and movies

[mmcirvin]

Lileks beat me to reviewing "The Core". He gets it pretty much right, except for his fondness for the deleted scenes on the DVD: some of them would have worked, but about half of them were just devoted to making the Stanley Tucci character more broadly obnoxious than he was in the final cut, mostly by emphasizing the modern shorthand of smoker = villain or asshole.

I actually expected "The Core" to be far worse than it is. It's a pretty typical, harmless, big, dumb summer popcorn movie with a scientifically ridiculous premise and a better-than-usual cast. Its troubled production history, the capstone of which was the modification of the trailer after the Columbia shuttle disaster, probably caused the industry to regard it with fear and trembling by the time it came out, so it wasn't marketed as heavily as it could have been. Also, for some reason, the people who made it kept going around chatting up how scientifically accurate and educational it was, which is absolutely the wrong thing to say about a flick like this, since it's both a lie and counterproductive.

It may have helped that before we saw it, we watched the low-budget knockoff "Deep Core", starring Terry Farrell and Wil Wheaton as The Guy Who Dies First. It makes "The Core" look like a good movie just because the latter is mostly competently made.

Comments

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Wil Wheaton is a white male, he's not allowed to Die First. Hell, as a white male he's practically Immortal

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. A classic mistake. You're thinking of the standard action/adventure movie. This was a disaster movie. No one escapes alive except for two or three lucky folk.

Smoker shorthand

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I was watching Stargate SG-1 yesterday, and an episode opened with some people in military uniforms smoking, and I could automatically tell they were going to be Russian, because Americans never smoke. In fact, in a previous episode they found a discarded Russian cigarette pack in front of an ancient temple on another planet.