I Blame
On-Demand
Damn you, Charter Digital Cable. Damn you because you
give me full, free access to the movie store in hell. The
deepest circle of hell. The movie store that has a special
section for all the Ernest movies, even the ones they never
released because they would never be a commercial success,
like Ernest Gets Molested and Ernest Goes to Coahoma
County, Mississippi . Damn you Charter Digital Cable for
giving me Charter On-Demand, allowing me access to the
worst that the world of cinema has to offer at the push of
a button.
For any fortunate soul who doesn't have On-Demand, it works
like this: You turn your cable to channel 999, and you are
presented with a list of all the movies that the premium
channels like HBO and whatnot are currently showing. You
then select the movie you want to watch, and it plays it
with all the VCR-esque features intact, like, pause,
rewind, and the like. At any given time, I have a menu of
about 60 really bad movies available to watch at a moment's
notice.The problem lies with the fact that I will watch
pretty much anything if I'm bored enough, and on-demand has
not only pretty much anything but pretty much everything.
Perhaps there was once a movie that I briefly considered
seeing in the theaters before the reviews of it came out
and said that if you were forced to choose between seeing
the movie and being fed a pound of leeches, the shrewd
consumer would go with the leeches. If that movie is on
On-Demand, I will watch it. Perhaps I notice a sequel to a
movie I may have like, I'll probably watch that too, even
if it's Citizen Kane 2: Roseblood. Hell, I'll probably
watch a movie with a word I like in the title.So what have
I elected to sit through? Observe:
Never before have I seen a movie with quite so much Al Gore style environmental moralizing. Because clearly, nothing will make us try harder to save the earth like seeing the calamity caused by our shortsightedness. Calamities like, say tornadoes destroying LA or air from space causing helicopters to freeze instantly and drop out of the fucking sky! My favorite part was when everyone in the states is evacuating to Mexico to escape the cold and they close the border. The only way the'll reopen it is if America forgives all Latin American debts. Heavy-handed moralizing? I'll have an extra helping, thanks. There's also a totally unneccessary bald cancerous kid who I assume is supposed to make audiences cry, but instead he makes audiences want cancer.
I'm not ashamed to admit it, I really liked the first Starship Troopers. It was a satisfying mix of bugs, gore, boobs, and Doogie Howser. How could the sequel suck so badly? It had all of these elements, except Doogie Howser. Therefore, Doogie Howser is clearly the winning ingredient in any movie. Interesting. But what really made this movie bad is that it traded large scale, planetary warfare with thousands of soldiers and bug shooting and chewing each other respectively for about five people trapped in a small outpost with pseudo-zombie movie overtones, but with bugs in the brain instead of zombie viruses. On the plus side, the boobs are better, and it went straight to video, never to punish theatergoers.
Even I'm shocked that I sat all the way through this cinematic abortion. I can't believe I sat through anything showcasing the dubious talkens of both The Rock (with a capital The) and Sean William Douchebag Scott. Bottom line: wrestling moves do not belong in action movies. You can punch, you can kick, you can bite, and you can eye gouge, but the minute I see a fucking suplex, you've crossed the line, and it's a line that only seems to be crossed when you cast a wrestler. God knows they can't act, so a director may as well let them suplex something a couple times. But not only does it have a wrestler, it's got guys with whips. Mmm, homoeroticism. The Rundown is another unfortunate example of the extremification of american cinema that began in earnest with xXx, and it needs to stop.
I like Kevin Smith a lot, and I think hiis movies are comedy genius. That is, I liked Kevin Smith, until I saw Jersery Girl. Any movie with a cutesey, precocious, child actor is going to be a problem, especially when that child actor is shockingly homely. You may think it's low for me to be making fun of children now, but really, she deserves it. There is no other explanation for this movie's exsistance other than Kevin Smith having been exposed to gamma radiation, causing abnormal growth in the Sleepless in Seattle gland, resuling in the production of positive, life affirming romantic comedies, like some kind of melodramatic Incredible Hulk. My life may have been affirmed, but my sense of humor was not, nor my respect for Seņor Smith. That, and any movie with both Mr. Affleck and Ms. Lopez in the time when Bennifer roamed the earth is going to be the worst kind of celebrity masturbatory self-promotion, and Kevin smith is complicit in it.
Sure, I've watched a couple of the good movies that pop up from time to time on On-Demand, but these four films constitute roughly 6-7 of the most frivolously squandered hours of my life. Alternate, more productive possibilities might have included:
- Scratching myself
- Raising and lowering my desk chair
- Creating nude photos of government officials with photoshop
- Creating nude photos of government officials with a camera, dark clothes, and a ski mask
- Perfecting a winning rock, paper, scissors strategy
- Doing something about my chronic unemployment
- Drinking myself to death
That, or I could reach into my vast DVD collection and watch something, I dunno, good. Something like Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy But apparently I have some kind of disorder where if crappy movies are available at my fingers on On-Demand, I am compelled by some higher authority to watch them, probably by the ghost of Ed Wood. In conclusion, I blame On-Demand for being a failure at life.