Alien: A Biological Dissertation

So the Alien trilogy is pretty awesome. Yes I said “trilogy.” Any movies based off of H. R. Giger paintings *have* to be awesome right? Sorry, I’m getting a little ahead of myself... For anyone who hasn’t seen them, the Alien movies are an iconic sci-fi/horror franchise started in the late 70’s. The basic premise of the first movie was a small crew of people of various occupations working on a cargo spaceship. They answer an SOS signal on some planet where they find an abandoned ship. (Ever since, this has been a typical sci-fi death sentence ala Event Horizon, Lost in Space, and Sunshine. You know, I don’t understand why they didn’t just name Sunshine Event Horizon II. It’s almost the exact same thing only it involves the sun. Anyway this is off topic…) While exploring the ship, one of the crew becomes a host to a baby alien. It gets brought onto the cargo ship where it kills everyone. But it’s not just about the killing. A large part of the movie is devoted to understanding the alien as a life form. The most interesting thing about it is that it goes through a few stages before it reaches it’s adult form. The concept of the facehugger phase is totally believable. It’s perfectly adapted for accomplishing what it needs to do. It has a bunch of long spindly legs for wrapping around the front of your head. Then under that there’s a long tail that It wraps tightly around your neck, usually incapacitating you. Point being, once it’s on you you’re not getting it off and it gets to have it’s way with you. It’s pretty sound reasoning. However, everything else about the alien is a little uh… less believable.

On the alien’s life timeline it starts out as an egg, (which always inexplicably hatches precisely when a human walks by it.) From the egg comes your facehugger. The purpose of the facehugger is to find a way inside a host organism, (mostly humans and always through the mouth.) Once it latches on to someone’s face it becomes somewhat mysterious as to what happens and how it’s accomplished. After a while the facehugger falls off of the victim’s face as a sort of dead husk. The victim, now a host to the alien, comes to and goes about life as usual until what is essentially a miniature form of the adult alien bursts out of their stomach and wriggles away into a dark secluded corner. At this point the host is dead.

Now going back to when the hugger first attaches itself to the face, what happened? Clearly the alien entered the host via the esophagus but what’s really weird is that the hugger and what comes out of the host’s stomach are completely different life forms. That’s perfectly acceptable because it happens with butterflies all the time. But when butterflies do it they don’t leave behind a totally intact dead caterpillar. Was the hugger just some kind of vehicle the alien was riding around inside of until it could get out and jump down someone’s throat thereby abandoning it? Or was the hugger a separate entity whose only purpose was to transplant an alien embryo in a nearby host and then die upon success of it‘s mission? But the real point I’m trying to make here is that it already hatched out of an egg, why does it need to further develop inside of a host? Shouldn’t it be more or less fully formed? If it is in fact a transplanted embryo why didn’t it just develop inside.. oh I don’t know, the egg it just hatched out of?! It’s like it has to hatch twice. And what if there was no host nearby or anywhere? Wouldn’t this be an evolutionary dead end? Or if not, it’s just an extremely inconvenient way to propagate your species.

When the juvenile alien exit’s the host, I dare say it’s small enough to cram snugly into a Pringles can. At this point the only thing it has left to do is grow. And holy hell does it grow! It goes from being about a foot tall to around six or seven feet in about half an hour. And somehow it manages to do this without eating anything. One minute it’s no bigger than a chicken and then the next time you see it it’s taller than the crew members. The law of conservation of mass just got suspended.

Another baffling time related discrepancy is how quickly the aliens multiply and establish themselves in a habitat. In the fourth movie, (OK yes it’s not really a trilogy,) a group of aliens get loose on a ship where they are being used as test subjects. No more than an hour later they’ve plastered entire corridors and rooms with their gross membranous snot goo, designated a room for their queen, started an assembly line of egg production in multiple rooms, claimed about a dozen people as hosts, hatched out of said hosts, killed several lab personnel, and created a fully mature human/alien hybrid. I’m aware that there is a difference in movie time versus real life time but in this movie it’s actually pretty similar. If the breakout had occurred at the beginning of the move, the aliens would have had enough time to create an entire civilization complete with night clubs and a sewer system. It almost makes the growth speed of the alien in the first movie look perfectly reasonable.

Something else interesting about the aliens is that they have highly acidic blood. Like so acidic that it can burn through several inches of metal in just a few seconds. I’m willing to let this slide for two reasons. A: I don’t know enough about blood and acid to make a legitimate complaint. B: It’s awesome.

Arguably the coolest feature of the aliens is their mouth within a mouth. Although if you think about it for too long it starts to sound kind of funny. I think I remember watching a Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers where Dale is watching an Alien parody on TV. Though instead of having two mouths, this one had like ten. They did have a valid point… if it already has two mouths, why not give it ten or twenty. It’s already outlandish. In the movie the inner mouth extends out of the outer mouth fast enough to puncture a skull and kill prey. So I guess that’s useful. The only thing is that since that mouth has to fit inside another mouth that’s about the size of a regular human mouth it has to be really small. Can you imagine having to eat solid food through a mouth half the size of yours? It would take forever. But since you never really see how the aliens eat I guess it could be argued that the small mouth doesn’t completely block the big mouth and they actually eat with the big mouth. Whatever...

Why go next gen?

I’m still waiting for next gen consoles to be worth a damn but It looks like I have a while to wait yet. The main problem seems to be that I have to trade a reasonable price for quality games. In other words, the ability to play good games is more expensive than the ability to play bad games. Funny how that works…



PS3:
First off, it’s enormous. And the way it bulges out in the middle like that makes it look like an over-inflated life raft or something. I know I’ve seen computers this size, but computers do a lot of things. The only thing the PS3 needs to be able to do is run PS3 games. So why the hell does it need to be this big? Was it made in 1975? Are there vacuum tubes and tape reels in there?



Then there’s the price. I’m not going to pay $500 for the platform and then $60 for every subsequent game. It’s ridiculous. Not only that, they felt the need to make different models with different hard drive capacities at different prices. Well I hope you know the exact amount of hard drive space all of the games you will ever install is because if you don’t buy the correct amount you’re making a really expensive mistake. This isn’t a good thing. It’s just frustrating. Why have to install games at all? Well it makes load times shorter but what it ultimately does is inhibit the amount of games you can keep by varying degrees depending on how much money you fork over.

Maybe someday I’ll think about it when the price goes down enough but while I can still get new PS2 games and Devil May Cry and Splinter Cell cost $6 in the used bin I have little initiative to buy one.



Wii:
It’s embarrassing just saying the name of this consol let alone playing it. I remember when it was called the Nintendo “Revolution.” (Why does Nintendo always have to code name their stuff?) Anyway I recall thinking that the Revolution was a stupid name for a video game consol. Then later I was reading some magazine and learned that the official name was now the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, the name Revolution seemed a lot less retarded than I had initially thought.




I couldn’t care less if my consol had motion sensing capabilities. In fact I think I’d rather it not have them. I understand the motion you
perform with the wii-mote is similar to the action in the game but it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re swinging around a TV remote like a moron.


The real problem though is that there aren’t any games on the Wii that don’t suck ass. God help me, I’m just not that enthused with creating a hideously deformed avatar and then suffering through nine holes of golf with it, or any other sport for that matter. Golf isn’t fun in reality. Why would it be fun on the Wii. Party games are stupid and so are mini games, at least as a purchase. Getting in shape is not entertaining either so I guess that cancels out about 96% of the games on Wii. Also I’m so tired of Mario at this point he can kiss my ass. We need another Mario game like we need another shitty Will Farrell movie.

The only cool thing about the Wii is that you can buy retro games off of the internet with it. At least it would be cool if you couldn‘t already get retro game roms off of the internet for free with your computer. Then it would be of great interest to me and wouldn’t seem like such a gravy train.


360:
The Xbox is obsolete. There, I said it. Well, maybe obsolete isn’t the correct word. It’s more like pointless. Since it’s made by Microsoft, every game on it is default ported to the PC. And if that’s the case then there is nothing an Xbox can do that a PC can’t do as well or better. So why would I buy one? Why would anyone buy one? (Unless they have a Mac.) It would be like if you had a regular computer keyboard and then went out and bought another keyboard that only had number buttons on it and was made specifically for typing numbers. And any time you wanted to type numbers on your computer, instead of using the ones on your regular keyboard you use the ones on your special numerical keyboard. Then it has a hardware failure and you have to buy another one. Doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile investment?

Holy Shit... I just realized that all of the consol names rhyme with eachother.

Lucky Star

Lucky Star is an anime series based on a comic strip. It’s unique in one aspect: I have no idea why it exists. How anyone could become legitimately engaged in this show is not something I can fathom. Right off the bat, the show’s intro assaults you with a song and dance performed by all of the main characters. Now this is an automatic failure in my book. There’s just something about anime characters dancing that pisses me off. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the theme song is one of the worst sounding and lyrically incoherent songs I’ve ever heard. The vocals in the beginning and end are so awful they don’t even sound like they’re emanating from human vocal chords. It’s easier to believe it’s some kind of evil robot or demonic entity‘s creepy mockery of the musical arts. The first time I listened I briefly wished I had been born deaf. After that, every time I started a new episode I had to turn off my computer speakers and drag the slider bar on my media player to precisely 1:30 and start there. If I see or hear anything in the intro at all I get extremely upset. I never thought I’d say this but I’d rather watch the intro to Tenjho Tenge

The show’s plot is nonexistent. With the exclusion of a few episodes, it’s just four high school girls doing every humdrum activity you can think of: They talk about food, how to prepare food, and how to eat food. They do homework, text on cell phones, ride public transportation, and use computers. They also walk and talk, sit and talk, and stand and talk. I know this sounds quite thrilling and totally foreign to you but please try to contain yourself. I think Lucky Star is supposed to be a comedy but it’s really not that funny at all. However it never ceases to amaze me how it manages to keep you hoping for a payoff and then it never actually delivers. It’s like it tells you half a joke every episode and then stops before reaching the punch line thereby tricking you into watching it. In reality the show’s just a bunch of random unrelated scenes, (of the above mentioned content), thrown together. The thing that bothers me the most about the flow of the episodes is the lack of scene transitions. There are almost no transitions and it makes it really hard to follow sometimes, like when the scene cuts away and all of a sudden everyone’s wearing different clothes. Or when a character calls a person on the phone that they were just talking to in person a second ago. Or when they just slip a completely random and totally irrelevant two second clip in between two scenes, making you wonder if the people making it spent any time at all in post production. With negligent editing and zero plot development, you could just about watch the series upside-down and backwards and it wouldn’t change a thing.

There are countless anime references in the show but they’re never executed with any sort of tact. It’s always “Hey! Look at my new Sgt. Frog key chain!” Or “I love your Full Metal Panic plushie!” There’s also manga and magazines like New Type inserted within episodes. They aren’t spoof or even recreated versions though, they’re just literal scans of the front covers digitally added in. Kyoto Animation is the studio responsible for creating the Lucky Star anime. Therefore, any other series created by Kyoto Animation is fair play for showcasing and saturating every single episode of LS with to an annoying degree. Occasionally they reference an anime not under their jurisdiction. Of course when they do this they have to censor everything said and shown. Every time they say the name of the show it’s bleeped out. And every time they show a picture it’s blurred out. Now if legally they aren’t allowed to convey this information then why the hell are they talking about it? If you can actually figure out that they’re talking about the Gundam franchise then that’s great. But if you can’t then they might as well be discussing the socioeconomic parallels between chronosynclastic infundibulums and a totalitarian government. Nothing they say during these segments is going to matter to you in the slightest. It’s going to ridiculous lengths for a gag that was never going to be funny, interesting, or worthwhile in the first place. Actually the most elaborate and dynamic scenes in the show are always anime reference scenes which is pathetic because it leads me to believe that that’s the apex of the shows focus. In other words, the best thing they have to offer is content someone else made and we’ve already seen. How much effort/talent does that take?

i.e. About *this* much…

This is the show’s mascot… As you can see it’s a reanimated severed cat head grafted on to it’s own dismembered tail. Quite horrifying really. What sick bastard spawned this abomination of nature?

As I already said, Lucky Star is about four high school girls around 17 and 18 years old. But for some reason they’ve been drawn to look like they’re about eight, except for Tsukasa who look’s like she’s six. In fact pretty much all of the characters in the show look too young to be the age they’re supposed to be. The main girls look like they should be playing hopscotch on the playground. Their teacher and the police officer look like they could be high school freshmen. Miyuki and Konata’s moms somehow look younger than Miyuki and Konata. The only person that looks almost old enough to be who he is, is Konata’s father. That means that in the show he’s probably like 85 years old. It’s very weird watching high school freshmen come home drunk and listening to flat-chested eight-year-old girls talk about their periods. It’s been a while since I was in high school but I distinctly remember there being boobs. And that’s another thing, occasionally Miyuki will appear to have breasts but only when it is called to everyone’s attention how “big” her breasts are. After that, she morphs right back into a billiard-table-chest like everyone else.

If there was a main character in LS it would probably be Konata. Incidentally she’s my least favorite character. Her voice is annoying. She's about three feet tall, has blue hair and walks around with her eyes closed half the time. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with her mouth. I guess she was born with a cleft pallet or something. She’s also addicted to anime, manga, and video games which I can’t help but see as a cheap ploy to connect with the target audience which undoubtedly has the exact same vices. It’s this latter quality that makes her character not believable. Girls are mentally incapable of being that enraptured by video games. Also, they never really show the video games that she plays. It’s always just her sitting at a computer, her holding a PS2 controller, and her saying “I played video games last night.” Why don’t they just show the damn games?! That would actually be interesting. I don’t care who got a new cell phone or about the correct way to eat a disgusting brown blob filled with goo. Show a shooter headshot or some finisher move from a fighting game. Or something like that Virtual Valkyrie MMO story from that one episode of Mission Hill. That was funny. Whatever… The games she plays probably suck anyway.

At the end of every episode is a short segment called Lucky Channel. All it is, is this manic depressive girl and a guy with perpetually closed eyes sitting at a desk talking about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sometimes what they say is pertinent to the show but mostly it’s just asinine garbage. Actually most of the episodes of Lucky Channel are a great magnitude funnier and more entertaining than Lucky Star itself which is more sad than anything. I guess that’s why they put it at the end.

In the last episode of Lucky Star there’s a culture festival at the school and all of the girls decide to do a cheerleading number set to music for it. And surprise surprise, it’s the exact same dance and song from the intro. I’ve never watched a show possessing such bad taste that it would use the worst part of the show, (the part I’ve avoiding watching 22 times since episode 1), for it’s own climax. I mean what the hell made them think this was a good idea? And I still have no idea why it’s called “Lucky Star!”

The Adventures of Ecco the Dolphin

Alex Kidd: In The Enchanted Castle

This game has to be a joke. There’s no way anything could be this ludicrous without design. Before you even start the game, you’ll probably get to see this… Could they possibly make the character look like any more of a dork? Maybe, if they gave him buckteeth with an overbite. I’m also having a hard time believing he has a regular humanoid ear back there if we can see that much of it.

The first thing you’ll notice about this game, (even before the bad controls) is that if you get hit once you’re dead. Not only that, but everything kills you. Even things that shouldn’t kill you kill you. Even things incapable of harming you in your wildest imagination kill you. This is paradoxical because on the other hand, Alex can punch the shit out of bricks, pottery, and even trees with his bare hands. And he can completely destroy a full-sized sedan with a single kick. But if he touches a toy airplane he‘s dead meat.

Here’s a selection of the more outlandish enemies. However, I’ll try to rationalize as many of them as possible. Technically none of these enemies even attack you. They just walk around waiting for you to touch them and die.

Prairie Dog: Well obviously these are rabid mutant prairie dogs with a thirst for blood. Clearly they aren’t normal if half of one is as tall as you are.

Porcupine: Porcupines walk up to you on their hind legs and lay down with their spines sticking up, basically hoping you’ll jump on top of them and kill yourself. They seriously won’t move from that spot until you jump over them. Apparently they have nothing else on their plate today other than doing this.

Vulture: Why would you die from touching a vulture? Everyone knows they’re cowardly scavengers. And they’re scavengers because they’re incapable of hunting.

Toy Airplane: O.K. This is a product designed for children to play with but for whatever reason you aren’t intelligent enough to not slit your throat with it… or something.

Toy Soldier: They’re small and move slow as hell but periodically stop, thereby tripping you and causing you to impale your spleen on them.

Tiny Fire: It’s a fire about the size of a light bulb that’s so charismatic that you can’t help but pick it up and burn yourself with it until you have 3rd degree burns over 80% of your body.

Turtles: This is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. When you’re swimming in the third level, sometimes turtles will just spontaneously hurl themselves spinning up at you from the bottom of the screen. Sometimes they launch clear out of the water. But that’s not even the half of it… Above the water surface are a bunch of turtles spinning around and flying, putting on an acrobatic display that makes Cirque du Soleil look like physical therapy on ice. There’s absolutely no reason or explanation for this phenomenon. Were they even thinking at all when they made this? Any three-year-old can tell you that turtles are slow and coincidentally would be the last creatures on this planet capable of flying. What the hell is they’re excuse for it?

Bee: Maybe he’s allergic.

Dung Beetle: It force-feeds you a ball of crap, making you catch hepatitis C.

Mouse: It’s carrying bubonic plague.

Old Man w/ staff: Let my people go!

Rock: Angry rock is angry.

The controls in the game suck. You can punch on command but kicking sort of just happens as you descend after a jump. Usually if you land on an enemy while kicking you can kill it but sometimes you don’t kick in time and end up dying. So basically you have to somehow coincide your randomly uncontrollable body movements with the moment of impact. Also you slide around everywhere like you’re walking on ice. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t the character just stop moving when I stop pressing the control pad? Doesn’t that make sense? In reality I don’t wear Vasoline on the bottoms of my shoes. I don’t have to start walking backwards to keep from sliding past where I want to stop.

Within the levels there are “stores” you can walk into where there’s only ever one item for sale at a time. Instead of just handing money to the blue shirtless cueball store clerk to purchase the item, he makes you *bet* the money and then play him at rock, paper, scissors. If you lose the game, you lose the bet money and you don’t get the item, and you get a weight dropped on your head. If you win, you still lose the money, but you get the item and the store owner gets a weight dropped on *his* head. Now does that make any sense to you? Imagine if you went into Best Buy to get a laptop. As you check out, you pay full price for the laptop and then get challenged by an employee to rock, paper, scissors. You lose, the store keeps your money and the laptop. Does that sound like a good business model? Would you ever shop at Best Buy again? No you wouldn‘t. It’s a completely idiotic idea. And what's with the weight? Is it not bad enough that he already stole my fucking money?

The items you get from the store typically aren’t worth a damn. You can get several different things that “help” you and you can hold more than one of each. There are a few vehicles that you can ride like a self-powered helicopter that disappears for no reason when you touch something, and a motorcycle that also disappears for no reason when you touch something. On any given level that gives you roughly three seconds of ride time. What the hell’s the fricking point?!

There are a few bosses in the game. You don’t really fight them though, you have to beat them at rock, paper, scissors (go figure.) Well that sort of makes sense when you first hear it since your character is a worthless pile of chicken shit, incapable of touching everyday objects without expiring. Well that begs the question, how has he even survived for this long? Anyway, at the end of some levels there are bosses. You have to beat them at RPS or you die and have to do the level again. And then the shocking realization hit’s that beating the game is dependant to a large extent on chance. You could play the game perfectly and still lose because of a random number generator. When you lose to a boss they say something like “I can not be beat” or “you need more practice.” You need more practice?! It’s rock, paper, scissors for God’s sake! You can’t practice it any more than you can practice only hearing your favorite songs on the radio. This game scoffs at your childish notions of logic and sensibility.

The last level of the game is of course the Enchanted Castle. Actually it’s not so much enchanted as it is long and annoying. It’s like 20 times longer than any of the previous levels. It takes forever and gets boring really fast, especially with the droning music. Once you beat the boss at the end you find out that nothing was wrong in the first place and you just risked your life for absolutely no reason. Isn’t that special?

Constellations

Ever since I was little I’ve thought constellations were stupid. Yes it’s an interesting passtime, finding shapes in things like clouds and stars but only if it actually looks like something in the first place. Trying to put stuff in the sky that isn’t there is retarded. Very rarely do the constellations look anything like what they are labeled as. Why were those stars chosen to make them? And why that configuration? It just looks like some random assemblage of dots. You could pick any other star cluster in any corner of the sky for any constellation and get something just as good if not better. You can’t tell what anything is without an illustration overlay. But then that just makes you notice how terrible the constellation is when you see everything that’s missing from it. I don’t know who invented them or how but I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

Ancient Astronomer 1: Have you finished designating the constellations yet?

Ancient Astronomer 2: No, I still have to find Hercules, Orion, the entire zodiac, and some bears. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. I can’t find anything that looks like Hercules.

Ancient Astronomer 1: Wait, you’re trying to find stars that actually look like the names on the list? That’ll take forever! We need those constellations in by Monday.

Ancient Astronomer 2: Well I just thought…

Ancient Astronomer 1: You’re not getting paid to think. Just close you’re eyes, spin around and point. Think of it as assigning characters to parking lots at Disneyland.

This is Pisces, the fish constellation (and my sign.) Have you ever seen a fish this long that was bent at a 30 degree angle? Actually I guess it’s supposed to be two fish jumping out of the water. At lest you can see the path of the fish.

Here’s Cancer the crab. How anyone saw a crab in two intersecting lines is beyond me. Every time I write the letter Y I’ll think about crabs from now on.

This it Gemini, the twins. OK, this one’s acceptable. They both have heads and all of their limbs are there. And I like how it looks like the one on the left is helping his brother who apparently has a broken ankle.

This one is supposed to be Taurus the bull. I was always able to spot the V for the horns and just assumed the whole constellation was only a head. Now that I see it in it’s entirety, It looks more like Freakazoid running with his arms stretched out.

Here’s Leo the lion, (AKA a question mark grafted on to a triangle.)

I’m sure you’re already familiar with Ursa Major, (or the Big Dipper.) It’s supposed to be a bear but I can’t even tell which direction it’s going let alone that it‘s a bear. Since when do bears have spindly stilts for legs? And why only three of them? Or is that the fourth one sticking out of it’s ass? Or is that it’s head? Maybe that’s it’s tail and the pointy end is the head. But if that’s true why is the tail so damn long? Actually this looks more like a stilt strider from Morrowind or one of those big six-legged monsters from The Mist.

It’s a crown, whoop-dee-do.


Sagittarius: Wow! Doesn’t this look just like a centaur drawing his bow?! It’s so life-like it’s almost photo-realistic!

Magnolia

I watched Magnolia because it’s supposedly a good movie but it turned out to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s convoluted. It’s annoying. It’s a waste of time. In fact it took me three days to watch it because it was so disengaging. The opening sequence with the three urban legends is interesting but it takes too long and doesn’t really do much for the plot… not that there is one. After that, it’s character introductions. Lots and lots of character introductions with fragmented back stories all in different scenarios and times shown in rapid sequence. This was the first time I stopped watching the movie. It was going for so long that I was starting to think that the whole thing was going to be like this, and I decided that I didn’t have patience for that shit. When multiple characters doing separate things are depicted in a movie you can always fall back on the formula that says everything will unify into one story eventually. The problem with this movie is that it never actually does this. It sort of does, on and off. But ultimately it’s just alternating between five or six stories the whole time. Why do they have to do this? It’s just exhausting and upsetting to have to keep up with that many developing stories mixed together. It’s like some kind of endurance test. It’s such a twisted knot of circumstances that you immediately stop caring about anything happening. I’d have a more satisfying experience turning on five random movies I’ve never seen before and watching them all simultaneously.

The whole point of the movie is that all of these people either know each other or incidentally have tangent meetings before continuing onward, creating an ever-expanding circuitous network of bullshit. And what does it all accomplish in the end? Absolutely nothing. They might as well all have nothing in common. They spend the entire movie drifting around and then nothing is gained by it. There’s no payoff. What it should have been leading up to is some kind of chain-reaction or series of events spawning a catastrophe that only occurred because each of the people somehow contributed a small part to it. I could see a good short film based on that but this movie is three hours long. Three excruciating hours of nothing.

What really makes this movie bad is the characters. Every single person in it is either a humongous asshole or a whiny dumbass that won’t shut the hell up. Every last one of them is ready to fly off the handle and throw an epic tantrum of biblical proportions at even the slightest inkling of opposition. Hell, Julianne Moore’s character is ready to curse you blind for making eye contact with her. My point is that they’re all terrible people with no redeeming qualities. Now one of the most important elements in any movie is to have a character that the viewer can latch on to, to experience the story through. While watching this movie I kept thinking, *if a nuclear bomb went off and the entire town was leveled would there be a single person I would feel remotely sad for.* The answer was always no. *None* of these people fit the bill. If the town *was* nuked, the world would just be a better place.

Then, for whatever reason, frogs fall from the sky on top of cars and buildings and all over the town. (Yes I know it’s an urban legend.) This is actually a pretty cool scene; too bad it’s too little, too late. The movie still sucks. My recommendation for watching it is skip to the frog part and turn it off when it‘s over. For those of you who’d like to experience Magnolia without having to see Tom Cruise, do this; clone the most despicable, irritating, loathsome person you’ve ever met 10 times. Now lock yourself in a white room with the clones for three hours. And that’s Magnolia.