I just finished watching "10.5" an NBC 2-night Mini-Series about when the big one hits the West Coast.

The most affecting moment in the movie was when a government advisor turns to Beau Bridges (the US President, in the movie) and says "It's over!" and old Beau gets a close-up as he cranks out a tear.

I too, felt like crying. I had just spent two nights in a row, watching for a cinematic miracle of stunts and an emotionally wrenching story of survival ... but instead got stunts so bad it felt like something out of the 60's, and emotion the likes of which I've never seen and hope never to again. Have they learned nothing from Peter Jackson's WETA rendition of special effects marvels?

There were several scenes in particular that were so BAD that it inspired me to blahg tonight, tired though I am:

A speeding train was barely outrunning the fault as it swallowed up all of the train tracks, drawing out the excruciating inevitability of the train getting sucked into the maw of the ravening fault ... am I the only one who wonders why exactly the train was built on a FAULT? And why it took so long to actually swallow the tracks? Not to mention it was very obviously a model train. Pathetic.

But, unfortunately, worse was yet to come: The Collapse of the Golden Gate bridge. If only they hadn't felt compelled to use models again, AND, to save money, they didn't use very many of the bad models. Instead, there was an actor doing a really, REALLY bad "reporter on the scene" reporting what he sees ... If I was NBC, I'd have slapped CBS's logo on that pathetic excuse of a movie and make sure that everyone who was in that movie never works in movies again.

That was last night. I almost didn't watch tonight because it was so bad last night. If only I'd listened to my inner voice.

The crowning moment of the movie, the point at which you are to feel completely terrorized by the helplessness of the victims, roused me to total apathy. ;p This was when the fault widened and let the ocean in, creating Las Frisco, a new Island off the coast ... meanwhile, you could watch the magic of computers as it very, VERY obviously showed someone's cheesy computer rendition of the ground crumbling away to be replaced by foaming water.

Meanwhile, they did a slow-mo of people "falling" into shallow pits and "desperately running" that was laughable. Then, when it's all over, Beau is shedding his crocodile tears, and the very untalented cast was obviously directed to shuffle mindlessly towards the cliff like a bunch of lemmings, because that's what they did.

I have never been so irritated with myself before. I could have gone to bed at 9:00 after American Idol. Now THAT was worth watching! :)

Hope you spent your evening involved in something more interesting than me.

Oh, and today was my first day at my new job, and I'm not even inspired to say anything about that! :) I'll write about it tomorrow when I'm not so bitter about my television viewing choice. G'nite!