Clone Wars -- "Missing in Action" (Ep. 5.11)

-- A soldier's most powerful weapon is courage.

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The adventures of Colonel Gascon continue this week, and we get a clone thrown into the mix. With amnesia. Generally speaking, I hate amnesia stories, but the story of Gregor has been the best thing about this arc so far. Except for the Russian-sounding sullustan. And it would have been okay if they had just used the Russian accent for a bit of audio-flavor, but he was clearly culturally Russian, including naming the clone Gregor, and that felt a little weird.

So, yeah, I'm tired of Gascon, the frog general. I think the first time I watched the series I found him amusing -- that's my memory impression, anyway -- but, this time, I just find him tiresome. It's the prejudice against droids and his own self importance that does it. Perhaps, though, it's fitting for the time we're in, right now, because there are some analogies that can be drawn from the character. Clearly, he has the attitudes of the typical white male boomer; maybe that's why they made him a frog, which is a thought I am, at this moment, finding amusing.

Not enough for me not to be ready for this arc to finish, though. I'm ready to get back to the real story.


"I hope you have a plan to get us off this armpit."

Abandoned Places: Pripyat

Pripyat was founded in February of 1970 as a housing development for the workers of Chernobyl, which went into construction at the same time. The city was laid out on a brand new triangular layout, unique at that time, although it became very popular  in Russian cities for a while. By 1979, two years after Chernobyl had become operational, it was finally declared a city. In 1986, the population just shy of 50,000 people, an explosion occurred at Chernobyl sending a plume of radioactive gas into the atmosphere over Pripyat. The entire population was evacuated in two days. Ultimately, more than 350,000 people were evacuated from the fallout zone. One interesting fact: Russia had originally wanted to build Chernobyl just outside of Kiev, but the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences protested.

There is a plan to have Pripyat cleaned of radioactivity by 2065.

The following photos are used by permission from www.pripyat.com:

A radiation warning sign.

The consumer center.

The Prometeus Cinema.

Stained glass in a cafe window.

The following photos are used by permission from http://www.justwalkedby.com/:

A Good Day For This Movie To Die Hard

Despite the bad reviews, I figured I should probably see A Good Day to Die Hard since I've seen all of the other Die Hard movies and liked at least one of them. Okay, maybe two of them. However, I went in with low expectations. This is the series in which the protagonist survives the explosion of a boat by jumping into the water next to the boat. Because, you know, being in the water totally protects you from explosions in the water. So, not only do we have that, but this one, the 5th (and I'd totally lost track, at this point, that this was the 5th one), was actually getting pretty horrible reviews.

It seems I did not lower my expectations far enough. Good Day fails at pretty much every level of story telling and movie making. Well, except for the explosions. It has plenty of those, which, in the Michael Bay theory of movie making, is all you need to make a good movie. I have to suppose John Moore and Skip Woods (the director and writer, respectively) are Bay disciples.

The first real mistake the movie makes is having the movie open with McClane's son instead of with McClane himself. It's Die Hard; we're here to see John McClane, not junior. To make it worse, they just throw the audience into the middle of a situation for which there is no context. This is one of the reasons I hate that whole "start in the middle of the action" "rule." They definitely did that with this movie. However, not knowing anything about the characters or the situation, there is no way real way to know whom we should be caring about, so we don't really care about anyone. Of course, this all ends, as we come to find out, with John Jr. (Jack) in a Russian prison. And, as my wife said, "What? I didn't even know he had a son."

[As a total aside, the plot arc includes the exposition for a reason. When you skip that part so that you can "start in the middle of the action," you skip the part where the audience gains empathy for the protagonist and comes to care for him or her. Without an exposition, you do not have a complete story, and that's just bad writing.]

The issue here is that there is an expectation that we will care about Jack because John cares about Jack. Except we don't have any context, really, for John caring about Jack since he's barely mentioned or seen in the other movies. Conveniently enough, John has suddenly chosen this moment to care about Jack, whom he has not spoken to in years, and has had one of his old cop buddies track Jack down for him just at the time that Jack is arrested and thrown into a Russian prison. Of course, there is no good reason why McClane's cop friend should be able to find out that undercover CIA agent Jack McClane has been thrown into a top Russian prison. Especially within what seems to be hours of it happening. Not that McClane even knows that his son is CIA.

Being John McClane, he just jumps on a plane to Russia with some vague expectation that he will be able to connect with his son when he gets there. His son that is in a top, possibly top secret, Russian prison. And, of course, without planning it, he happens to arrive on the day that his son is going to appear in Russian court as a witness against the guy that Jack is supposed to be saving. And, also of course, he stumbles into the middle of a prison break/abduction of the guy that Jack is supposed to be saving (and also testifying against).

This is where we expect, I guess, John McClane to become "yippee-ki-yay" John instead of old, tired John that we find at the beginning of the movie. But we don't get that. No, what we get is John chasing his son around during the middle of a fire fight trying to talk to him about how sorry he is that he wasn't there for him when he was a kid. I think it was supposed to be funny. I think. But it didn't even rise to the level of ludicrous as John meanders through the bullets and explosions and, eventually, when his son takes off in a vehicle without him, steals a truck to follow his son while yelling, "I'm not through talking to you!"

And through all of this we have been given no real reason as to why this guy Jack needs to save is so important other than that the CIA want him and that some muckety-muck Russian wants him dead. Or abducted. And the guy's daughter is involved, except we're not supposed to know that, but as soon as the dude tells McClane that he has a daughter, I knew it was his daughter that was the woman in the group trying to capture and/or kill the dude. And also of course no one turns out to be on the sides they're presented to be on except McClane, the sadist bad guy, and the dead people.

Possibly the worst bit, which is saying a lot considering how terribly the movie began, is when Jack overhears John telling the Russian dude about how bad a parent he was and how bad he feels about it and how all he wants to do is make everything right with Jack. But, since, Jack hears John saying this, we are spared any action or work on the part of John to repair his relationship with his son, because his son, now, understands that his dad worked all the time because of how much he loved Jack. And, then, of course, they bond over killing the bad guys and everything is okay.

I'm not making it out to be as bad as it really is. It was bad enough that, before the hour mark, my wife decided that she was through with the movie. I'm not actually sure why I finished watching it other than the fact that I have a hard time stopping something once I've started it no matter how bad it is. That this movie was bad wasn't even the worst part about it. It just felt completely inauthentic. McClane's actions didn't feel authentic (Who, really, just jumps in a plane and flies to Russia with the vague plan of getting in to see someone in a Russian prison? John was a cop; he, theoretically, knows how this stuff works and it's beyond far-fetched that he, even being John McClane, would just hop in a plane without contacting the State Department or something). The fact that Jack refers to his father as "McClane" didn't feel authentic (Seriously? "Damn you, McClane" is the best they could come up with for Jack to say? I buy him calling his father "John" but the whole "McClane was a stretch the rubber band couldn't take). The whole conflict of the movie involving Russia and nukes didn't feel authentic. It's not the 80s anymore.

So, yeah, give me more of escaping explosions by jumping into the water next to the boat that's exploding. At least that was just a brief moment of stupidity unlike the stupidity that was this movie from beginning to end. And that doesn't even cover how dumb the title is, because, if you're going to use the phrase "a good day to die," you need to actually have it be relevant to the movie, but no... no relation at all. Just a cool title. But, then, a cool title doesn't make a cool movie.

Let's go for a walk... Part 8: The Ruins

It's been a while since we've been on a walk with my dog, so I figure it's about time to do that again, especially since I got sidetracked, last year, by A to Z and never told y'all about the ruins. Actually, I did mention them back in the post about Goblin Town, but I didn't go into too much detail.

This area was first settled by the Russians. They set up here in the early 1800's in order to hunt these guys:

The sea otter. The sea otter has the thickest fur of all other animals, so their pelts are very valuable. You know, more valuable than gold and all of that. [As a total aside, they were hunted to near extinction by 1900, at which point less than 1% of their estimated original population was left, as few as 1000 of them still in the wild (from a population that may have exceeded 300,000 in 1800). No, it wasn't just the Russians that did this, but they were (mostly) responsible for it in this area.]

What the Russians found here, though, was more than just sea otters. They found an area infested with goblins, goblins that also hunted otters but not to the extreme that humans did.

Initially, the Russians set up Fort Ross.

The fort was to defend against goblin attacks. They even joined forces with various Native American tribes to fight against the goblins that were being agitated by the swelling numbers of settlers.

Eventually, the Russian-American Company collaborated to build a stone fortress just down the creek from where I live. It must have been an impressive structure based upon the ruins that are still there. You can see the outline of how big the structure was in the remains of the foundation.

The goblins didn't take kindly to the building of a castle in the midst of their lands, so they mustered their various tribes for a large assault against the humans with the intention of driving them out of their lands. It was a terrible battle. Vicious. Bloody. The creek ran red with the blood of the fallen for weeks.

The humans lost. And the goblins tore down the castle, leaving no stone upon another.

But it came at a tremendous cost to the goblins. The survivors were forced to join together into one tribe just to survive. Retreating to their tunnels,

they have remained hidden through the years as the humans came back and completely overran lands that were once theirs.

However, of late, they have once again been growing bold and can often be seen crawling out of their tunnels at dusk to scavenge for food and other bits and pieces of things they find useful.