Last night I was lucky enough to catch a little bit of Jack Hanna on the David Letterman program, displaying his endearing lack of knowledge about animals.
As you will recall, Hanna is particularly testy when the subject of marsupials comes up. He brought out a bearcat. "What does it eat?" asked Letterman. "Fruits, bananas, people," said Hanna. "Is it a marsupial?" asked Letterman. "I don't know, look for yourself!" yelled Hanna. In other viewing news,
our annual Halloween film festival has continued with a movie called ATM. It's about some people being tormented in a freezing, confined spot, and as such it put me in mind of
FROZEN, a Halloween film festival feature from a couple of years ago. The trapped characters in ATM were a polite young man, the mildly sassy young woman upon whom he has a budding crush, and a wisecracking pal who makes everyone miserable. My recollection of FROZEN is not all it could be, but I'm almost certain the three unfortunates in that one form an identical combo. Allow me to quote myself from my own "blog" from two years ago this very day: "[FROZEN] was about all the gruesome things that can happen to you on a ski lift. Can you imagine all the gruesome things that might happen to you on a ski lift? Well, yes, you probably can. But that doesn't make them pleasant!" By way of contrast, NOTHING that happens in ATM is anything that would ever happen to anyone at an ATM, gruesome or otherwise. There is the obligatory scene in which we learn all the various reasons why none of the characters happen to have a working cell phone. For the devious madman's plan to work (
SPOILER ALERT! There is a devious madman!) he would have to magically assume that everyone at the ATM would lose, forget, or let the batteries run down on his or her cell phone simultaneously. For starters! In fact, the devious madman makes a lot of incredible assumptions - like, "I bet the protagonist is going to toss a flaming tequila bottle at me all of a sudden out of nowhere" - all of which come true. And once again, throwing a flaming tequila bottle is something we hardly ever do at ATMs anymore. The wildly improbable circumstances piled one upon another in ATM had me thinking nostalgically of the organic integrity of FROZEN, a movie about which no one has any reason to think at all. We also watched SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES as part of our Halloween film festival. I don't have anything to say about it. I just like to keep you informed.
