Where will you be....?

Have been absolutely busy these past few days and all, and have been staying in the office extremely late, until the wee hours of the morning. Like last night for example, the work that i had to do just kept coming and coming and coming non stop, and without me noticing it, it was already 11pm and i had to FORCE myself to shutdown my laptop and leave. Sad? Absolutely! Necessary? Unfortunately. Watched two movies at the end of last week which I am surprised now, thinking about it, that i actually found the time to head off and spend 2 hours plus a time, idle, just sitting in the cinema. However, it was good fun and it did keep my mind off more pressing matters which i just did not want to think about at that particular time.

First movie that i watched was the Roland Emmerich "Doomsday thriller", "The day after tomorrow" (or "Lusa" as what some of my colleagues call it). Its one of those mega-budget, blow your brains away with over the top special effects and CGI and hope you don't notice the absolutely ridicilous plot line. Basically what happens in this 2 hours and 4 minutes of film is, the hero, Professor Adrian Hall (Quaid) finds out that due to us humans continously polluting the environment, earth will, in a million years, due to some scientific mumbo jumbo reasoning that he tried to explain, which I just failed to comprehend after the first few lines, experience another ice age which would wipe out all living creatures as the previous one. Obviously, the deputy President of the United States would laugh at his over the top suggestions , and obviously the hero will be proven right, well sort of right since his timing was way way WAY off as it happened within a few weeks, not a few hundred years!

So what happens then? His son finds himself in New York for joining some quiz competition to be spending some more time with the girl (which initially, i wouldn't have mind either, but after seeing her absolute stupidity of just keeping quiet and walking around like everything's fine and dandy while a whole chunk of her leg has been ripped off, i had my doubts), and surprise surprise, New York would be one of the first places to be hit by the storm. So, after finally convincing the Deputy President of the US of A that shit is indeed happening, and saying stuff like "Save as much as you can" and telling people to move as far south as possible, our hero goes against everyone and goes up north so save his son (initially he was planning to go BY HIMSELF, but obviously his two buddies would follow him, right?), because he is the hero of the movie, and only the hero as his gang of merry men would be able to survive ultra freezing temperatures that even the oil in the tanks of helicopters would freeze in a matter of a few seconds. Yes, he is the MAN. Actually, I just cannot be asked to write much more on this, but i just have to mention that the ending is just SUCH a rip off. ** Spoiler Alert**. I mean, at the end of the day, the "greatest storm ever experienced by mankind" just suddenly decided, "hey, i'm tired of all this" and just DECIDED TO STOP WITHOUT ANY PARTICULAR REASON. When I saw that, i was thinking to myself, "What the ****?!!". In the end, he saves his kid and some other people, and everyone is happy.

At the end of the day, if you can see past the major flaws in the movie, such as the scene where the ultra freezing cold temperature "chases" the guys from the back, up the stairs and all, while freezing everything else that it comes across, only to be stopped in it's tracks by, get this, a WOODEN door!!, (and come to think of it, i read somewhere else something that didn't come cross my mind a that time, that the kids were burning the books to keep the fire buring when there were tons of WOOD, like the chairs and all laying around. A normal person like me would have thought that burning the wood would be a much better idea, only to be corrected when they used the wooden chairs as "snow shoes" (is that what u call them) for them to go outside in search of medication for the poor little girl, only for them to be chased by ultra huge wolves which can survive ultra freezing weather), basically, it IS an entertaining movie. You just need to shut your brains off and be mesmerized by stunning scenes of water flooding through the streets of manhattan, and also don't miss the scene which i personally find absolutely hilarious and ironic, where you see American citizens illegally crossing over the border to Mexico, where some of them actually were cutting the barded wires in order to get through.

I think i've written enough for now. The other movie which i saw was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which i think i'll write about a bit later. "Lusa" gets 3/5 stars for the special effects, 4/5 stars just for the scene of Americans crossing over the border, -5/5 stars for an absolutely ridicilous plot line, 3/5 stars for Emmy Rossum, and -2.5/5 stars for her character being an absolute idiot. So all in all, "The day after tomorrow" gets 2.5 / 5 stars. Cheers.