As you can see, I had some difficulty with the letter 'a' there. I find that the 'a' in 'least' is one of the more difficult a's to print. It's an ongoing struggle.
FWG
300 is all about the visuals. It seems that 99.9 % of thought, time, effort and expense went into the videography – which apparently is not a word, according to my spellchecker. But I’ll use it because I’m sleepy and my vocabulary is sluggish today. Every single scene – and I mean every single still is dedicated to being an intense canvas of visual artwork, rich, dramatic and perfectly composed. Every landscape is majestic, every facial expression wrought with intensity, every thrust and parry an iconic pose. Never a hair is random or out of place. The result, I found, though intriguing for a while, became a massive over-stimulus that tired me out. If you recall the film The Cell – with the virtual reality environment - this had a somewhat similar feel, with much toggling back and forth between ultra-slow-motion and ultra-fast-motion. All footage was graded to extreme blue-on blue or dark metallic tints.
Don't ask me why I called them Goggles and Noodles. It was the first thing off the top of my head.
The other three actors are pure no-talents who play mathematicians/rocket scientists despite their looking like members of the 4H club. We film them in their garages and basements with a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker - or at their dining room table with a laptop.
For special effects we have a watermelon filmed in the infrared spectrum with a little dry ice or something going on. This will be passed off as a watermelon-shaped planet. Did I mention this is a sci-fi movie?
Okay. That's it for the visuals. Still with me?
The soundtrack is an endless stream of chanting that sounds African except very dreary. Perhaps it's African funeral music. Over that we lay endless unbearable droning violin. We expect theatres to drape the seats in plastic sheets because viewers eardrums will surely bleed profusely.
Now the story.
The astronaut trainees, we claim to be astronauts on the Galileo mission (the probe NASA sent to Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter - if I correctly recall) only now it is a manned mission and our gang is looking for a new planet for humans to inhabit because the Roswel crash, unknown to the public, unleashed deadly unearthly microbes into our atmosphere. Not finding the outer planets to be inhabitable the astronauts decide to take a jaunt out to Andromeda country. Um - just never mind the lights from the training facility pouring into the windows of the 'spacecraft' that is supposedly rushing through black space. Remember - it's just pretend.
The old clips? Well. The bi-plane landing was actually the first alien of Wormtongue's clan to arrive. Yes. That's right. On a bi-plane. The smoker was an alien who tried to commit suicide. And the Defense Secretary or whoever - was an alien who became Defense Secretary. Or whatever.
As coincidence would have it. Our Galileo peeps happen upon the same planet that Wormtongue and his clan came from!
Now - brace yourself for this. The antarctic seawater - we shall pretend - is cooled helium, the atmosphere of this planet in the galaxy Andromeda. The ice is the extent of the planet's atmosphere and is frozen because it's sun is dying. We're talking an extraordinarily thin atmosphere on this planet. No 8-storey buildings allowed! The scuba diver - your regular earthling garden variety scuba diver - is presented as an astronaut. Mm-hmm. Oh - one more thing - and you really need to be sitting down for this: Antarctic jellyfish and cut-up fruit are staged as the semi-intelligent wildlife of this distant planet.
People - I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
I had to watch the special feature monologue by writer/director Werner Herzog trusting he would offer some explanation for this egregious theft of people's time.
"I've always had a passion for science," he says. Which is why he's made a complete mockery of it I guess - for instance, turning the circular/ovular planetary orbits into a goofy two-dimensional labyrinth pattern.
"I call this a science fiction fantasy," he says, and then confesses the unbelievable: "Actually, I've only ever seen a couple science fiction movies." Yeah, no kidding, dude. It shows. "I saw one of the Star Wars movies and the Kubrick film - Space Odyssey. Oh and a couple episodes of - I think it's called - Star Trek? Is that right? With Doctor Spock? With the big ears? I thought that show was rather silly."
WHOA!! Hold the phone, Weiner Hotdog! Or whatever your name is! You don't get to call Star Trek silly! I get to call it silly if I want but YOU do not! YOU filmed a floating half lemon and called it a gentle but sad wildlife creature from the planet Wild-Blue-Yonder! You took the cake on silly! You don't get to call anyone else silly EVER again, you demented senile dumb-ass freak! You imbecile! You... you... That's it! I want you jailed for this disgrace. I want you restrained for life from ever touching a movie camera again! And I want your head on a platter, you... you... twit!
I'm out!
It really was a great wedding and more than a few guests commented such. I haven’t demonstrated why though. In reality there were no details that made it stand apart. Just this. The bride and groom are both the kind of people you love to be around. The kind who are always ‘up’. Who are happy and kind and enthusiastic but who not only speak with intensity but listen with intensity. They’re the very rare kind of extroverts who actually give more energy to a room than they take. Very rare. Very special.
Like Advil. Advil is very special at times like this. Come Advil! Come to Papa.
FWG
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