2012 - Spoilers

[Spoilers ahead, don't read if you haven't seen the movie]

I watched 2012 last night in HD and the movie did have some

fantastic effects, sort of like a giant chase scene with the Earth

in the pursuit role. I thought the plot was similar to deep impact

and day after tomorrow, but the actions of the government officials

were dumber and more venal.

If the big risk is giant tsunamis, and the solution is to build giant Arks

on mountains, why outsource building of ships in the mountains of Tibet

to the chinses? why would the chinese take our money, build the ships

and then not say "screw off" when the disaster happens. And charging

people 1Billion euros for a ticket seems pretty bs too, if I had several billion

dollars I could build a pretty kick-ass submarine for me and my friends

(ok, it could be a pretty small submarine).

But on the gripping hand, our normal government officials are pretty dumb

and pretty venal, and if there is some looming disaster that they know about

and we don't, we're pretty screwed. The government is just stupid enough

to fill the Arks with a bunch of 70 year old politicians and just male soldiers.

So I guess the movie was a true representation of what is likely. Doh.

I see blue people

We finally watched avatar yesterday on DVD. There are probably

some watusi tribesmen herding cattle that haven't seen it, but other

than them we were probably the last people to see it. Since it wasn't

in 3D I was expecting a "meh" type response, but I liked it.

The story inhabits a similar universe as Aliens, and even with all the

plot holes that I was expecting from the chatter on the interwebs, JC

got me to buy in and think of the blue guys as the good guys. Hopefully

it will be shown in 3d at theaters again sometime when we're back in

the western hemisphere.

Avanti

The movie "Avanti" with Jack Lemmon was on sky this morning, it's a pretty funny
movie with most of the comedy based on quirks that are seen in italy. The 3 hour lunch
when everything is closed with 16 kinds of pasta available was spot on, but I thought the funniest
was the scene in the morgue at 8:10 in the above clip as the coroner stamps all the forms
in triplicate, then sticks other stamps onto each form. That really captured the individual
style of italians while showing the omnipresent bureaucracy here.