Tomorrow is Independence Day, where everybody gets together and celebrates America’s history by lighting off fireworks in the grand Chinese tradition. But the fourth of July is not simply just a day to celebrate our nation’s independence from Canada; it’s also a day to get me gifts in preparation for my birthday on Friday.
Speaking of Steven Spielberg, a lot of people are talking about the movie A.I, which is apparently about a robot struggling to find his place in the human world. I liked this movie better when it was called Short Circuit, which is a film that chronicles the adventures of a robot who escapes from a factory and then reads books really, really fast. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to watch a robot read a book really fast? See this movie. (Insert Reading Rainbow sound effect here).
Short Circuit was made in the ‘80s, which was a good time for filmmaking because about half of all movies that were made during this decade featured an inventor who was having trouble in his inventing career. This was a smart move by the movie industry as it allowed for the audience to be treated to seeing all of the inventions that didn’t work out. For example, if there was an invention that was supposed to automatically turn oranges into orange juice, you can bet that the oranges would start shooting out at everybody in the room in a very hilarious, very intimidate fashion. Gremlins is a movie with one such hapless inventor. It starts off with said inventor looking for a Christmas present for his son, and so he walks into a mysterious shop. This is his first mistake. It used to be that the premise for nearly every single movie is that somebody buys a strange relic from a mysterious shop, only to find out later that the item in question has some sort of mystical power. In the case of Gremlins, the item is an animal who is capable of spawning off an entire race of monsters if water lands on his fur. The two other rules are as follows: The gremlins evolve immediately if they eat food after midnight, and, just like in real life, they instantly die if they appear in direct sunlight. The director was clearly focusing on realism.
The most inexplicable thing about this movie is that whenever somebody sees a gremlin, they’re like, “Aww, it’s so cute! What’s it’s name?” What’s it’s name? Are you retarded? It’s a bizarre animal that you’ve never heard of before! Nobody in this movie ever stops and says to themselves, “Now wait a minute. There’s no such thing as a gremlin. Shouldn’t I be surprised to see one of these things?” If you saw a gremlin in real life, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, that thing’s pretty cool. Where did you get it?” You’d probably say, “Holy shit, what the hell is that? Get that hellish beast out of my sight and burn it before it comes any closer!”
On a different note, F sharp. Also, a special shout out goes to all of the strange people who have been signing my guestbook. God knows how you found this thing.
