I watch bad science fiction and action films on purpose. I am looking for cliche’s to rework in a humorous or surprising way for my novel. That is why I continue watching the trainwreck that is La Brea.
Every episode could be a Mystery Science Theater episode. It is a disaster about a disaster. Watching this show is like holding a hot coal until the pain becomes too much. Its the Terra Nova of sinkholes, but with worse acting and special effects. Did you know that it is shot in Australia? I guess the sinkhole goes all the way through the earth and they landed down under.
This Lost wannabe even ripped off the golf scene from Lost in the latest episode, copying it but changing it to baseball and doing the whole thing badly and removing every ounce of charm that scene had with Hurley. And remember in Lost how Charlie’s heroin was used to help an injured person? Yes, they do that as well, except they find the drugs in a trunk, with a terrible subplot about the owner of the drugs. Are they just rewatching Lost trolling for ideas they can execute badly?
One of the aspects of Lost that was so unique is that you got caught up in the characters and yet any one of them could die at any time, and they did, and it was usually gut wrenching. Here there is not a single character that I would care at all about if they died. In fact, a lot of them are more annoying than anything else.
I do a great deal of research for my writing. I think the writers here did none. Military uniforms are wrong, they don’t understand what ambulance’s actually carry, they don’t know anything about medicine or recovery time, they don’t seem to understand paleontology and how museums work, they don’t understand how predators hunt, and they have no idea how people actually act in a crises. Yes, some of this might be a prop or costume department problem, but accuracy for anything seems remarkably slipshod.
These characters do nothing smart to protect themselves. Considering that they are being attacked by wild animals, they might want to make some weapons, organize lookouts, see who has survival training, protect their food from scavengers, find out if anyone is an experienced hunter. Instead, they just wander around aimlessly, squabble pointlessly, and consistently make the wrong choices that only put them in greater danger, like characters in a cheesy horror film.
The special effects don’t quite reach Asylum’s level of winking with “we know these effects are terrible and it is on purpose.” Why the effects are so bad is one of the show’s many mysteries, and I believe that the answer is that the effects time traveled from the 1990s.
Speaking of bad and derivative, I watched Tom Cruise’s Oblivion last night. It is a master class in science fiction movie making. Watch closely, and don’t do what they do. Okay, the special effects were quite polished, but all in service to a script written using a cliche-o-matic to make sure they included almost every science fiction cliché imaginable.
It also inspired me to coin a new word: Starcicist. That is when a star has a certain amount of power and an overwhelming sense of self love that ultimately negatively impacts a film. I think Cruise believes that we just can never get enough Cruise. Long tracking shots of him walking, shots with the camera locked down just watching him walking away. There is even two of him, a la fellow starcicist Will Smith in Gemini Man.
As I was watching this trying to remember if I had actually seen this forgettable 2013 film before, my wife pointed out that I had seen it before- just in a lot of other movies. She nailed it. Towards the end, Cruise runs through a tunnel ahead of an expanding fireball only to just miss being barbecued by jumping out of the end of the tunnel at the last second. My wife, who was half asleep and only occasionally watching out of one half-opened eye, chimed in, “Thank goodness. I thought they might not get that cliché in.”
There are spoilers here, but frankly, I doubt it will harm the viewing experience or ruin the muddled plot for you. We get a tie fighter style chase through a canyon almost straight from Star Wars (even the silhouettes of the vehicles are similar), the cloned worker bee concept at the heart of the 2009 movie Moon, and the caretaker/repairman on ruined Earth (too many to list). The female characters are spectacularly underdeveloped (a common problem in science fiction written by men, and in Cruise movies in general). Morgan Freeman is there for the sole purpose of dying heroically. There are bits and pieces from so many other movies it is like they threw them all in a blender and this is the result. Did I mention that the special effects are nice?
My story is filled with cliches, but on purpose. Some of the cliches I include in my story but twist around are the classic car chase in San Francisco, a speeding car going towards a slowly lowering door, the evil bad guy threatening to kill one character in front of another if they don’t talk, a shoot-out in the villains lair, and the countdown timer to a big explosion. These all go in ways that I hope the reader will find unexpected.
What’s Up With Us
My wife booked a dozen magic shows for October, making it a very busy month. Her last one is this weekend, a special event for a casino in Palm Springs. We are also taking a few extra days while there, as we have been going seven days a week for awhile now.
The non-fiction book I am writing is going well. I am close to 75 percent done. Should be finished sometime early 2022.
I am trying to learn the new 3D software I recently purchased, but I really need a more powerful computer and a much more powerful RTX class or better graphics card. The RTX means you can do real-time ray tracing, which blows my mind.
Unfortunately, these high-end graphics cards are also being used by bitcoin miners, who snatch them up at any price. Because of covid, manufacturers decided to reduce their inventory when instead there was actually higher demand as so many needed to buy or upgrade computers for working at home. There is also a global semiconductor shortage.
The bottom line is that this is the perfect storm and the worst time ever to do a computer upgrade. If you can find a graphics card it will be triple the MSRP price. You probably won’t find what you want, however, at any price.
I have been waiting to upgrade until it could be a major one. I have literally been waiting for years because I thought that AMD was on the right track with the architecture in their Ryzen processors. They botched the initial version but have worked hard to improve it and I think it is finally at a point where it is worth upgrading to. I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 3950X, which right now seems to be selling at a couple of hundred dollars higher than normal retail.
I had a pretty big budget in mind for this new system. Triple monitors with the center one at 4k. A super fast CPU with a killer GPU. These price increases and limited availability have blown that to smithereens. The cost of the graphics card alone now exceeds what I planned to pay for the entire computer. I guess I will have to wait until next year. Sigh.