Disaster Highs

It's 3 a.m. and I can't sleep. The world just ended 3 years from now. It was awesome.

I'm speaking of the new disaster flick 2012. I blame the fact that my first kiss followed a viewing of the movie Armageddon, but I'm a huge sucker for a good full-on disaster film. The more ridiculous and formulaic, the better it is in my book. Aliens, asteroids, nuclear warfare, perfect storms, volcanic eruptions, sinking ships, mountain avalanches, splintered freeways, tornadoes throwing cows around... you name it--if it's on the big screen, I'll be joyfully there, gnawing on twizzlers in stressed out rapture.

The big screen is the key though. I don't care for any of these once out on DVD...the mildly witty humor, obvious deadpan comments, vague moments of semi-scientific explanations, absurd escapes, heroic sacrifices and human togetherness need to be seen and heard in massive proportions to be any fun...a tv screen amputates away all the mindless vibrant joie de vivre of the genre.

Over the past few years, one of the things I've missed most was having great, mild date nights of food and movie. It's plain and routine and I love it. The movie theaters in Wuhan seldom show anything in English...so when they do, we usually make a point of trying to go. For this reason, in the past year, I have seen 3 movies in Wuhan theaters (and 2 in Beijing...which gets a bunch more of the international movies...so it doesn't count in this discussion): Valykrie (or however that one with Tom Cruise as a German was spelled), Transformers 2, and now 2012.

The first two were obviously duds, and it is a testament of Americans' innate love of a movie date that we all went at all. AND WE ENJOYED IT. The joy of movie theater movies is that if the movie is crap, you can laugh and make fun of it together while enjoying the atmosphere. The AWESOME joy of CHINESE movie theater movies is that you can also mess with peoples' minds. A row of foreigners draws attention....and so when that whole row of foreigners laughs simultaneously, everyone's going to notice. When those foreigners all laugh at a dramatic moment on cue from a pre-agreed-upon signal, everyone's going to get confused and wonder what their subtitles aren't telling them! And maybe they're even going to laugh along, pretending that they get the humor as well. It's wrong...but so fun.

Anyway, as soon as I heard of 2012, I knew I desperately wanted it to come to Wuhan. A review mentioned that the scientist character would utter "My. God." NOT JUST ONCE....but TWICE! And that the director...whatever his name is...is the type who's perfected worldwide disaster to the extreme...he's not just going to crush the White House, he's going to crush it with the USS John F. Kennedy battleship! He's not just going to have water flood some mountains, he's going to have it be Mount Everest! How could you ask for anything more!

And obviously, it did open in Wuhan. Disaster movies do well in China with only subtitles (not the usual redubbing) b/c you don't have to worry about everyone understanding the plot for it to be enjoyed. Plus, China actually has a role in the plot of the movie, so when we arrived, the first 2 showings were already sold out. We had to wait till 11:30 to see it, and the theater was packed! The movie did NOT disappoint! Cars drove through buildings!, airplanes brushed mountain peaks!, limos jumped cliffs!, California fell into the water!, the President was noble!, the expendable bumbling idiots met their end!, families found the love!, humanity found the love!, my heart raced and lots of cola was sold!

Without giving anything away, the movie is much more enjoyable if you:
1. Play your own version of a drinking game anytime there's obvious foreshadowing
2. whisper "dead dead dead" to your partner anytime a new character appears who will obviously not make it
3. Insert the line, "Wanna procreate?" into the dialogue any time the couples who will obviously be united by the disaster speak.

Ok, I'm finally coming down from the rush that was 2012 and will finish this up and go to bed. I don't know if I would ever recommend this movie in the States...the point of all of this is that I've lived over here for almost 2.5 years, so anything English in theaters is a drop of water in a parched land.

In closing, I'll share the line that got the biggest laugh in the Wuhan theater (foreigners and Chinese alike....though I think we the foreigners laughed harder at it):

Character 1 to hero as they fly in a small bush plane away from disaster (paraphrased for understanding): "So, where does this secret map that you just almost died to retrieve tell you the secret location is where we must go to save our lives?"

hero opens map to reveal the PRC with the word "CHINA" written in red across the country

hero: "We're gonna need a bigger plane."