SNAKES ON A PLANE.

Yes, I saw it. It was a "before 6 p.m. 'bargain' matinee," but I paid for myself and my two children to see SNAKES ON A PLANE.

How was it?

Thirty seconds into the movie, I was ready to see the snakes on the titular plane. Plot? Characters? Motivations? Don't care. I already knew the movie would be "bad"--at least based on high-falutin' film academician standards. This movie is not for them. I wanted to see the snakes on the plane. Period.

As the credits started, I thought to myself, "Samuel L. Jackson. I bet that's the only name I recognize in this cast." I lost that bet. The second name in the credits is Julianna Margulies (wow, leaving ER makes her the Shelley Long of 2000) and I also recognized Kenan Thompson (Hey, hey hey!). The name Lin Shaye seemed familiar, and looking her up online I realzied I first saw her in a 1970s t.v. movie about the Triangle Shirt Mfg. Company factory fire.

The set-up is as brief as it can be. I think it took us about twenty minutes to get to the plane, and it's flight list of no-dimensional characters. That's right, they're so thin they're not even one-dimensional. There's the older flight attendant, the young flight attendant, the male flight attendant whom everybody thinks is gay, and the somewhere-in-the-middle on her last day before quitting (to go to law school, of course) flight attendant. That will be our female lead. There's the pilot, and the sexually-harassing co-pilot. And that's just the crew.

We have several passengers. One or two of them even have names. Not that we are given their names up front; usually, we get the name much later into the film. There's rapper "3 Cheez" (no wait, it's "3 Gs") and his two bodyguards (one of them gets a name at the end, because we need it for a plot point), hot Mercedes ("like the car--vroom! vroom!"), unnamed mom with unnamed baby, a pair of UMs (Unescorted Minors--kids travelling by themselves), overweight drunken might-be-Hispanic lady, OBM (obnoxious business man--at least he's not American). And Mercedes has a dog which she carries in her purse. The dog's name--I kid you not--is Mary Kate. There's also young couple on honeymoon and a separate horny couple (platinum members of the Mile High Club). And there's a kick boxer--a world-class champion kick boxer.

Can you guess who dies first? Who lives? Dare I spoil it for you?

Oh, let's cut the crap and get real. Anyone who wanted to see the movie has already seen it. We all know that. Heck, it's been out for almost two weeks now and New Line will be lucky if this movie breaks $40 million in box office (before DVD sales).

The horny couple (not so subtly) moves into the bathroom, disables the smoke detector, and gets high during their Mile High experience. I knew it was a federal offense to disable airline lavatory smoke detectors, but who knew that disabling said detectors would lead to snakes biting your breast? As their howls of agony are misinterpreted as howls of ecstacy, older flight attendanct notes, "He's good." When the howls stop abruptly (since they're dead), she intones something to the effect of, "Maybe not so good." Yuk it up folks, none of the breathing passengers have realized that we have SNAKES ON A PLANE!

The next attack is some anonymous passenger. I will always call him "Penis Guy" because that's where the snake bites him.

I don't remember attack #3, but attack #4 is "snake eating someone's eye" attack. I can't remember for sure, but I think this was overweight, drunk might-be-Hispanic woman. She's sleeping. And she gets sexually aroused by a large snake slithering up her dress. When she wakes up, the snake bites her eye. At least I think it was her.

The most creative death is not due to snakes. Some poor man gets trampled, and dies from a woman's high-heeled shoe impaling his ear.

Oh, and naturally we have "snakes-eye view" shots throughout the movie. I think these shots are just there to pad the anemic running time.

The movie promises nothing except SNAKES ON A PLANE. It delivers that. And just that. Nothing else. Well, I did see some spark of chemisty between Samuel L. Jackson's character and Julianna Margulies' character (they had names; I just can't remember them). If the film had delivered anything else, just a little something, it would have been worth the price of admission.

During the movie, I had to keep reminding myself not to expect realism. The 30' constricter on the plane? Just accept it and move on. (Although it does give one passenger a nice bit to perform.)

There might be worse ways to spend 90 minutes. My only regret is that I didn't see it in a packed house on opening night. That would have made it a fantastic film. Unfortunately, the moment where that can happen (i.e., opening night) is gone forever. And I'm almost left thinking, "I can't believe I paid money to see that--knowing in advance what it was." Almost. I wanted to see the snakes on the plane. And that's what I got. Unfortunately, that's all I got. Even the famous tag line, "I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!" is not enough. It comes too late in the movie and seems badly shoe-horned in, to boot. Which is a shame, because it could have come earlier and gotten the big reaction it deserved.

Not a bad way to spend your last free day before school starts. But it's no PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, either.

JFC!

No, that's not a new fast food chain. It's my shorthand for Jesus Fucking Christ!

Why the anger?

I have decided to start eating a more healthy diet. And as much as I hate doing it, I think keeping a "food journal" would help. So, I stumbled across (quite accidentally) a word processing document to keep such journal entries and thought I'd start using it today.

I type in my first few items. Then I think, lugging this document around with me everywhere will a pain. I should just keep this information on the web. I know, I'll blog it!

But, JFC!, something is wrong with blogger.com or my work internet connection, because things are taking forever to build a screen. I mean, 10 minutes after I hit the "create post" button, I still don't have a screen to start typing in.

Thus, my first "food blog" entry just migrated over here to another M.A.S.C. rant.

I'm about to say, forget this whole 'eating healthy' thing--God obviously doesn't want me to do anything to keep track of what I eat (and, therefore, how I can change what I eat).

JFC!

Award shows. Need I say more?

Golf. On television. Need I say more?

I think not.

Who has time to read?

Several years ago, Bill Maher's cable program Politically Incorrect (before it became a network crap-fest; about the time it was becoming a cable crap-fest) had a segment called Who Has Time to Read?

I laughed at the joke, as Bill mocked Americans by summarizing some recent bestseller, reading a few humorous excerpts. Sometimes the humor was even intended by the book's author. The beauty of the segment was that the viewing audience could banter about said book around the work water cooler without having to actually read it.

Well, the joke is on me. I haven't read a new book in years. I read parts of them (but never finish them). Or I buy them and never read them. Or I just think about buying them.

Life of Pi. Loved it. At least, the 60 pages I read.
Cryptonomicon. Loved it. At least, the 100+ pages I read.
Wolves of the Calla. Loved it. At least, the 40 pages I read.
The Tortilla Curtain. Loved it. At least, the 80 or so pages I read. (This one goes back to at least 1999, so maybe it started here).

Ooh, I just remembered a book I actually read. Kirsty MacColl: The One and Only by Karen O'Brien. It's not very good. You never feel like you get to know anything important--or even interesting--about Kirsty. You get a better sense of Kirsty by reading Billy Bragg's one page Foreward to the book than by reading the book itself. Or reading the liner notes for her compilation album, Galore.

So, that's it. One bad biography in the last five years. I did recently purchase the new biography of Dolley Madison, A Perfect Union (I hope it has her snack cake recipe in it). Maybe some day I'll finish it. But who has time to read?

I'm sure there are books out there I would enjoy. I tried reading a couple of best sellers, but they were dreck (The Celestine Prophecy, I'm looking at you).

I have managed to re-read some old favorites recently (Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft). Lynda Barry's Cruddy, which I first read in 1999, is tugging at my brain again. Maybe as you get old, you just want to re-read your favorites, instead of wasting all the time on something unproven.

Hey, that list reminds me! There is another book I actually read recently: Managing Ignatius: The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in New Orleans by Jerry Strahan. It is a factual account of managing a hot dog vendor company in the Big Easy. I kid you not. The Lucky Dog vendors are fictionalized as Paradise Hot Dog vendors ("12 inches of paradise") in A Confederacy of Dunces.

Oh, and I did make myself read each book from Lord of the Rings before the corresponding movie debuted. Parts of each book were fantastic. Parts of each book were horrible; it was mental torture to make myself finish each one before the next movie came out. And the movies came out a year apart.

OK, so I've read one bad biography, one decent autobiography, and three old fantasy novels. That's only five new (to me) books in five years.

I really must make more time for reading. But who has time to read?

So at long last someone has finally been taken into custody in the murder of America's favorite Dead Future Spokesmodel, JonBenet Ramsey.

I can't be the only person finding the timing to be, shall we say, suspect. Just as other issues in the world really seem to be spiralling out of control, we get an arrest for a mercifully nearly forgotten death of a spoiled rotten little girl who seemed destined to spend her life waving while standing next to Evil Rich Men. Would anyone really be surprised to find that Karl Rove was behind the resuscitation of this case?

Would you put it past Karl Rove to have maneuvered some poor kiddie porn fanatic into confessing after manipulating Colorado police into putting off a serious investigation until just exactly the moment he wanted?

And what am I to make of the confessed "killer"'s ex-wife going on the record saying that he was in Alabama with her when the world was freed from the burden of supporting yet another Infomercial Hostess? I saw this little bit of info online and it has been quickly buried in all kinds of other allegations about the accused loony.

Ick. Ick, I say.

I am Roscoe. I say Ick.