Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
Humpty's Menu:
one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - twelve - thirteen - fourteen

Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
open brackets
smartypants
friday-films
luvabeans
buzzflash
new world disorder
sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
mirabile visu
The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

I also saw Igby Goes Down

Last night I fulfilled a long-standing fantasy of mine and went to see The Core. It gave me an appreciation of how gooey the Earth's interior is. It also made the following phrases appear in my head:

This movie was Core-iffic!

Move over Godfather! Here's the real Don Core-leone, making the planet an offer it can't refuse!

Be Core-ful when you're burrowing to the centre of the Earth!

These latter-day Core-tezes are on a mission to save our planet!

Hi, my name's Corey and I'll be your server tonight (the last bit sung to the tune of "Let's find each other tonight").

Looks like the Earth needs a shot of Core-tisone!

Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank take the Earth to Core-t!

Let's unCore-k this apocalyptic thriller and get drunk on its sweet liquor!

Time to exCore-iate this piece of shit movie and go home!

Okay. It's difficult to talk about The Core without first pointing out how disastrously dumb it is. The basic concept is so soaked with stupidity that it leaks out over the rest of the film. The Earth's molten outer core has stopped its rapid spinning? I'd take the threat more seriously if the Earth's core actually spun rapidly in the first place (it rotates at a different rate from the rest of the planet, but the pitch meister producers probably couldn't sell Paramount on "The Core is synchronized! Oh God, it's all synchronized!"). They should have just made a movie that gives the planet Mars a pair of beefy arms that will pummel the Earth into submission unless a crew of brave astronauts travels to the Angry Red Prizefighter Planet with gigantic surgical tools, or maybe a planet encircling championship belt. In fact, that movie sounds way better.

The Pitch: A group of quirky Americans in a spaceship save the Earth from destruction by beating the living crap out of Mars.

The Tagline: It's a knockout punch to the planet!

We open with the Paramount logo. The stars shoot through the atmosphere and encircle the mountain. Then a big red fist pounds the Paramount logo into dust. When it settles, we see: American tourists on the Eiffel Tower. The tour guide is French and snotty. A young dark-haired boy strays from the group and looks out over Paris. Suddenly a reaction shot on the boy's increasingly freaked-out face. "Where's Billy?" says mother. Boy's face again. Then: gigantic middle finger and thumb poised to flick. Mother finds Billy, says "Billy, come here...". Mother's face drains of expression. Then the gigantic hand flicks the Eiffel Tower over. Tower topples, Parisians run screaming. Mother grabs hold of Billy as tower hits ground.

Interior of classroom. Improbably handsome and well-built prof Dr. Costlysweater expounding some addled theory that just may save the planet to a heap of dazed undergrads. Sober dark-suited types appear at door, flash their badges and spirit him away. They take him to meet a man in some sort of military outfit.

[Banter]
"You've heard about the collapse of the Eiffel Tower, Dr. Robthomashair?"
"Yes, it was a terrible earthquake".
"That's the story the public heard. It's just pure luck that the French weren't looking up at the sky that day".
"What was in the sky?"
"We're hoping you can tell us that, Dr. Earthsaver".
"Wait. [furrows brow some, looks about some] Was it a gigantic hand?"
"What makes you say that?"
"Why else would you call on me? I'm the only advocate of the Beefy Arm Theory of planetary development. And I was a prize-winning boxer before I turned my back on the game and became a scientist".
"Yes. I heard about your tragedy, Dr. Cleftchin".
"Besides, the pattern of structural damage on the tower could only be caused by a gigantic finger. The nail bed, the fingerprint - it all makes sense. But how?"
"SETI received this transmission yesterday. We've pinpointed the source as being from somewhere in the inner solar system".
[They look at screen, screen shows graphs and waves and shifting blocks of colour. Thank you, art department.]
"You're the expert, Doctor. What do you think?"
"Well, I'm not sure, but it looks like a series of rhyming taunts".

Allow me to summarize the rest. Subsequent scenes reveal that Dr. Manlystubble became a scientist after he accidentally killed his wife with a playful demonstration of how he'd won the Middleweight Championship of the World (she walks right into his decisive uppercut, maybe). He agrees to save the planet with the help of:

  1. a plucky NASA astronaut babe (in the fourth scene she guides the shuttle to safety after it gets punched out of orbit, and so is picked to pilot the space craft on its fateful journey)
  2. a hermit-like scientist who has developed incredibly powerful mechanical arms made of super-strong titanium alloy
  3. a Stanley Tucci
  4. a Canadian
They build a spaceship capable of accomodating the mechanical arms, launch it, and the three expendables sustain fatal injuries from Hilary Swank's cheekboness and die heroically in the following order: 1. Canadian; 2. desert hermit; 3. Tucci. Each gets their tearful goodbye scene, as stipulated in the contract. The spaceship now begins to grapple with the beefy arms of Mars. But wait! It turns out that the government has secretly been building a gigantic championship belt for Mars. NASA radios the spacefarers (without any of that stupid radio delay) to jettison the mechanical arms and head for home. But Dr. Aaroneckhart has observed the cocky prizefighter posture of Mars and realizes that it will only challenge Earth to a rematch within a year or so. There can be no surrender. Doc takes the controls and boxes with the Angry Red Planet, with Hilary Swank reffing the match. An ally at NASA intercepts the course of the championship belt and sends it to Saturn. Doc employs the trademark uppercut and wins on a TKO, Mars is humiliated, and the world is set aright. Saturn falls on hard times and hocks the jewels in the belt for a fraction of its original value.

Dr. Forearm and Ms. Swank come home and discover that the world has been taken over by a cabal of neoconservatives who took advantage of the confusion to take power in the US and launch a war in the Middle East. With the region destabilized, they then undermine their domestic economy in order to transform the lower classes into a gigantic military unit capable of enforcing the new order anywhere in the world. Doctor and the Miz travel the globe in their beefy-armed ship, pummeling evildoers the world over. The super rich grow phenomenally rich and keep the poor pacified on a diet of fatty food and testosterone-fueled Hollywood allegories of United States military and moral supremacy.

ANYWAY

After all that talk of beefy arms and Martian supremacy, I find myself reluctant to return to The Core. So let me take an oblique approach and discuss this movie by way of my grade 10 history teacher.

Rita Ackerman was an old British woman with short grey hair and oversized glasses that slid constantly down her fine nose. The slipping glasses had given her face a pleasingly scrunched look that forced her mouth into a half smile, even when she was thoroughly disgusted with your attempts to answer questions about Charlemagne's rule.

Ms. Ackerman, as well as teaching European history, also took it upon herself to teach us the basics of essay writing, spelling and grammar. For some reason our English teacher, an American expatriate with a giggly laugh and great taste in books, was not very interested in teaching us these fundamentals. She remains in my memory because as a child she lived on the same block as Albert Einstein, and met him at the age of nine, when she pushed her way through the hedge in her backyard to investigate the sound of a violin. She found Einstein playing away and introduced herself. She also remains in my memory because she was almost always drunk.

One day Ms. Ackerman came in with a pile of our grade 10 essays and told the class that they couldn't spell and she would teach us how. She drew two pictures on the board: one of a gigantic Scotty terrier next to a tiny stick man, the other of a large stick man next to a tiny Scotty terrier (I'm guessing that this was the only dog Ms. Ackerman could convincingly draw). Below the first (big dog) picture she wrote "The dog knows it's master". Below the second (little dog) she wrote "The dog knows its master". She faced the class and said, "None of you know the difference between 'it's' and 'its'. The first is a contraction for 'it is'. The second is a possesive pronoun. Until you can differentiate between them you do not know how to spell". The drawing and the speech made such an impression on me that even now, whenever I see those words misused, I envision Rita Ackerman drawing a Scotty on a blackboard and squinting to keep her glasses up.

Ms. Ackerman makes an appearance in the final minutes of The Core, when good guy super-hacker The Rat (yeesh) uploads megabytes of classified information into the world's computers. Let us gloss over the fact that the information is shown going all over the world but conspicuously bypasses Cuba. Let us also gloss over the fact that The Rat overrides the entire hurly-burly of the Internet with a hegemonic multi-platform browser that somehow knows how to dial into every network in the world (except Cuba. Smoke your cigars in the dark, Fidel.) As the magic hack uploads a message cheerfully pops up on his screen that the info is "On It's Way!" And then I see Rita Ackerman, drawing a Scotty on the blackboard and informing The Core that it can't spell.

Retracted on 2003-04-01::2:12 p.m.


parode - exode


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