Thursday 19th June 2003
Prot's back. The little Golgafrinchan figured out how to post to the board after all. Which is his new obsession.
This one will be a little weird. Rightclick the image and copy it into Photoshop if it helps to add the dialogue....
As predicted, Prot is sounding and acting a lot like BangBang did. The only difference, so far, is that Banger was never much for doubleposting; he may have been a little smarter than Prot is.
Not that we can necessarily blame Prot for his idiocy; he's reportedly only been on our planet for ten days now. The question now is whether he'll become as smart as BangBang was before I have to ban his ass for filling up the board.
I've taken care of one problem. Since Prot keeps changing his name and making it difficult to figure out who he is, I've fixed the script to change his name from whatever he comes up with to Prot. That should eliminate that sort of confusion. Short of writing a spellcheck for the board, I don't see any way to prevent him from sucking otherwise...except, of course, to ban him from posting at all.
If he hasn't figured it out by the time V14 goes live, I'll ban him from the new board. By 1st July, he'll have been on Earth for twenty-three days; anyone who takes more than twenty-three days to figure this shit out is a lost cause.
All that aside, Prot may be asserting that deities exist. It's hard to tell, since you kinda give up trying to read his bullshit after the first couple of sentences prove to be too incoherent to bother with. If so, he'll have to prove these deities to exist, or, in accordance with the disclaimer, remit ten thousand bucks to me for attempting to defraud us.
Incidentally, Wasted, Inc. don't accept travellers' cheques from the Bank of Andromeda. Terran Funds only.
Nuts. My reminder just popped up; Return of the Living Dead just came on. That'll slow me down a bit....
Nevermind. Another 4:3 broadcast into my 16:9 television. I've got RotLD on DV anyway. I'll watch it later....
I really need to do something with SiteoftheLivingDead.com sometime. So many websites; so little time....
So I saw The Hulk. Something I've been waiting for since...ever. I wasn't precisely unhappy with it.
I have no real idea who Eric Bana is. Except that he's apparently Australian. The only thing I've heard of that he's been in was Blackhawk Down, which I haven't seen yet. Something about army films always makes me sleepy. Put anyone you like in the cast; get any director, Saving Full Hamburger Apocalypse Platoon is still going to cause narcolepsy. I just don't care.
So now we've got Hulk, which is nearly another army film. Eric Bana plays Bruce Banner: a GenerationX nanotechnologist, or something. Who, however coincidentally, is following--without knowledge--in the footsteps of David Banner, played by Nick Notle playing Kris Kristofferson nee Robert Redford, who had been working on some sort of eugenics gig back in 1966. Having altered his own DNA, he managed to pass on the genome to Bruce, having borrowed it from starfish and Nile monitors.
You never want to put too much thought into the Deus ex Machina behind comicbook films. Especially the ones Marvel come up with. Batman was okay; even TankGirl worked; XMen, Spider-man, Daredevil, Hulk...don't think; just watch.
Okay: one exception. Men in Black worked well enough as a Marvel film. Except for the part where Elvis Presley's career predated the reported first contact with alien life in 1961 or so.
For the first hour of this 135-minute film, Bruce Kensler nee Banner kills frogs and represses rage over situations no one would get particularly angry about. Until, one day, a LabTech manages to get stuck in the gammacannon thingy and Bruce has to save him by throwing him to the floor and waiting for the moron to stand up and walk to the door in less than thirty seconds before the gammasphere frognuker fires; that being physically and chronologically impossible, Banner instead leaps in front of the gammacannon, somehow absorbing all the radiation, none of which goes through or around him to nuke the LabTech. Disaster is averted. Or something.
Next, we wonder why Banner didn't explode. Or, we would, if the first twenty minutes hadn't made it terribly clear that Bruce was genetically modified by David. But Bruce wonders about it. Along with Jennifer Connelly, playing Betty Ross by reprising her role of Sarah from Labyrinth, but without David Bowie reprising his role as W. Axl Rose the Goblin King.
Finally, the rage Bruce has been repressing all these years gets loose. We know that, because he starts grunting and wailing like a Predator in Los Angeles who just had a hand cut off. And, suddenly, he metamorphoses into into a four-metre-tall, thousand-pound hulk; by luck, his trousers metamorphose into Bermuda shorts with a ninety-six-inch waistline, sparing us the sight of a fifty-pound zubrick flapping about as its host screeches and breaks everything from lab gear to physical laws.
I was hoping that the CG seen in the trailers was incomplete. And it was. Unfortunately, the basic movements were final. Hulk may weigh half a tonne, but he dances about like Baryshnikov in zero gravity.
David Banner, also interesting in a dancing career, releases mutant dogs to eat Betty and inspire Bruce to metamorphose again, so he can get the sample which Mariette Hartley got back in 1978, thus allowing him to alter his own altered genome into the kind Bruce got after being hit by gamma rays. Which lets Hulk break more things. Although you'll want to watch for a presumably-intentional spoof of King Kong during the dogfight; that made it all worth it, in the end.
Meanwhile, Jack McGee has been replaced by Josh Lucas, playing Lew Dodgson of BioSyn. this guy is apparently with some private-sector rival corporation, yet somehow has the authority to override Sam Elliot the four-star general. Which allows him to take over the mission in the name of Atheon...which is either the corporation he represents, or the name of the project he leads, or just a dumb name for something; if it was ever in the comics, I don't remember it.
If this isn't messy enough, Public Enemy Number One David Banner goes to talk to Bruce in the Atheon boobytrap to explain that he can metamorphose too, but still needs the genome upgrade to become Hulk; then, when reasoning with Bruce doesn't do any good, he bites through the electrical cable which killed Richard Kiel and becomes NadaHulk--a huge manifistation of Robert Patrick, who can do the same thing Grunge from Gen13 can do.
Which inspires Bruce to hulk out again, and the two get into a really confusing battle until the army nuke everyone.
And that's that. Or is it? Bruce Banner is believed to be dead; and he must let the world think that he is dead. By translating his notorious catchphrase into Spanish whenever the guerrilla armies of South America try to take medicine from the locals.
It's not precisely a bad film. I just don't see the people it's targetted toward staying awake for most of it. It makes The Phantom Menace look like Die Another Day.
In other news, for those who aren't paying attention, it's 19th June 2003. Garfield the Cat is twenty-five years old. Something about that disturbs me. Probably that I remember the day the first strip showed up in the paper.
So, here's today's caption contest. Hopefully, it won't get us sued....
More later....
--Gremlin