Bit-size impressions: Journey to the Center of the Earth

Asylum's "answer" to "why is the whole exploration force women?" seem to be "why can't they all be women? Are you sexist?" Well played Asylum, well played.
This makes their Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) movie the highest number of female leads vs male I've seen in a long while.. 

A California science/military institute is doing a teleportation experiment, planning to send our group of women to (I assume) a similar institute in Stuttgart, Germany. Instead the team end up in the center of the earth, where they're chased by a T-Rex, poisoned by plants and hunted by huge spiders. Fortunately the sister of the team leader (and the experiment head's ex girl-friend) has a huge drill that's already dug deeper than ever before, so she and the experiment head set out to dig their way into the core to save the team.

The movie itself is okey - a bit boring in places, but passable entertainment. Most of the leads do decent performances (besides the blonde, dainty soldier. How did you get on this mission?!?), the special effects are adorably bad and the story is okey. Props for smearing the women in gunk and not keeping them pretty while they're escaping dangers and spider webs (and the same running footage... Every time..). 

The single male lead was the only one who got out spot free, so to speak, so it was almost like he was the designated eye-candy. ^^
I wish they'd explained the tough girl's infatuation with the blond one, as it was never clear if she was bullying her because she liked her, or because she had PTSD..

And please, for the love of God, give Dedee Pfeiffer better directing on what to do with her hands, or tie them down! *glasses on, glasses off, glasses on, glasses off, pen in mouth, pen out, pen in, pen out..* She was a slave to her props in most of the exposition scenes!


At least it was better than the 2008 Brendan Fraser one. I'm -still- pissed at that infuriating "family movie", where we spend most of the movie following the underage teenage nephew creepily hit on the adult woman who's there to be their guide.

Ella Minnow Pea book review

"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn was a really interesting book about language. A small island Nollop - outside the US - have built their society around the guy who came up with the pangram "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". When the letters on his statue fall down the council decides this is the will of Nollop and removes the characters from all discourse.

The epistle-based society fall into despair, but do not dare fight the council, and we follow through letters, notes and other written communication the fall of the Nollopian society.

It's a very smart book, with a huge glossary and some interesting grammatical choices as the letters fall, though you have to have a huge vocabulary to follow it - as they start using more and more synonyms I spent an increasing amount of time looking up words in the dictionary, until they lose so many graphemes that they resort to "sound-likes" which makes it difficult to read in a totally different way.

While I really liked the word-play and the intelligence in the language-based writing, I wasn't as fond of the story-telling. I felt the book kept telling me plot threads right before them coming into effect - why doesn't the increasingly tyrannical council read the islanders written communication? Because Nollop said before he died "never to read your neighbour's letters". Literally the next page is the council putting into effect a written-communication checker. He's just French so he won't be able to actually read the letters, keeping true to Nollop's wishes. - and stuff like this happens several times. I also found the tone took a heavy turn towards the end, suddenly becoming very dark, and there's a huge plot element with one of the council members I felt was never acknowledged or resolved.

So, I really liked it as a intelligent language experiment, but not as much as a stand-alone story. I'd recommend reading it if you're interested in language, grammar and creative takes on writing.

Ice Twisters review

Ice Twisters is a 2009 Canadian made-for-TV movie that can best be described as an episode of Castle - if the episode was a low-budget disaster movie set in one of Castle's books.
Main protagonist Charlie (Mark Moses) is a former scientist turned disaster novel writer, who's coincidentally doing a book signing/film interview in the same general area that the FSF (Federal Science Foundation) is testing their weather drones, that revolutionary can generate rain clouds, not just seed them. Of course, the experiment generates a freak storm at the book signing, and Charlie runs into his former love-interest/assistant Joanne (Camille Sullivan) - now the main scientist behind the weather drones - and forces himself onto their investigation. After another storm Joanne wants to pull the plug on the experiment, but we soon find out that the government official in charge and the other scientist have conspired and locked them out of the drone control program. The heroes go rogue, trying to stop the drones while battling worse and worse storms threatening to destroy the entire Portland area.

"We just need to shoot through at the right angle"

The first half of the movie has a surprisingly plausible set-up, with pretty well-written dialogue. Most of the actors both do and say things you could actually accept real people doing (bear in mind I'm comparing this to movies which often have plot-synopses like this: "Stunned, scientist David Koch discovers evidence that it was a shift in the Earth's polarity that triggered the last Ice Age.. In just 24 hours." (from my newly bought 10 disaster movies DVD collection. No I don't know either if it's the ice age or the realization that only took 24 hours..)), and pretty much every scene with the main protagonist (Charlie) is laugh-inducing because of his snarky, arrogant attitude.
The one discrepancy is the government official - Frank, played by Robert Moloney - who apparently decided to show up on set ready to play the main villain in a Bond movie, and nobody dared tone him down. Which is fortunate, because his performance is by far the best thing about the movie, to such a degree that you don't even care that the movie goes off the deep end during the second half.

Romantic sub-plot development, shot by hiding in the grass..?

None of that however explains the weird creeper camera work, where the camera man is often laying on the ground or hiding behind furniture/buildings during exposition or character development scenes. It's like Mark Moses and Robert Moloney thought they were doing a comedy, most of the side-characters thought they'd act somewhere between a biopic and a (poorly acted) drama (besides the aid, who was obviously playing in an action-thriller terrorism movie..), while the cinematographer was making a slasher-movie.

Saving the earth at the University's HAARP facility, framed by the background shelves

The movie ends with the heroes (the ones who survived) walking into the sunset(rise?) and the villain being confronted with his actions - sitting by his desk silently realizing that his job and life is over.
It is cliché-ily beautiful. His performance combined with the Castle-like attitude of Moses' character and the insane disaster shots/deaths in the second part makes most of the movie genuinely entertaining to watch.
If you're looking for a realistic disaster movie, you won't find it here (let me know if you -do- find one), but if you're looking for a silly, low-budget disaster flick, this one is definitely worth considering.
For me the biggest "quality" sign for these types of movies is "would I watch it again?" and for Ice Twisters, that's a definite yes, in fact, it'd probably be one of my pics for a disaster schlock night.

"Good luck in prison"

And Robert Moloney is definitely making my list of  "Ooh, it's that guy again, yay!" actors..