The not-so friendly skies

I know it’s been said but I have to reiterate, the airlines do as much as they can to make your trip unbearable. I have to assume this is accidental because it would just be cruel if it was purposeful and there is no way this bunch of people could collectively do anything right on purpose.

If you can’t tell I recently traveled on USAir to Tampa, and it is the first flight since a trip to MVY several years ago, Abbott’s flight withstanding, and was well before 9/11. I completely understand arriving to the airport early. The airlines cannot possibly predict what may or does happen before each flight to delay your ability to board it. However if you are at the airport an hour before your flight then there should be no question that you or your bags would be able to make the flight. I’ll get back to this point later. I also understand the new security measures that are needed at the airport. These may or may not prevent hijackings or airline attacks but they do make at least some of the passengers feel safe and that may mean as much or more. Okay, that being said, they make you take your shoes off. Please reread that last sentence. In most instances the shoe itself would and can be viewed as a more deadly weapon than anything you may hide in them. The also allow laptops on the plane! How easy do you think it is to empty one of those out and use it as a container? Even if you aren’t that smart it can still be used, very effectively I might add, to clobber someone over the head. So apart from me having to take off my belt, shoes, watch, remove the change, gum, and phone from my pockets I understand the increase in security. Sure it’s a hassle but the airlines and airports are doing it for our protection so I will indulge them.
Moving onto the overall experience created by this efficiently run mass travel machine (sarcastic).

So let us say you get to the airport thanks to someone wasting one to two hours of their time to drop you off at the catastrophically overcrowded area they call departures, at the risk of getting any number of tickets, yelled at by airport security and/or the police. Now you stand in a line that waits on two personnel to get everyone their tickets boarding passes and check their luggage. Now why do they even tease us with the unused check in counters? Similar to Best Buy or even better the DMV (MVA if you live in Md) there are always less people than you need working and more counters than you would ever want. After standing in the line for way to long you wonder if you will actually make your flight you arrived an hour or more early for. Then we get to the security checkpoint where the shoes come off and if you forget to remove anything metallic, such as a bobby pin (actually I don’t really know what one of those is so I probably wouldn’t have one in my pocket while going through airport security but you get the idea), you are then forced through a fine mesh screen so they can be sure you aren’t a threat. I won’t even talk about the no electronics rule they have on the plane.

Once at your destination you are greeted by friends who again had to waist an hour or two and undoubtedly circle the airport 7000 times to wait for you to get off your plane and get your bags. Then rinse, lather, and repeat. All and all a terrible experience that I wouldn’t wish upon my enemies, and I haven’t even mentioned what they charge you for this service.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “Blaine why such animosity toward the airlines?” Well I’m glad you asked. Rachael and I were going to fly to Tampa to see a friend of hers and her fiancé. We booked the flight, got a decent price, I guess, because of a layover in Charlotte. Layovers are another post entirely. Anyway we all had a great weekend and got some sun until hurricane Jeanne came through. Now I have to thank the weather people for this one. They knew Jeanne was coming; they were just off by three days. So everyone panicked. Grocery stores closed, restaurants closed, Cinemas closed (I don’t get this. When its raining outside you want to see a movie, the weather wasn’t that bad, everyone just freaked), so of course the airport closed. Our flight from Tampa to Charlotte to BWI was canceled. The airport doesn’t control the weather but they have absolutely no contingency plans for cancellations. So only fitting for the playoff baseball season quickly approaching, STRIKE 1.

It’s like trying to get tickets to a Pearl Jam concert, who sold out a 120,000 person show in 48 minutes. Everyone calls and no one gets a flight for two days. Our 7:30pm Sunday flight turned into a 5:30am Tuesday flight. Now we did get to stay and enjoy a great beach day, the hurricane having moved north 16 hours ago, we cooked dinner at the beach and I even got to watch some Monday night Football. Skip to 3:30am on Tuesday. We are awake and out the door for the 5:30 flight and the hour drive preceding it. Once at the airport again there is a line and again several people wondering if they will make their flight. I however was not. Instead I am looking for which person I am going to break in half if they tell me I missed the flight (next available one Wednesday night at 9). We get to the counter just fine but they tell us our bags may not make it on the plane. STRIKE 2.

How can you get checked in with plenty of time to get to your gate, through the shoe removal place, board your flight and sit there waiting for takeoff but your bags can’t got on the plane? So instead of wondering if my bags made it I decided to ask the woman at our gate before we board. You guessed it, she can’t check on that. After hearing this I retaliated with “so no one can tell me if my bag got on the plane?”
“No sir.” She replied, and I walked on the plane muttering something hateful in disgust. STRIKE 3.

Food for thought:
The aforementioned multi-million dollar electronics business conglomerate Best Buy has a neat system. All their items have barcodes on them and each barcode is unique. When merchandise arrives to the store the check that it’s what they ordered, see that it’s all there, and enter the items into the computer. If they had to do this manually this would be an enormous burden so instead they have scanners to read the barcodes and transmit the info into a database. Now this entered data is available to all Best Buy stores so if one store doesn’t have the product you are looking for then they can direct you to another store that does. So to wrap up, Best Buy has the ability to keep track of every cd, video game, television, speaker, washer/dryer, etc… and tell you if they have any in stock and even if they don’t they can direct you to a store that does.

Back to the airport:
They already put a barcode on every piece of luggage; all they would need to do is scan it. However an airport that has to worry about far more people than Best Buy ever will cannot possibly be bothered with a trivial thing such as people loosing their bags. Having one of the throwers (that’s baggage handlers for those of you who didn’t know) scan the luggage before they heedlessly launch it to his fellow thrower would be way to easy and efficient. Instead they would rather have you guess whether or not your bags will meet you at your destination.

Final note:
I have driven from Maryland or Northern Virginia area to Blacksburg 843 trillion times in the past several years and not once have I lost an article of clothing, had to stop for more than ten minutes if at all, had some unforeseen problem cause me to arrive late, or had a complaint about the price. It’s now 9:45am, I’m not even home yet and I’ve been up for six hours and forty five minutes.

As miserable an experience as airports and airlines are…unless someone can tell me about a good flight experience or airline in general, I guess next time I’ll just drive.

P.S. Abbott this is only concerning commercial flights I’d be glad to fly with you again.

P.P.S. The stupid pen I bought at this airport to write this down is almost out of ink and I paid $3 for it!

An action movie discussion with no strings attached

To start I have been reading a lot of The Sports Guy. For anyone who regularly reads his posts this will sound a lot like those. If you want to start reading The Sports Guy who in my opinion is witty, intelligent, and funny go here:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index

If you don’t have time to sort through all of his posts let me know and I will pick out some of the better ones and send the links to you.

I am just starting this and I can already tell it’s going to be long so go get a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and be prepared for a few pages of ranting. Anyway… on with the post. If there is one certainty in movies in the last 5 years it’s this: The Matrix was a bad movie! Now if you haven’t seen it you probably are thinking a lot of people raved about the movie, it made a gagillion dollars in the box office, and they made two other movies stemming from the success and cult following of the first. So how could this movie be terrible? If you have seen it you are probably not reading this anymore but I’ll continue anyway. I don’t mean the movie itself was terrible but what it led to certainly is.

Let’s start with the story: pretty good they got it from a fairly well know book, you may have heard of it, it’s called The Bible. It’s the best selling book of all time (I looked this up http://www.askmen.com/toys/top_10_60/62_top_10_list.html ) so you can’t go wrong there. Not only that but the movie did a good job with it, the religious undertones were there but they didn’t force them on the viewer and it didn’t take away from the sci-fi/action of the film.

The casting was great as well. Laurence Fishburne was terrific as the parental/teacher figure for the movie. Carrie-Anne Moss did a good job as the token hot computer dork chick, she is very attractive but not so much that you wouldn’t believe that she was interested enough in computers to have found the Matrix. Hugo Weaving was spectacular as Agent Smith and played his role to perfection (ex. The scene where Fishburne is held captive and the subway fight scene with Reeves). That brings us to Keanu Reeves; even this casting fit his character. Starting out as a fairly unsuccessful 9-5 office type, but an underground computer guru, he later “wakes up” and becomes for all intensive purposes a blank slate. This is perfect for his abilities, an almost shut in reserved character that is suddenly thrust into the unknown and unthinkable. Keanu pulls off the hesitation and uncertainty, with the kid at a new school feel, to perfection and his character’s simple dialogue relieve the movie of the “trying to act” flaw.

Now you are probably saying to yourself, “Blaine, all you have done is rave about this movie how can it possibly be terrible?” Well here’s how:

The special effects!

The effects are spectacular, even revolutionary, in this movie. The jumps, the flips, the martial arts moves, the “bullet time” shots, everything. Here is where they messed up. The Matrix opened the door for all other movies without a hundred million dollar budget to use green screens, wires, and computer generated imagery (CGI) profusely in order to get what they think is convincing and realistic effects, but they continue to routinely fail.

The actors in The Matrix had to go through 6+ months of martial arts training and they used wires so frequently they became comfortable with the movement and feel when they were connected to them. Not only that but the CGI teams had a big enough budget and were precise enough in there graphics art to make every scene look real. In addition the story allowed for all the superhuman stunt moves preformed throughout the movie.

Now when you see an action/adventure movie it can be a horrible experience worthy of receiving a refund. Perfect examples are Charlie’s Angels (the first one not so much but the second is terrible with this), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Daredevil just to name a few. What these movies did was to take big name actors (who may or may not be able to act), have them do as much of the simple stunts as possible, then use bad wire tricks and horrible CGI to fill in the impossible scenes. These techniques take away from the movie because if you are actually getting into the plot, the acting, or even the action scenes one of the blatantly fake sequences jumps out at you and ruins the illusion of real people doing the stunts or even the stunt being remotely possible in the first place (ex. gravity ceases to work in many instances and people can instantly change direction in mid air).

Some people might say, “you should include both X-Men movies, the Spiderman movies, i-Robot, The Hulk, and all computer animation movies in your list”, well here’s why I don’t:

All these movies, except for i-Robot and computer animated movies, are all based on comic books therefore there is an understanding of superhuman ability that is not only going to be but expected to be displayed. In addition to this these movies had enough time and money to get the action scenes correct. I just plain liked i-Robot and am not going to bash it, so you are going to have to deal with that. The computer animated movies are for all intensive purposes cartoons, and when is the last time a cartoon was expected to be realistic?

“Well Daredevil was based on a comic book you should take it off the list.”

No. The only power Matthew Murdock (Ben Affleck) possessed is enhanced vision based on sound waves. The rest of his abilities are based on his martial arts background and human strength, he should not be able to do any of the things he does in this movie. Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner) has no superpower, but is routinely able to pull off impossible moves 5th degree black belts wouldn’t even try. Not to mention it is blatantly obvious every time CGI takes over for actual actors. It is possible to make an action movie without gratuitous green screen and wire usage, just look at Troy.

I’m not saying that every action movie needs a hundred million dollar budget, martial arts training, and exquisite CGI but at the very least the action scenes could be convincing. All of this didn’t start with The Matrix but it was definitely taken to a new level.

As I’m writing this Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid has grossed thirty million dollars, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had a fifteen million dollar opening weekend.

* Sigh*

I guess some people just like bad movies.