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Friday night, I saw Alien vs. Predator with my cous Pratik Trivedi. Before I explain exactly why I thought this movie sucked ass, let me set it up for you a bit. We get there an hour before the movie’s about to start, so we sat in on The Village a bit. That looked really good. Manoj (that’s the ‘M’ in ‘M. Night Shamalan.’ Where does the ‘Night’ come from? He gave that name to himself cause it ‘sounded cool.’ I degress.) Anyway, Manoj has a pretty cool way of filming suspense. There was a lot of action going on barely on the corner of the screen, letting your mind wonder what exactly what was going on. He does that shit well, and for the 20 minutes that I actually saw, I’m kind of excited to see the whole thing. But we didn’t want to ruin it, so we walked out. Then we sat in on Hero. That looked AWESOME. I was ready to sit in and just watch the rest of that, but my cousin promised his little sister he’d see that with her next weekend, so again, we walked out of a pretty good movie. Then, sigh we watched Alien vs. Predator. I didn’t have very high expectations of the movie to begin with, cause I hadn’t heard very good thing about it, and part of me wanted to let the good movies rest in history as good movies (minus the already-made lame sequels). But man, it was boring, the story was predictable, the dialogue was sooo WEAK. The characters looked like they were being reminded their lines as they were going through the scenes.

If you haven’t seen the movie and you actually give a shit about not ruining it for yourself, don’t read on.

So the premise of how Aliens and Predators actually know each other—as it was stated in a corny flashback sequence in the movie—was that there was this temple in Antactica that was basically a breeding ground for Aliens. Once every 100 years, Predators would send their amateur warriors to the temple to test their might. One or two predators would sit at the top of the temple while HORDES of aliens would climb to the top, and the Predators would kill off all of them like they were 7 year olds plowing through pixie sticks. So one or two predators were able to kill off an army of aliens without blinking, yet Arnold Schwartzenagger was able to kill one predator (with his cunning skill) by himself in the first movie? That kinda made the first predator look like a big wuss. Then one of the Predators in AVP created a bond with the main chick in the movie and took her under his wing. That was lame, he shouldn’t have given a shit about her, he’s a Predator. Early on a face grabber grabbed a predator’s face when he had his mask off (that was already screaming ‘sequel a la underworld’). Then at the end of the movie (again, stop reading if you actually give a shit about seeing this movie) that Predator died. So after the Predators defeated the mother Alien and they’re heading back onto their ship, they put the dead Predator on a hammock and put him in the bay of the ship as they take off, and they all walked away. Zoom in on the Predator’s chest and all of a sudden ‘whoa!’ an Alien that looks like a Predator pops out of his chest (sequel sequel sequel). Okay. All throughout the movie, the Predators were scanning the chests of people, and if they didn’t see aliens breeding in them, they’d let them pass and wouldn’t give a shit. Wouldn’t they have noticed an alien breeding in their comrades chest BEFORE they let him back on their ship? BEFORE they considered their mission complete? Also, this dude was dead for a while. Doesn’t the host need to be alive in order for the Alien to still breed? Can an Alien still be born after the host has died? My first thought is ‘no.’ But I might be wrong.

So yea, I’ll admit, I’m being a big movie dork and looking into the flick a little deeper than I should, and I should just sit back and enjoy it for what its worth. But the action and gore wasn’t even good enough to allow me to do that. The movie was a bore, and I sat in the theater the whole time wondering how the other kids in the theater were buying this shit. Worthless.

What I’m listening to right now:

Shahid Parves, Raag Yaman. This is the cat I’m going to be studying under for a week in September. So I went up to a Devon a week-week and a half ago and found this Japanese import in a pile of Shahid Parves CDs my uncle-buddy at Bombay Video had. And it’s awesome. The way he plays with dynamics in his melodies sounds really smooth. He gets loud and really soft, and lets a single note ring out as he’s bending it like crazy, lets it sit with total silence for a moment, and they break back into it. His quality and intonation and speed has slowly been blowing me away the more I’ve been listening to this CD. I’m a fan.