LIFEPOINTS - MAKE THEM AVAILABLE TO THE DESERVING AND TAKE THEM (OR ACCEPT DONATIONS) FROM THOSE WHO EITHER DON'T APPRECIATE THEM OR JUST CAN'T DEAL WITH HAVING THEM ANYMORE...

I Don't Know - But I'll Bet Jails Would Be A Lot Emptier

Pardon the brief and somewhat depressing entry - Miss Murder is in a mood (no I'm not going to talk in the third person) but I was thinking:

I hate hearing of people, especially children, who never get a chance to see what a 'normal' life is because of various diseases or disabilities.



And I think of those of us who sometimes wish our lives would just disappear, and those who don't appreciate what they have and try to take it from someone else. I mean, the United States only has 4.4 percent of the world's population, yet as of 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. 

We ALL know he's out of credits...

While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Imprisonment of America's 2.3 million prisoners, costing $24,000 per inmate per year, and $5.1 billion in new prison construction, consumes $60.3 billion in budget expenditures.

I think Matt Groening was on the right track, but movies like Idiocracy and In Time (one movie I haven't actually seen yet but it's on my list, even though dystopian futures isn't exactly horror - just unpleasant at best) are closer - the better you live, the longer you live (in Idiocracy I think a 'dude' is included in there somewhere).

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to (briefly) say that if it were possible, I would give away more than enough credits today and that's all I have. Sorry. Here's something cheery:

Okay so that wasn't so cheery... but it was FREAKING sweet! 

I FIND THAT TRYING TO BE 'NORMAL' WILL BE THE FASTEST WAY TO KILL ME, PEOPLE ARE STILL WILLING TO BELIEVE THE STUPIDEST THINGS YET NOT BELIEVE THE REAL THINGS, BEING NORMAL IS NO LONGER 'PC', AND OH YEAH, A MOVIE...

Big Ass Spider! (2013)

I'm hella-pissed. Yeah, I know, welcome back from the 90's, right? Well in the 90's I never used the word 'hella' so I guess I get a few free ones, right? (For those with that gut-dropping feeling that I'm about to go on a rant, congratulations, you may know me a little) Now let me say first that I totally understand the never-ending battle for human beings to be, well, human to each other and treat each other with the respect and peace we all desperately crave. But then I found out that calling somebody 'normal' is now insulting? Did we go through Idiocracy already and I was just sleeping when that was called out?

...and now, this cartoon for absolutely no reason...

For those who are scratching your heads (don't, it stirs up bugs), the PROPER way to refer to a person who, well, lives, breathes, sleeps, and not much else is Cisgender. Ummm what? Well (the muckrakers desperately looking for muck to rake will tell you), when you call yourself 'normal', you're actually showing ignorance because you are labeling those different from yourself as 'abnormal' and we JUST CAN'T HAVE THAT IN THIS EQUAL, LOVING AND PEACEFUL SOCIETY, CAN WE?

Did you believe this picture of the 'giant crab'
was real? If you did, there's a special label for you, too.

Ahem. Sorry about that. To be more clear, a cisgender is a person who identifies with the sex they were born with. So what's next? To be more clear about more things, such as what kind of air we usually breathe? Let's see, that means soon we will be using labels ('cause that's all they are folks, don't try to pretend you're being all superior or anything) Mountainbreathers (for those who live in or near the mountains), seabreathers (self-explanatory I hope), citybreathers (ditto), countrybreathers (also ditto), and so on.

Big Ass Spider! For real. As best as they know
right now anyway, the Goliath bird-eating spider
is officially the 'biggest' arachnid we've
got so far.... HEY, GET BACK HERE COWARDS!!!
While they don't think it really eats birds, the
fact that it actually COULD is terrifying enough...

Well, I have (as I have mentioned hella-times) fibromyalgia, so where is my label? If lifestyle gets one, and gender preference gets one, then we better get our dictionaries out and figure out labels for people with different disabilities. Hmm? Disabled IS a label? Well that's freaking boring. I want a 'special' hella-label to go with the illness that prevents me from doing simple things in a reasonable period of time without becoming so ill I get (symptom deleted due to gross description), my feet swell like they've been bitten by hella-spiders, I get so dizzy and weak I sleep for a month and then I look at all the reviews I have to do and hella-cry.

Hmm? Okay, okay, NO MORE HELLA. No, wait a minute, I have rights. I'm a CISHELLA! GET USED TO IT!


So. Let's talk about bad movies. Big Ass Spider! is one of those fun ones that wasn't supposed to be serious (or good either, apparently), and also was NOT made by either The Asylum OR SyFy. It polarized critics (a fancy way of saying they either thought it was lovely or a piece of crap) but hey, any movie with an exclamation point at the end is all right by me. To rip apart. Oh and since the Google pictures are all copies of each other's picture and I get screamed at for using copyrighted material anyway, I'll be using my own screenshots for my (ahem) unique perspective.

The hubby had to watch this with me, anticipating a bit of fun watching all the mistakes, bad CGI effects, and huge plot holes... and got really, really, bored. Yeah, unfortunately, they pushed the word 'comedy' really hard in this thing but - nope. Horror comedy as a genre is pretty difficult to pull off, and a nasty spider that's bigger than a cruise ship isn't really a reason to yuk it up.

Our movie opens with a picture of a guy watching this big ass spider (to make this easier we'll just use BAS) tear the top off a building as a really weak copy of the song 'Where Is My Mind' by Pixies plays in the background (which, by some weird coincidence, is the only Pixies song I actually know). People are screaming, running, burning (for some reason) and shooting weapons at something that's 73 stories up (uh, don't think bullets travel that far guys). Let the bad CGI begin NOW!


He's an average guy with a blue collar job who's lonely. Okay, so our first lesson of the movie: Unless you're movie gorgeous and have an exciting career, you can't get a date. Nice. Somebody needs to have a talk with Mike Rowe. No, not for a date you potatoheads, because real work is... ah skip it.

His day started twelve hours earlier (cue flashback) and we get to see that he's a kind hearted hard worker even if he doesn't get paid much. Sounds like a great guy to me but this is Hollywood's view of blue collar workers so they make him out like he's a loser. His day starts with doing a favor for a crazy cat lady (a puzzling appearance by Lin Shaye, who you would know from the Insidious series) who pays him in fruitcake (oh, that's subtle) and goes downhill as he has to go to the hospital for a brown recluse bite.

Lloyd Kaufman (Troma Films) appears 

briefly as himself and as spider bait.

Just for info - a Brown Recluse spider is mainly found towards the Gulf Of Mexico and people scoff at the thought of them being anywhere near California. I'm not going to argue with the where and the when and the why. I'll just say from personal experience that while living in Washington state, a friend was bitten by one (they're not supposed to be there either) and was hours from death by the time he got to a hospital (not that it's that lethal, the friend was that stubborn about going for treatment).

So. While at the hospital our hero, Alex, notices a body bag go by... yeah, that happens a lot at hospitals. Not. But it's a convenient plot device to tell us how this spider got into the hospital in the first place - inside the body of the dead guy. Nice. It starts the size of a puppy and will grow exponentially according to the Army guys who suddenly show up and explain that it's not a real Earth spider 'cause they took some stuff from extraterrestrial sources so it's a...

...and that's the best I could come up with for this movie, sorry.

The rest of the story is simply Alex and his new sidekick, a Hispanic security guard from the hospital cleverly named Jose, to catch the spider before she (It's always a she isn't it?) lays her eggs and infests the world...

Just one Kardashian butt could
feed a giant spider for a month...

Sigh. I wish I had a lot more jokes for this but with the two repeating that they need to 'shoot it in the butt' a thousand times, there's not much comedy material there. Oh, they want to shoot the spinneret because apparently the flaxen material is highly flammable so they believe that will cause the spider to explode from the inside out.

Despite the fact that she does lay her eggs and there are tons of baby spiders running around toward the end of the movie, they conveniently forget about those when they manage to bring the big girl down. Duh.

It's okay, he's was just a weekend dad anyway...

All the movie seems to care about is Alex getting the girl, in this case some Army chick named Karly who of course IS movie gorgeous so even though they've known each other for an hour, tops, they're in love and everything is in flames and destroyed but they're happy so it's good, right? Right?



                        

GETTING NEW (WELL, THEY'RE NEW TO ME) MOVIES, TRYING TO FIND THE TIME TO WATCH AND REVIEW THEM, WATCHING WILDFIRES NEAR MY TOWN, WATCHING THE NUMBERS OF OUR THERMOMETER GO WAY WAY UP AND THEN DOWN THEN UP, THEN DOWN, AND WATCHING THE IDIOCRACY OF PEOPLE WHO INSIST ON ONE LANGUAGE IN THIS COUNTRY AND THEY CAN'T EVEN SPEAK IT WELL THEMSELVES





Random Ramblings

Okay that's a long title and pretty much sums up my mood, our current events around here, and a personal peeve I have that seems to be getting worse.


If you want to blame my irritability as a combination of fibro and changing weather pressure, yeah, that's a pretty good bet. But we'd also have to blame the fact that I'm known (and not at all popular) as a spelling and grammar Nazi - which is probably why people dropped off my Facebook page like Disney pushed lemmings off a cliff.

THIS IS AMERICA DAMMIT, WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE!

No, no we don't. What we do (or a lot of us do) is mangle a language that I admit is pretty confusing and, even though I still believe that Mandarin Chinese is probably one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak and write, English isn't the easiest.

For those who need reminding, America is the ultimate melting pot. So unless you are 100% Native American (Although I am a degree that is just enough to be registered, I don't even remotely look like one), your family came here from somewhere else. Our sense of patriotism can be impressive but our intolerance of other people who speak other languages is not. "I shouldn't have to choose '1' for English!" That gets repeated A LOT. You know how many times I hear or see that? Way, way too many. 

What happened to us being a free nation for all those who want to live here? And no, I am not going to get into politics and talk about who pays for what. That's not my point. What I am saying is, if you're so incredibly proud of your language that you think everyone should use it and ONLY it, shouldn't you also have the responsibility to be able to read, write, and speak it well?


I am not perfect by any means. I do not have a college education. I graduated from a small town high school with decent enough grades but I was not valedictorian - just another face in another class of average kids. But dammit, what the hell happened to them? I've given up on reading posts from people I know as well as those I don't on my Facebook page because I get a headache cringing when I see how badly they write (which is why they're not on my page anymore). But it's not just the people I used to know. It now seems that the idiocracy has spread.

English seems to be converting into a mangled language to news sources, entertainment sources, even sources that really REALLY should at least have a passing knowledge of the language.

'Weird Al' did a song about it which sums up my feelings perfectly. I've posted it before and I'm doing it again:

Just this morning, in referring to a recent tragedy the whole nation is speaking of, one news source said (in part because really the whole sentence didn't make sense) we lost someone who made us 'bare' with our madness...


Bear. Bear with our madness. Why is that so hard? And no, it's not about doing you-know-what in the woods.
You lose time.
You work a knot loose.
You go to the store.
Your friends go to the store too.
You go to the store with two friends.
You're a good friend.
Your friends are good to you.
Your male friend just got his mail.
It's not nice to point at a dog if its tail is bent.

Okay, the combo of heat, frustration and a heap of movies to review has got me a bit cranky and I can't even keep my eyes open. But please consider this:


Many people who have come to the United States know two or more languages. When Americans go to other countries, they get bent out of shape if they can't find someone who speaks English. And a lot of people for whom English is a second language speak it a lot better than we do. How pitiful is that?



                        

ROUND AND ROUND IT GOES, WHERE IT'S GONNA STOP I DON'T KNOW AKA THE FUTURE IS NOW





Idiocracy (2006)


Have you ever had one of those roundabout conversations with your significant other? They want to watch a movie with you (usually I'm watching 'em myself 'cause I yell at the screen a lot) but they don't know the name of the movie?

"I want to watch this movie - it's supposed to be funny."
"What's the name?"
"I don't know - you probably don't want to watch it anyway."
"Sure I do, what's it called?"
"Nah, I think it has that guy you hate in it, you won't watch it."
"We'll watch it right now, what's it called?"
"I... I don't remember. You won't watch it anyway."
"We'll. Watch. It. NOW. What is it called?"
"You don't like the guy in it. Never mind."
"What guy?"

Oh, THAT guy - yeah, I hate him.

"The guy with the nose."
"The nose?"
"The guy you don't like with the nose and blonde hair."
"What's the name of the movie?" (Steam is coming off my head now)
"I think it's... well it's... Idiocramacy?"
"What?"
"I told you that you won't watch it."
"Is that the name?"
"No."
<Half an hour later>
"Look, we will see it RIGHT NOW if you tell me the title."

OMG people over 3 million results now? STOP IT!

"Ow my balls."
"WHAT?"
"Google ow my balls."
"Why?"
"See? You don't want to watch it."
<Makes sure there are no sharp objects nearby> "You want me to Google ow my balls."
"Yeah."
"Ooookay. (Googles ow my balls, get 1,610,000 results, no lie and the very first entry is called Idiocracy) Geez Louise what the hell?"
"Yeah."
"That  movie right there?"
"You don't want to watch it 'cause it has that guy you hate."
<Two hours later>
"We WILL watch this movie, SHUT UP!"

Oh him? He's okay.

So. This quasi-science fiction comedy was written by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King Of The Hill) so if you're expecting something witty... uh... watch Beavis and Butthead. This stars Luke Wilson (who is the brother of Owen Wilson, the actor with the broken nose who I personally detest for no good reason) and... other people. 

Owen plays an Army librarian named Joe who is absolutely average in every way. The Army decides to conduct an experiment using him and a prostitute named Rita they borrowed from her pimp named Upgrayedd to be in pods in stasis for a year to see if it was possible (?!?). The whole experiment (after the two are put in pods) is forgotten and trashed when the officer in charge decides he likes the whole prostitution thing a little too much.

Our future leaders... don't you just want to die?

So everything is in the landfill - including the pods. Instead of one year later, the pods are broken open five hundred years later, when the landfill is so incredibly huge it collapses and 'washes' through the city like a huge landslide. Joe's chamber breaks into the apartment of Frito, who's pissed he interrupted his favorite show which is... say it with me... SAY IT... 'Ow! My Balls!' (hence the over a million references in Google).

We're not that far off unfortunately - after all, there is this movie...

The movie... does not get better. There was apparently a statement to be made here, which has been made by other authors in other books, that the way our whole system - education, politics, entertainment, etc. - is constantly being 'dumbed down', soon our society will be nothing but morons. Okay, I can see that. Look at your Facebook page if you have one. You have to admit that a lot of the people on it use poorer English (if that's their primary language) than those emails you get from Nigerian princes trying to give you money. 

Looks normal to me...

When professional news sites write stories like 'the way the people died was grizzly' and people can write about 'my ex is just 2 po to pay child suport 4 his 6 kids and his preggers girlfriend is all like we ain't gots no money bitch' you know something has to change. The theory Mike Judge was trying to postulate was that smart people consider all the factors before having children and will often either put it off or not have any at all, while those of, let's say less to work with, will breed indiscriminately and produce most of the population. That's been thought of and written of before too, but let's get this movie over with.

Do you want fries with that?

Joe is pretty much in a daze so figuring he must be hallucinating or something decides to go to the hospital. When he approaches the ER desk and tries to describe his symptoms, the 'nurse' uses a machine like you find in a fast food restaurant - instead of words and prices there are just pictures. She punches one and he's led to another cubicle where the 'doctor' (played by the always ineffective Justin Long - I feel sorry for him, he's always playing someone who never helps) looks at a 'receipt and tells him he's... well, lets just say that people that act and talk as smart as him are deemed to be... you know what? I'm not going to repeat any of that - it sets the whole PC world back about... well, five hundred years. And some change.

Way to pigeonhole yourself, Justin.

The 'doctor' then notices Joe doesn't have his bar code tattoo - it has replaced money as currency - you work, the bar code gets swiped, you go to eat your bar code... umm, this is where it started to fall apart for me. These people are so dumb their favorite (and award winning) movie is called 'Ass', yet they can figure out a computer system with bar codes for... you know what? Never mind or this is gonna be very VERY long. He goes to jail where he is renamed "Not Sure" by a faulty identity tattooing machine, and takes an IQ test before outsmarting the prison guards by telling them they screwed up, he was supposed to be getting out, not going in and they let him walk.

No comment.

The President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is a guy who dresses and acts like he's from the WWE, and runs Uhmerica, where everything is based and paid for by corporate sponsorship. That means simple things like water are shunned - people drink only a sports drink because it has 'electrolytes' (which they manage to spell correctly) - water is for the toilet. Because the sports drink is also used to water crops, nothing ever grows and dust storms ravage the city. Yeah, I know - it would ravage the country where the crops are not the city but shut up or we'll be here all day.

Whoops, how did THIS get in here?

So Joe and Frito (he's the only guy he knows plus he's his lawyer) and Rita who they found later do stuff. Then they go over here and do stuff. Sometimes they do other stuff. Mostly they're searching for a 'time machine' that Frito claims is in the city but doesn't know where. But there are eyes everywhere and Joe's bar code gets caught by one and he's arrested (I KNOW - HOW WOULD THEY KNOW HOW TO - JUST LET ME FINISH THIS PLEASE?) and brought to the President, who makes him Secretary of the Interior since he is the smartest man on the planet. 

Trouble is, he doesn't know what that is. Do you? They, like, totally protect our environment and junk. Oh man, my head is starting to hurt - I feel like Charlie in Flowers For Algernon. What is that? Pick up a book once in a while, would ya?

I would've guessed that it would have been a Wal Mart...

So more stuff happens and junk. Joe spends a lot of the movie looking for the time machine. All of the city is in ruins and one particular area is totally wasted - except for a gigantic Costco. Nice social commentary there Mr. Judge. People are camped out all around this place like it is a third world country. Inside is everything a Costco usually has and more - and spelled correctly. At least most of it was.

Joe decides to use his position to force the farmers to use water on their crops. Since the corporation that owns the sports drink (again wouldn't someone have to be smart enough to... ah to hell with it) loses tons of money they lay off half the population and Joe is blamed, since plants don't just grow overnight. It was (slightly) amusing to see them pumping the water from their toilets though.

The hubby liked this one...

Joe is sentenced to die. In Uhmerica you are sentenced to participate in a monster truck rally. In a small car. Of course things go his way, the people see that yes, the plants are starting to grow and Joe is not only spared, but becomes Vice President. He decides to stay and so does Rita. That's when they find that the time machine they've been spending the whole movie looking for is actually a ride at a carnival. 'Kay.

Relax, this is their salute...

Later Joe becomes President and Rita is First Lady. He swears he's going to put mankind back on the correct path, making education a priority and getting this great nation back to the glory it had before. 'Kay. He and Rita have three very smart children. Frito, who is now Vice President, marries eight times and has 32 of the world's stupidest children. So the cycle of duh life begins again. The end THANK GOD.

If you watch all the credits (or at least fast forward to the end) you see there is a third pod (please don't ask, I don't have a clue) that bursts open and out comes Upgrayedd the pimp, ready to search for his ho'.

This is about right...

My hubby said if people asked why I would put myself through this, just say I was tied to the chair and not allowed to eat, drink, sleep or go to the bathroom until I watched it. Nah. I was curious just because of the dystopian theme which has been explored by different people (some sci-fi authors, some actual scientists) and was a bit scared that some of the movie is awfully close to things that are happening right now. You hear that Honey Boo Boo? Please don't grow up to make a reality TV show called 'Ow my taco.' I said please didn't I? (Thank you hubby for that.)

Update 6/25/14: I found an article that compares the world today with the movie... and it's not good. Not good at all. I don't want to copy the guy so here's the link to the article:

http://www.mandatory.com/2013/08/09/10-things-idiocracy-predicted-would-happen-and-sadly-already

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies