This is the guy who knows the words...

Bru
-I dare you to say 'kill'

You'd be surprised at just how frustrating the process of posting this picture was. My advice to those considering their own pictorial blogs: don't download the stupid program called Hello. Just trust me.

I've been thinking about words a lot lately. All the jobs I've applied for have been writing-focused, and I'm tired of describing my linguistic proficiency in cover letters. Maybe I'm kidding myself; maybe I'm a hack with an inflated lexicon, much as Bru has his own bag of words. I just hope I can combine them a little more meaningfully than he can.

As though the world is governed by the laws of Sesame Street, the best and worst movies I've seen lately both start with the letter C. The best: Crash.

No, not the David Cronenburg one about people crashing cars and having sex: the more recent one with people like Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Ryan Phillippe, Brendan Fraser and Ludacris in it. These actors and others play various people in LA, who are tied together loosely by circumstance and thematically by being racist or impacted by racism. It's a harsh but absorbing movie. I don't want to give away plot elements, but if you like movies in which a diverse, seemingly unrelated set of characters gradually fall into the same pot---a la Snatch or Magnolia---you'd probably like Crash. Don't be fooled by the title and the trailer---I was skeptical about the originality of a movie based on the idea of people 'connecting' through car crashes. This idea comes up about three times in the story, which I think was just enough to make it an undercurrent in my head, not a hammer coming down on it.

The worst: The Cave.

Oh. My. Goodness. What a load of bat guano. First the sad story of how Shauna and I ended up wasting money on this travestie. And I don't mean travestie executif.

Last Friday was rainy, and we figured what better to do on a wet Friday night than see a movie. In hindsight, a better activity might have been to just sit on some curb and get dejectedly, soddenly, soaked. There are several cinemas in the KW area so we had new and just-past-new movies to choose from. Shauna was gunning for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Brothers Grimm, whereas I was holding out for The Constant Gardener or Lord of War. To decide, we watched trailers and read movie reviews online. Nothing really stood out. Lord of War had an interesting description, but seemed foolish in its trailer. And I've never liked Nicholas Cage. The Constant Gardener looked good in the trailer, but received scorn in its reviews. The Brothers Grimm was downright panned, and C and the CF was held up as a poor hand-me-down of the original Willie Wonka movie from 1971. We considered alternatives; the most highly-touted of these was actually The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which I would have seen, but Shauna figured would be too puerile. ('Better puerile than Rinkydink and the Rinkydink Factory,' I thought but did not say.) Then we came to The Cave...now, both Shauna and I love scary movies that are actually, really scary. 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead qualify for this category. Some may disagree, but we both find the scenario of the world crumbling under an outbreak of fast-moving, vicious zombies deliciously terrifying. Also, The Ring is an awfully creepy movie full of nightmarish visuals, e.g. the horse on the boat. The general absence of stupid decision-making ('There's a serial killer in the woods? We better split up unarmed and go find him'), gore for gore's sake, and mass-produced plot and characterization that is normally part and parcel of the horror genre helps set these three movies apart. So, we had some expectations for The Cave. Shauna even hoped that it would have some token reference or parallel with Plato's cave. Not to be. A reviewer at filmcritic.com gave it a middling 3 or 3.5 stars, but was enthusiastic in his review, likening the cave-spelunking, monster-fleeing movie to a dark waterslide he rode as a boy. I thought, 'Appealing to boyish fears, sounds good to me.' We didn't go running in full force with our eyes on our shoelaces, but we were quietly hopeful.

And then we actually watched the movie. Ok, here's the scenario: some scientist guy with a smart-sounding accent finds the ruins of an ancient church in the Carpathian mountains in Romania. The ruins have fallen down into this cave that is, of course, the deepest cave on Earth. But don't worry---he knows just who to call. Cut to the young, sexy, daring and racially diverse group of adventurers out on some body of water scuba diving through dangerous and exotic submarine caves. The team is made up of the usuals: one muscular bad-ass black guy, a blonde who needs to wear skimpy clothing in order to do her job right, a quirky tech guy who you know will be the first to die, and three white, square-jawed bo-hunks who, for at least the first half-hour of the movie, are indistinguishable from each other. But don't worry---these three will soon fully develop into rounded, intriguing, conflicted, richly-woven, not at all stock characters. One establishes himself as the maverick, staying under water longer than is safe, going into the deepest caves, pushing the envelope, giving 110%. Hmm, hero of the movie perhaps? The older brother of the maverick is the leader of the group, Mr. Calm, Cool and In-Command. (The actor who plays this guy is Cole Hauser, who seems to have learned his facial expressions and swaggering southern drawl from the Matthew McConaughey School of Acting.) Finally, the third white dude is Briggs---I've never understood why calling characters by their last names makes them tougher...maybe Briggs's first name is Fabian or something---whose only functions are to provide more square-jaw and bicep and to later on challenge Matthew Mc---er, Cole Hauser's leadership. Okay, so we've assembled a cast of characters not likely to grace the syllabi of Classics courses in the year 3041. If they do, our era will be retitled the Very Very Dark and Stupid Age.

So of course this bunch of hip young sciency folk just have to get their crampons and climbing gloves on this once-in-a-lifetime spelunking opportunity for the purposes of mapping all the underground caverns...or something like that. They are joined on this adventure by Dr. European-Accent Man, a sexy female 'Romanian' (I know a few Romanians, and she sounds as Romanian as my elbow) scientist who you just know is going to establish chemistry with the younger brother maverick-guy, and an Asian dude whose job seems to be to videotape the trip and feel the brunt of Cole McHauser's tougher-than-thou scorn. [Sidenote: this character is played by the same guy diehard 24 fans know as Agent Baker and who, to further link The Cave and Crash together beyond their diametrical opposition on the good/bad scale, also appears extremely briefly in the latter.] The gang is equipped with cool technology, such as this silly solar gun that shoots sound/light/plasma/CGI into the darkness to give them readouts on the cave structure. Not only are they equipped with the junk, they also like to talk about it. Without end. Using pseudo-science jargon to the point that I mentally put my hands up in front of me and said 'Okay, you've got more gadgets than James Bond and despite being young idiots you all have advanced scientific degrees, whatever, I'll believe you, just shut up already'.

But I should get to the real meat and potatoes of the story, the plot. And I'm not going to hold back on revealing too much, just in case any of you still think you should see this movie despite what I've already said.

So the group of young twits gets to the cave in no time and sends out their first scout, Fabian Briggs. He goes far, far into the claustrophic depths of the cave for the purposes of reconnaissance and setting up base camp and other military terms cool people in movies use. He reports back over a Blair Witch-like videocamera thingie but his report gets interrupted suddenly, just as he was saying 'What the--?!' The rest of the crew goes swimming after him and finds out, thank God, that he's okay, but that something chewed the fibreoptic communications line (and all the people at home slammed their keyboards and shouted 'I want my Internet back!') So nerdy tech man, whose name is something bizarre like Strod or Strahn or Stroganoff, and someone else split off to go repair it. Uh-oh, here comes the monster, which is a mix between Alien and a gargoyle. Nerdy man gets ripped to shreds and dragged down into the depths of the ubiquitous underground river, much to the horror of whichever character it was who was with him I can't bloody well remember they're all so very bland. You can see the plot unfolding from there; our swashbuckling spelunkers are too far to turn back the way they came, so they must press on in hopes of finding a way out on the other end while gradually getting picked off by monsters who always advertise their arrival with a clicky, chickadee-like call one of the characters intuitively identifies as echolocation. When one attacks bad-ass Mattcole McHaushey, our fearless leader manages to cut off a claw, which Romanian scientist/sexpot woman analyzes in her portable scientific laboratory. Turns out the claw is crawling with this wormy parasite grossness. In collecting this specimen, McCole gets a good rake across the back...as the movie drags on, his behaviour starts to change. He starts making snappy decisions without any explanation (like any good adventurer leader should do...everyone should follow him out of respect for his awesomeness, goddamn it). He gains ultra-senstive hearing. His irises re-shape themselves to look like, um, ninja stars. He starts doubling over with nasty bellyaches that make you wonder when a baby monster's going to rip out of his innards in another shameless rip-off of Alien. Is the parasite turning him into one of the monsters? Could he make the ultimate sacrifice by fighting to the death with his future brethren so that the remnants of the young cool people can escape? In a word, yes. I figured this out around the time they said the word 'parasite' and his eyes turned starry, as I'm sure all of the other five people in the theatre did too. But, of course, this didn't stop the characters on the screen (and the authors who put words in their mouths, shame on them) from debating the evolutionary existence of these creatures and pondering their place on the cave food chain.

The movie drags on from one scene and obtuse explanation of escape route to the next (the writers, directors and producers should have realized that no matter how much you talk about it in expository dialogue, one part of a cave looks the same as every other part...unless you're creative with the rules of geology, see below) and the characters gradually die in semi-cool ways until the great face-off between between the guy whose name I'm tired of poking fun at and one of the monsters. This suicidal face-off takes place in a room full of flames and lava the characters emerge into from the underground glacier next door (yeah, I'm serious). [Sidenote I can't resist: As his final act, Cole Hauser climbs this giant stalagmite and jumps off to meet an in-swooping monster in mid-air...just like Matthew McConaughey's character does in to an in-swooping dragon in the climax of Reign of Fire. Hmm, maybe McConaughey trained the actors and wrote the story. And I've heard that Agent Baker brought a coffee to a guy on the set of Reign of Fire and...] In the end, younger brother maverick guy, sexy Romanian scientist and bad-ass black guy are the only ones who escape, though the black guy does sustain a broken leg that initially seems painful but he is then able to 'walk-off'. In the final scene, the Romanian woman and maverick man sit in a quaint, stereotypically European cafe and hmm and hah over the events and the existence of the parasite in the cave, until the woman leans forward, pecks him on the cheek, reveals ninja star eyes behind her sunglasses and says 'I think it wants to get out.' She then runs off into the crowd and maverick man can't find her. SEQUEL! SEQUEL! SEQUEL!

...my goodness. When I first started writing this, I didn't think it would end up as much more than 'Crash good, Cave bad'. But, I felt sheepish leaving the theatre on Friday, and I'm sure the attendants were looking at Shauna and I and thinking 'Ha, they got taken,' so this is my revenge. As Paul Bettany, playing Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, said, 'I will eviscerate you in fiction.' Or in an impromptu movie review.