Sharknado: you are not wasting your time

[Image from earwolf]

The Sharknado movie was everything that I expected it to be and more. I was watching it with my friends and we were all super excited to see the actual sharknado. It took about an hour but we finally got the glory shots of a shark tornado that we were aching for and everything in between was glorious. The ninety minutes of flying sharks, disaster porn and menstruation jokes about the floods of bloody water were an epic that was worth every second of my time. 

This film follows a bunch of people – I don’t remember their names. There’s the divorced dad, the girl who works at his bar, the ex-wife who’s still in love with her rugged ex-husband, their two grown-up kids and the divorced dad’s friend from Tasmania. I’m not entirely sure what their deals were, since they were in no way more important than the sharknado itself. The phenomenon dominates the entire movie. It is the only character that matters. There is a moment of excitement at the beginning where sharks are pouring into the streets in giant waves and it seems that there may even be a sharknami featured in the movie. There wasn’t, but that’s just something to look forward to in the sequel then, isn’t it? 

Just diving into a shark's mouth with a chainsaw... nothing to see here. [image source]

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Anyway, for the human characters, the storyline is an epic race to find higher ground and save all of their family and love interests from getting eaten by sharks. The sharks are buffeted everywhere by the wind and water. They can go anywhere so long as there is even a little bit of water and they will COME RIGHT AT YOU!! The random chaos and carnage the sharknado causes as it creeps across the city of Los Angeles is scary enough but then all of a sudden THERE ARE THREE SHARKNADOES!!! Almost every shark in the ocean must have been plucked for the creation of this disaster. For sharks to be flying around in the air for hours, ripping stuff up and devouring people, would be the equivalent of a ton of grizzly bears jumping into the ocean on a busy beach and murdering all of the swimmers. Isn’t that terrifying to think about? Not only would you have sharks, jellyfish and sea snakes to worry about, there would also be grizzly bears in the ocean. 

 

dude, it's gonna kill you. [image source]

While watching the film I found myself wishing that it had been released years ago while I was in high school. The critical theme analysis I could glean from this movie would have covered my “man VS nature” requirements in my final exam. In this film, the sharknadoes are eventually defeated with explosives. It sends a powerful message to the audience that man is not powerless in the face of nature; we can overcome the trials that natural disasters present. 

It was surprisingly accurate too. Shark skin is really rough so a shark shooting past you at 100 knots and more is definitely going to shred off some skin, which happens a lot in the movie. Not to mention that there were many different types of sharks considered. As an Australian citizen, it makes me happy to see that there are now so many popular films giving Australia more rep than just a nation of blondie-redneck-“throw a shrimp on the barbie”-crocodile hunters. Not only does Straya get its own mechas in Pacific Rim, Sharknado also sheds light on some Australian issues. 

Not only is one of the main characters Australian, sharknadoes are sometimes a naturally occurring disaster that plagues our country, along with the many other dangerous things we have around here. Every summer is a terrifying waiting game to see if one of our seasonal cyclones will evolve in a sharknado. It’s particularly a problem in the northern parts of the country where humidity levels actually climb high enough to physically lift the sharks out of the water and carry them over the coast. In the failure of a cyclone, torrential shark rain is also a possibility. 

Real Life Problems [image source]

All in all, Sharknado was a totally worthwhile film. It should be on everyone’s ‘To Watch’ list because there is a shark tornado, they set a pool on fire and bomb the weather. What more do you want to see?

My First Vlog

Today I put a video up on Youtube which is essentially the first vlog I've ever done. It's kind of crap because I shot it with the shitty webcam that came with my laptop and used the stupid frame effects that come with the webcam. I don't have anything like a studio or proper lighting and a blank-enough wall to help make it look pretty with green-screening, nor do I have any good video editing software to spruce it up a little bit. All I had to give it some personality were my cheap facepaints and an exotic wig. Oh, maybe I had one more thing...

My actual personality.

That's nothing to talk about, though. I haven't been in front of a camera blurting out my opinions about things for years because as I got older and started to realise that pople judge you horribly and with great prejudice for your race, language and gender I stopped telling people my opinions and started being super shy instead.

[Image from Here]

So this vlog is basically me, giving my short opinion about something that people probably don't want to listen to and that sits within an admitedly narrow field of knowledge wherein only cosemtic shops that are within the metropolitan limits of my residence are included. The opinion might have been different if I'd had much exposure to cosmetic shops in other areas, such as places were non-white people usually live, but I don't move around the city enough for that. I need to start visiting all of these family friends who allegedly live in further out places (and by "allegedly" I mean that they actually probably do live there but I've never personally experienced their abodes.)

Anyway, the point that I was originally getting to is: I'm a super awkward turtle when it comes to expressing my opinion. And I feel terrible about it because not having the confidence to say things that I think are important due to other people wanting to put me down has started to rule me. I hadn't actually thought very much about how these things affect me until I got severely depressed in the past five months.

I've gotten too shy to do anything that I think is important. I'm too shy to drop in on people, even my friends. I'm too shy to talk back to people. I'm even too shy to even tell people what I really think about something for fear of their backlash. The shyness makes me feel so weak and lately I've started to feel like I couldn't ever be strong. That' why I'm starting to blog and vlog now. This is like my way of finally showing the world my true face. The simple act of uploading this video made me feel just a little more confident about myself and one day I hope I'll be able to sync my inner self to my outer self.

See this? This is my sassy inner self catwalking out into the world like a BAMF.
[Image from tumblr]

Plasmo: Science fiction has never been so beautiful

[Image from Plasmo and the Infinite Sadness]

Sometimes I really, really, really feel the need to have a bit (a lot) of nostalgia in my life, which is probably the reason why I love Kingdom Hearts so much. Very often I find myself on Google googling various keywords in search of shows that I used to watch as a child. I want to revisit them and in many cases I also want to confirm that they weren’t just things that I dreamed up or imagined.

I always knew for certain that Plasmo wasn’t something I dreamed up but I couldn’t really remember most of it. The most iconic scenes that stuck out to me were Parsty using her force field, Coredor’s slightly traumatic early-childhood-spent-in-a-bubble scene and Episode 3’s unforgettable brick wall at the end of the universe. It’s a short series and all of the episodes plus the pilot are available on Youtube on Anthony Lawrence’s account. That made things extremely easy. 

I watched a hell of a lot of TV when I was a child (my mother denies this but I assure you, it’s absolutely true) and Plasmo was one of my favourite shows to watch. It was incredible how much wonder, beauty, sensitivity, drama and action could be packed into Claymation episodes less than five minutes long. The lessons a child learns from the kindness of Plasmo are head, shoulders and hips above anything I’ve seen on children’s television these days. Each episode is succinct and direct while somehow remaining subtle and charming. They’re dominated by the morals of generosity, friendship and co-operation without needing to resort to the astounding levels of violence a lot of more modern children’s shows are inundated with. 

Some of the character design is pretty cute too.

I’ve got to admit that the pilot episode, Happy Hatchday to Plasmo, is also a kicker. I wasn’t even born in the year that it was made, so the first time I got to see it was recently on the internet with the rest of the series. The models are nothing like the refined versions they show in the 1997 series. It’s actually kind of incredible that something like that even managed to get off the ground. The creator even admits that they had a “shoestring budget” to shoot the pilot. The animation and voice acting is absolutely terrible but it’s still charmingly amusing. The plot is more fantastical than the series it preceded, which went with a more “hard science” approach but the underlying values and quirky characteristics of the characters are still there.

They do more stuff with technology that looks vaguely legit, therefore it's "hard" science. By the way, this is Coredor. Don't say anything about his face...

This planet's name is literally near-unpronouncable and is where most of the story takes place.

Now, I’m not a child. I am way, way, waaaaaaayyy too old for this show but somehow it’s still beautiful. In my recent revisiting of my past, the episodes of Plasmo still made me laugh and cry with joy, sadness, excitement and amazement. If you’re a parent, this show is something that you absolutely need to show your child. Even if you have no children, it’s something you just need to see because of the miracles it will perform on your heart. 

From left: Parsty, Brucho, Plasmo, Nik-nik (dog) and Professor Sashimi. The characters in this show are simply amazing, quirky, colourful. You need to see this show just for them.

The Worst Arthurian Legend

An English teacher at my high school once told me that leaving a performance at the intermission was one of the deepest insults you could give to a performance—actors, stage crew and production crew all combined. It is literally the worst possible thing. I half believed him, mainly because of his credentials. He was an excellent English teacher who was very well-versed in literature of all kinds, including scripts and screenplays. From the moment he began to speak it was always clear to me that he had a deep passion for literature and was immersed in any form that it took, be it in books, on a stage, in song, on television or on a silver screen. However, it was that one thing he said to me that always got to me: 

Leaving a performance halfway is one of the gravest insults you can give it. 

I seriously did not understand that because I am deeply interested in stories. I willingly admit to being extremely immersed in many awful things for reasons of curiosity – I always wanted to know what would happen. I sat patiently through various Final Fantasies and their random encounters and stupid (sometimes mandatory) mini-games because the characters themselves were so interesting that I wanted to see what would become of them; how their stories would unfold. How did their encounters with other characters, their conversations and their involvement in significant events (which are always few and far between in Final Fantasy) reshape them from what they are in the beginning to what they are in the end? I sat through the confused mess of alternate history, dystopian fantasy, inconsistent characterisation, plot holes, boring battle scenes and slice-of-life teen drama in the Left Hand of God series just because I’m curious as to where all of the main characters are going to end up and how. I almost gave up on the Twilight movie but saw it through to the end because I needed to know what everyone was crazy about. I never understood the concept of being so uninterested in something that you would leave halfway through and not want to know what happened to anybody in the end. 

That is, until I saw Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 film King Arthur. It is quite literally the worst thing I have ever seen. 

Now, I’m all for alternate history in fiction. Alternate history can be extremely interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. Unless it’s crap. The alternate history presented in King Arthur is crap. It attempts to portray itself as possibly actually true but the historical inaccuracies are so palpable that it’s impossible to believe. There is no way anyone could accept this iteration of the Arthurian Legend because nothing about it is remotely believable. You would have to literally know nothing about anything to be able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy this film. 

The angle they were going for in this movie was based on the belief of some left-of-centre historians who think that the Arthurian Legend may have some basis in actual historical fact. That basis being upon a 2^nd Century Roman officer named Artorius who supposedly commanded Sarmatian auxiliary horsemen in Britain. It’s an interesting theory and I’m sure there was a way to do it right. But King Arthur isn’t it. The creators somehow manage to confuse the 5^th Century with the Dark Ages, paganism with atheism and the Roman emperor with the pope. 

The actual action in the film was also quite boring. The first battle in the director’s cut of movie (which I was watching with my housemates) went on for ages. It was okay for about two minutes but after that I just wanted the film to move on. 

To top it off, the worst part of the film is the characterisation, which as you may have guessed earlier is one of my favourite aspects of a story. For some reason, Britons in the 5^th Century A.D. have American accents. The Romans all have Italian accents but that only applies to the shitty Romans. If you’re a good-guy Roman you can have an American accent too. The characters are all flat and annoying and harp on about freedom in a manner that is more reminiscent of America in the 2000’s than Roman Britain in the mid-400’s. Good job at suspending my disbelief there, guys. 

Honestly, I just couldn’t go on. Shortly after Keira Knightley appeared I gave up on watching it because it was terrible; not even Knightley could save this historio-fictional mess. I am no longer at a stage in my life where I am depressed enough to enjoy something so awful. The only reason I was watching it in the first place was because one of my housemates wanted to share it with us as a terrible film that we could MST but I just couldn’t handle it. For once in my life I finally understand how a film can be so uninteresting that I didn’t want to see it through to the end. 

I finally understand now. If King Arthur had been a stage show, I would have walked out at the intermission. I wish this movie was a theatre performance because would have liked to insult the hell out of anyone and everyone who was a part of it for having a hand in making something so shitty but not shitty enough to be good or funny. I’m just glad that I didn’t pay good money to see this thing because that’s the only way it could have been worse.