WATCHED: 10/19/2004

I had reviewed the campaign for this one in my Movie Marketing Madness column at FilmThreat and now get to trash the actual movie. Who says life doesn’t have it’s perks?

0:00 – There are certain studio logos that will always be associated with specific movies for me. The 20th Century Fox opening equals Star Wars. Tri-Star equals The Natural. United Artists equals Rocky. So on and so forth..

0:01 – Remember the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny is traipsing through some artic locale and comes across the penguin escaping predators or hunters. My favorite part was when the penguin cries the ice cubes.

0:01 – Perry King is in this?! How did I not know this ahead of time? “Riptide” was during that period in television when more than just district attorney and medical shows were on. Of course that was when there were a bunch of private eye shows like it, “Magnum P.I.”, “Simon & Simon” and “Jake and the Fatman”, which shared Joe Penny with Riptide.

0:02 – The score composer’s name is Harold Kloser. Guess the coffee is only for him.

0:04 – All this snow and I just keep waiting for a meteor to hit the ground near there.

0:06 – Dennis Quaid is speaking in a ballroom right now and I think Harrison Ford just came in to accuse him of covering up the drug test results.

0:08 – Ian Holm must be trying to balance out the good he did by being in the Lord of the Rings movies.

0:10 – I think this guy is eating at the same sushi stand they used in Blade Runner. How long till Edward James Olmos taps him on the shoulder with his walking stick?

0:14 – Did anyone else see the Tim Allen movie Big Trouble? Pretty good but not as good as the Dave Barry novel.

0:16 – The scene right now has three characters discussing turbulence and I can’t decide whether to go with Alec Baldwin’s line about it from Hunt For Red October or John Cusack’s airline safety stats in Say Anything. Any votes?

0:18 – Am I the only one who remembers Millennium, where Kris Kristofferson plays an NTSB investigator who comes across how time travelers are taking people off planes that are destined to crash? Thought so.

0:20 – All the birds are leaving New York City. Even they think the rents are too high.

0:22 – Did I bring an umbrella? Oh…right…It’s just in the movie that it’s been raining for twenty minutes now.

0:27 – Fox News: Providing fair and balanced weather coverage.

0:28 – Just to set out some ground rules for this movie – If any jokes are made which reference Wizard of Oz or if Bill Paxton and/or Helen Hunt appear at anytime I will turn the movie off immediately with no chance at redemption.

0:30 – Not only is Perry King in this movie but he’s the President. Are there more of less things wrong with this than Billy Bob Thornton being Prez in Love Actually? Let’s discuss…

0:32 – An example of the dialogue here: Dennis Quaid just uttered the phrase “critical desalinization point”. Almost makes my job too easy.

0:36 – Thanks to the posters and DVD cover we all know that the shot of the Statue of Liberty here is just a setup for its fate in a block of ice. Way to completely spoil a concept.

0:38 – Oh my goodness I think that’s Snuffleupagus in the New York Natural History Museum.

0:41 – I’ll admit it: watching the guy freeze after opening the helicopter door was kind of cool.

0:44 – I want all four of these kids to die. Damn. Probably shouldn’t have actually written that.

0:46 – So the character description for Sela Ward’s doctor pretty much said “gasps a lot, looks worried, gasps some more”, right?

0:48 – Lady Liberty has had it up to her armpits with all this global warming. I can very clearly visualize you all leaving this site after that joke.

0:50 – The problem with this movie is there’s no cheese factor. Independence Day is a bad movie but at least it’s a little bit fun and kind of knows how bad it is. Everyone is so deadly serious here that it sucks all the enjoyment out of watching it.

0:54 – I can kind of see Jake Glyenhaal as Spider-Man but can’t really picture anyone but Kirsten Dunst as Mary-Jane Watson. And now I can’t picture anything but Kirsten Dunst. I’ll be back in a little while.

0:57 – Quaid is doing his best with the material but he looks frustrated, like he’s trying to build an expansion bridge using balsa wood and spackle.

1:02 – The ship floating down the street right now has me remembering Cheech Marin’s line from Ghostbusters 2 when the Titanic pulls in. “Better late than never”.

1:07 – Ian Holm is right – Getting drunk should be a priority no matter what the situation is.

1:10 – I just can’t get past the CGI breath fog. (By the way, what’s the technical term for that? Cold breath? Breath smoke? Anyone care?)

1:14 – They just broke into a vending machine and I’m just now waiting for Colonel “Bat” Guano to show up and reprimand him. “You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company”

1:16 – I really hate movies that put kids in peril for no other reason than to elicit some sort of mawkish emotional response from the audience. If you can’t find a better way to make the people feel something then just move on and let it go.

1:20 – “You’re taunton will freeze before you reach the first marker.” “Than I’ll see you in hell!”

1:23 – Frank fall down go BOOOM!

1:27 – Almost and hour and a half in and we’re just now getting to the romance? Don’t the filmmakers realize this is what draws in repeat business? Teenage girls are not going to go gah-gah over Jake G. simply because he can throw books in a fire.

1:29 – Just asking (and speaking as a loyal fan) – Does all this snow mean the Cubs have won the World Series?

1:32 – If all this display of emotion was only in a better movie it might be worth something.

1:34 – I can’t keep it in any longer – This is horrible. It’s just really, really horrible. There are no redeeming qualities to this movie.

1:36 – Reason This Movie Sucks: Terrible looking CGI wolves.

1:37 – Reason This Movie Sucks: Exposed bare flesh is not freezing to metal in a sub-artic environment. I mean Flick learned this shortly after being triple-dog-dared.

1:39 – Reason This Movie Sucks: As with most films the only two cities we actually see affected are Los Angeles and New York. What happened to Chicago? Can’t you spend a week and build a CGI skyline for just a quick shot of it?

1:41 – Reason This Movie Sucks: Ice doesn’t really creep like a fungus, does it? It forms more from the bottom up, not growing across a surface so quickly I would think.

1:45 – Reason This Movie Sucks: Large scale catastrophe used as metaphor for personal crisis.

1:47 – A buddy of mine who went to UW: Madison sent me a postcard once of a paper-mache head and outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty some people had built on a frozen lake. It looked more realistic than this CGI garbage.

1:48 – Do you think the ghost of the librarian is still haunting the basement of the New York Public Library these people are surviving in.

1:50 – So now that Dennis Quaid has found the survivors what do they do? Walk back? Cause that will turn out well.

1:54 – I don’t even have anything. This movie sucks.