t give those ratty filmmakers one dime of your money. They’ll go broke, tra-la, and that will be the end of that.