i never finished watching the worst movies i have seen, so i can not say definitively which was the worst. the only times i ever attempt to watch a movie is when i am not at home and i do not have any other entertainment than a TV (like in a motel or hotel room, or at the farm).
the most boring movies are probably 1950's movies with elvis presley in them. they are unbelievably shallow. i have watched up to 20 mins of some of them in bored despair, and could not continue watching.
i dislike those american high school movies where the plot is cheerleaders and sports hunks and their social saga of a week in their lives.
i hate the family movies like "honey i shrunk the kids", and "hairy dog" movies.
i do not like most modern comedy's because they force their jokes, and they look painfully stupid. i get a similar effect from most comedies as i would if a boring clown was doing a dance in front of me while flipping his lips with his finger saying "bluberblubberblubber...".
one movie i was disappointed with (because i was looking foreward to watching it) was "deep impact". from the advertisements, it looked very interesting.
i thought that there was scientific input into the graphic representation of the actual impact, and also the after effects (tsunami's, light flash damage, seismic shockwaves, ejecta etc).
also, i was excited that this graphic representation was to be modeled with hollywood's best animation computing hardware (which is very powerful).
in TV documentaries, they may have a budget of $50,000 to get the graphics done.
but if there was a budget of say $10,000,000 for hollywood to produce the graphics with many people dedicated to the design, and scientific consultation and involvement as to the authenticity, then i may see the best simulation of an asteroid impact i have ever witnessed.
but the movie was more about the relationship between 2 teenagers. the "hero" was some teenage boy who worked out that the asteroid was coming and no one believed him (i think (it was hard to follow the relationship dialogue)), but the daughter of some general had faith in him, and they somehow managed to escape the devastation by trail bike riding to the woods at the end of the movie. ho hum.
anyway, the graphical representation of the impact event was very "lay" in my opinion, and it was mainly a "graphical artists impression".
i can not remember all my original misgivings about the film as i forgot it soon after watching it, but i remember that the asteroid was shown in a shot as it hurtled to earth from about 100,000 miles away. i could see by scoping it's leading edge against the earth surface, that it traversed the pacific ocean in about 3 seconds.
that is about 3,600 miles per second.
i think that the maximum speed of impact of any asteroid that comes from the martian/jovian asteroid belt is approx 72 km/s.
also, the shots as seen from the ground on earth (by people) show fiery balls tracing through the sky and leaving undulating smoke trails. these balls are traveling at nowhere near even 72 km/s or they would be gone and it would be all over before anyone's mind even registered that they were there.
the "smoke trail" would be a razor straight and white and unviewably bright streak of plasmified molecules in it's wake. the "ball" itself would start things ablaze by it's brightness even before it hit the ground.
the movie sequence was nothing but raining balls of fire, and i expected to see seismic simulations where whole lakes were emptied as if a giant drumstick had beaten upon their ground beneath them and all the water leaps into the air and splashes down in the surrounding lands.
i expected to see skyscrapers close to the event vanish in less than one frame. like a flame on a match head is blown out instantly when you say "puhh!! !" at it, i expected to see cities vanish.
instead, they looked like they were only being gradually torn down by 500 mph winds.
etc etc. getting verbose i am.
i guess they modeled it for cheaper thrill style entertainment.
i guess to show an object 100,000 miles from earth traveling at a mere 72km/s (to scale) would make it too stationary looking to keep the attention of most people for more than a second.
i guess that to portray an object that has landed before the audience sees it is not a good theatrical idea. obviously they could not simulate the brightness, so they would have had to pretend their camera's were burned out, and they got no shots, to make it believable.
obviously to have the destruction of a city razed to ground happen in less than 1/24th second (one frame) would seriously limit the wow factor that most people crave to see.
but the whole movie was built around a love story and i was yukked (i can think of no more fitting word) by it.
08 Mar 2009, 7:03 pm
