Albuterol For The Soul – LittleCubeNews.com

This is an archived copy of the Spring Break Shark Attack live review which streamed in real time while it aired. It is hard to believe such a great concept – The O.C’s Shannon Lucio and some other teenagers face an army of sharks – turned out so badly. That being said, as far as great ideas which go horribly wrong, it was second to my own personal decision this spring break to make money to pay my lawyer by playing high stakes poker. This choice eventually led to me being miserable enough to watch Spring Break Shark Attack.

8:00 – Five trophy wives are eaten by an unseen, underwater menace. I think it was a shark.

8:02 – Shannon’s dad won’t let her go to spring break because of all the Jello wrestling and sex. We are informed by the opening credits this movie is produced by someone named Peter Sadowski.

8:04 – The first montage of bikinis and lotioning is immediately followed by the first great line of dialogue – “You are pale even for a white girl!”.

8:10 – Guy Hero, who I think used to be on 7th Heaven, is introduced. He is smart and sensitive and depressed about college, but his mom encourages him to “go meet a girl” even though he is wearing a sleeveless flannel shirt.

8:15 – Two creepy dudes with a video camera walk around telling girls they are with “Girls Unleashed”. This reminds me of the time me and my friend went to Lake Havasu for spring break but somehow ended up there a week early. All he had was a still camera, and we only came away with this photo, which we always preface by rubbing our stomachs and saying, “We went to Lake Havasu and all we got was some terrible gas!”

8:19 – Guy Hero and Shannon dance awkwardly to a slow song at a raging kegger. His new flannel shirt has sleeves and I have to admit, I really like his haircut.

8:24 – Two teenagers are eaten by a shark in a marina which somehow produces a geyser of blood shooting out of the water, not to mention the first commercial break. Snuff Toll: 7

8:31 – It turns out Shannon’s pasty-faced brother is a nerdy shark scientist who works near the beach and says things like, “I don’t know what the question is, but the answer is sharks!”. He warns her about a reef he just discovered that could be home to the Tiger Shark which can “smell blood and has no fear”. I will coin this moment as the “The Moment the Second Great Line of Dialogue Occurs”.

8:32 – The first fake attack of the movie occurs when some girl’s boyfriend playfully pulls her under the water, alarming everyone on the beach and every viewer for a few nerve-racking seconds.

8:44 – Shannon gets slipped a roofie by a serial date rapist. I haven’t seen a shark for about twenty minutes and it hits me that more people will see this than Open Water, the good shark flick I saw a few days ago. I am sad.

8:53 – I wake up after falling asleep to find a scene of Shannon getting molested intercut with two teenagers being shark-yanked off a dock by their feet. Subtle. Snuff Toll: 9

8:58 – Dad shows up but it’s too late. Shannon is getting on that tour boat no matter what! As they stop the boat to swim Guy Hero eats apple slices off a knife… roofie rapist jumps in the water… second fake attack happens when he pulls a girl down by her feet… getting nervous… blood appears in the water out of nowhere… Sharks!

9:03 – The commercial immediately after Guy Hero yells, “Sharks!” is a Gap commercial with a jingle that refrains, “Shorts!”. I keep thinking they’re singing, “Sharks!”. Because I’m not looking at the TV, I think the movie is still going on and just became awesome. It’s not and it didn’t.

9:08 – Shannon wins the race back to the boat. Unfortunately, sharks ram the boat until it can only make it to the nearby island of a mad scientist (I’m guessing), where Shannon finds a near-full packet of Rohypnol (or maybe Sudafed) in Rape Guy’s bag. Who is the real enemy? Subtle.

9:15 – I finish downloading the Sex Pistols box set from the Internet. I’m sampling a demo of “God Save the Queen” so I nearly miss the nerdy brother look at a mutilated sea turtle and say something that ends with, “…inescapable conclusion – Sharks!”

9:25 – The dead body of her friend’s boyfriend is found on the shore of Blood Island by Shannon. I assume he was one of the guys killed earlier in the marina. I can’t help but think of the movie Tremors and it’s underground worms. In the sequels, the worms learned to walk and eventually fly. I am starting to hope something similar happens here so the local news can start 30 minutes early.

9:36 – Finally, after years of sharks on film only attacking by themselves or with a few others, they finally get their shit together and storm Spring Break Beach in a herd. Because of the geysers and generally bad camera work, I am left to speculate how many people actually die. Snuff Total: 1,981.

9:40 – Shannon, Hero Guy, and the nerdy brother lure every shark away by tying a cage full of shark food to the back of their boat and speeding away.

9:41 – Bryan Brown, who is apparently in this movie, stands on the beach amid the smoke and triage tents and says, “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s all wrong.” Though never really explained, he was evidently dumping chum in the water to attract sharks and scare tourists back to a beach where he owns resorts. I think he is just having a Vietnam flashback.

9:50 – Shannon’s boat is going down so the nerdy brother pulls out his latest invention – Tiger Shark-repelling electrical balls. Though Hero Guy shoots himself in the shoulder with a spear gun and Shannon has to swim into the shark swarm to fix one of the pods, the sharks are eventually driven away in the direction of what looks to me like Mexico.

9:58 – Hero Guy and Shannon enjoy the sunset and decide to spend next spring break together… in Cancun! Although, Spring Break Shark Attack 2: Cancun would be great I kind of hope they push it into production a little sooner – maybe a Memorial Day Shark Attack. Are you listening Sadowski?

…and if I had to do it all over again, there’s a couple things I would still do and recommend to everyone. Take a new picture. Don’t use the same picture you had taken for your license in high school, especially if you are a long-hair and pissed at the world. This combination is overly conspicuous and it is fairly easy to cut your hair. Also, for your fake name, pick an unfamiliar lead singer for a well-known rock band. I chose Chris Barron (who?) of the Spin Doctors (yes!). This is always amusing.

There’s a few things I would not recommend. Don’t use a 1995-era computer that you don’t really know how to work. Make sure your photograph has been cut so it has 90-degree angles. Don’t use a magic marker to fake the hologram. Don’t use your 1993-era dot-matrix printer to print it. Even after you’ve successfully used the ID in Chili’s and Red Robin despite doing all the aforementioned things, don’t try and use it at a bar. If you’re lucky, like me, the bartender will laugh and give you free diet cokes. But you could also go to jail.

Sometimes I think it’s time this web site gets back to what it was originally intended to provide: lots of book reviews. Along the way, it lost the course. This is probably because it became clear that most of the Little Cube News audience would read anything and was not very interested in quality of writing. So it only makes sense I review a book no one would find of much relevance anyway.

A Simple Twist of Fate is about the making of one of my favorite albums of all time, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. I could not pass up the opportunity to read an entire book about a much loved record, especially since I don’t foresee even a magazine article dedicated to the making of The Doggfather or Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In being written anytime soon. The first sign of trouble was the excerpt on the back of the book – a showy account of why Dylan decided to re-record a few songs for Blood after laying them down first in New York: “It was a gamble, but one he knew he had to take.” I’ll forgive the fact (for now) author Andy Gill makes it sound like Dylan was making a decision equivalent to Kennedy’s in not invading Cuba (although I think he actually makes that comparison in chapter 6). But the inference, arduously reinforced in the book, is that the resulting tunes were superior. Meanwhile, a legion of self-important Bob Snobs will tell you that the “New York sessions” were the actual masterpiece and should never have been tampered with. Gill is not interested in opinions, though, unless they are his own, which seems to make them facts in his mind. His fawning reaches a peak when he appoints Dylan’s return in the early 70’s as the only emancipating moment of the decade, a decade he describes as a “swelling sea of MOR pablum and prog/glam fantasy.” Even if I fully understood what that meant, I have to point out that “Kung-Fu Fighting” and “Come Sail Away” came out around the same time.

Despite the awful prose, the truth is I never knew I there were so many things I didn’t want to know about this album – the kinds of microphones used, the order of every cue sheet, and the life story of every studio musician present, for example. Skip this book – but if you want a bootleg copy of Blood on the Tracks – The New York Sessions, e-mail me. It’s a much better version, anyway.

On a scale of nasal decongestants, where Drixoral is a 1 and Flonase is a 10, A Simple Twist of Fate rates a straw with a plate of Cayenne Pepper, the painful and numerical equivalent of a 3.8.

Faced with the prospect of spending 24 hours in Tent City, Arizona’s jail for severe traffic violators and the semi-violent, I asked around for advice. Many told me to bring a book because it’s boring and hot. One guy I met in a bar told me he spent 30 days in Tent City for beating up his best friend and I needed to punch the first Mexican who makes eye contact and say, “There’ll be none of that.” I’m hoping my stay involves more of the “boring and hot” stuff than any race riots in the yard. So I have to decide what book to bring. I have a whole pile of unread ones because I love the idea of books more than actually opening one up late at night when Seinfeld reruns are on. If you have an opinion or suggestions, please e-mail me. These are my current options, provisionally ranked from least likely to most likely:

Bone – An unfortunate title, as I don’t want anyone to think it is what I am searching for in jail (or any derivatives made from adding a suffix; -er, -ing, etc.). It is also a graphic novel, which is just code for a comic book that certain adults fool themselves into thinking is OK to read past the age of 13. If geeks are treated the same way in penitentiary as they are in high school, I think I’ll pass.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale – This autobiography of Jenna Jameson includes pictures. The negative consequences of this are many. Even if it is not taken away from me as contraband I imagine many inmates would want me to “share” it. I don’t even want to “share” it with my friends because I’ve seen what they can do to a magazine when they work together.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind – This is a comprehensive history of large cats and their cultural impact through time. I don’t know why I bought this since I’m sure it is probably required reading for a college course out there. I don’t read books that could easily be found in a classroom (unless maybe the classroom is used to teach a course on Jenna Jameson).

Among the Thugs – This book about English soccer fans certainly has the most ironic title of the bunch. I don’t think irony fairs well when pitted against a shiv fashioned from the springs of a bunk bed, though. Plus, the guy on the cover looks like someone who I have been seeing enough of in my pre-incarceration nightmares.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – This book has the second most ironic title of the bunch (especially if I die from heat exhaustion in tent #3A). But I also have to imagine that my “prison mood” would not be enhanced by anecdotes of medical cannibalism.

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith – This is a book about Mormons. I do not expect to find and offend any members of this particular faith behind bars, plus it is a hardback, which means it would make a better weapon.

Moneyball – This is a highly acclaimed book about the quest for success in baseball. I figure the subject of sports will signify me as a “normal dude” who is at least behind the “fish that smells like fear” as a candidate for the lifers to make their wife. I should say a “lifer” is equivalent in Tent City to doing the 10-30 day stint.

The Best American Short Stories 2004 – As you can probably tell, I don’t read a lot of fiction. On the other hand, if I don’t like one story I can quickly move on to the next, which may be the most important thing when your stuck with only one book. The decision by a friend in the same situation as me to bring “Ghost Ships” was a big mistake. He thought it was a sequel to the classic horror movie Ghost Ship starring Julianna Margulies, when it was really an epic love story involving figures of the surrealist movement. The day after getting out he had a weird look in his eyes and couldn’t stop talking about Salvador Dali. Well… that and the shower raping.

I have a friend named Steve who likes to pour honey-mustard on everything he eats. “It just makes things better,” he says. When a screenwriter sits down for the first time to work on a new script, he is beginning at square one. The only way he can make it better immediately is with a decision to put zombies in as many scenes as possible*. As such, it is also that much harder to screw up a movie after a positive “zombie verdict” has been reached. Actually screwing it up? That’s just like giving Steve a plate of ravioli, waiting for him to smother it in honey-mustard, then taking a huge spit on it . That’s how I felt when watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Except it felt like the spit was directed at my face. And since I made someone else watch it with me, it was kind of like I was responsible for the spit on her face, too. And that was barely the worst movie I saw that night.

The script of Resident Evil: Apocalypse is not so much an “adaptation” of the video game as it is a “photocopy somebody made at a Kinko’s somewhere between the offices of Capcom Games and Sony Pictures”. It has something to do with Milla Jovovich fighting zombies, devil dogs, and a monster named Nemesis that is armed with a bazooka and urinates flaming acid. Though Milla is the tacit heroine, the movie really belongs to the character who goes through half the film playing the role of “Nameless Black Pimp”. He eventually tells somebody his name is Leroy (but he will always be a nameless black pimp to be). Like any worthy post-Grecian protagonist, he has a tragic flaw and it is a predeliction for prostitutes of the walking dead. Early in the movie he crashes his car because he can’t take his eyes off the topless zombies and he is forced to walk through the rest of the movie blasting with his gold-plated pistols. The only encouraging aspect of the this entire ordeal is that there will probably be a sequel, and if anyone in Hollywood knows what America wants, the subtitle will be Leroy Jones Takes Manhattan.

As far as subtitles go, the second movie I watched that night may own the most useless ever: Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. I guess they not only wanted to attract the “crappy horror movie crowd” but the “botanists who love quests for rare flowers crowd” as well. Where zombies are the equivalent of Steve’s honey-mustard, this movie has the equivalent of Heather’s Italian dressing. This particular friend doesn’t like Italian dressing on everything, but she likes it on a lot of things. Anacondas has something that a lot of movies would be better with – a pet monkey who gives a reaction shot to everything. For instance, when the boat’s captain (piloting down a river in an Amazon forest infested with man-eating snakes) proclaims he’s “taking the shortcut,” we know the shortcut is not a good idea when the monkey slaps his forehead in exasperation. The monkey also masters the expressions of fear, surprise, jocularity, intense rage, and sadness (pictured left). It is all the more tragic that the monkey is the best actor in the film, especially considering the original Anaconda featured a flawless B-Movie cast of Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and J. Voight!

It used to be that a midnight double-feature of movies featuring bio-engineered mutant zombies and snakes the size of freight-trains would yield something other than annoyance; maybe at the very least, some guilty amusement. I guess that’s not the case anymore. On a scale of salad dressing, where peppercorn is a 1 and honey-mustard is a 10, the combined rating of Resident Evil and Anacondas is lemon dill, the numerical equivalent of a 3.9.

* While I have not verified this theory with any scientifically accepted method like case studies or philosophical proofs, just imagine how boring Dawn of the Dead or Return of the Living Dead would be without the zombies. Conversely, there is an endless list of movies, including the Oscar-caliber likes of Rain Man and Chariots of Fire, that would be much better with a few zombies.