Cynical Cinema

I noticed something odd about Star Trek when watching Season Three of the original series, out tomorrow (November 18th) from Paramount Home Entertainment.  William Shatner is the kind of character who might conceivably refer to himself in the third person.  He’s overblown and arrogant and overacts and so forth.  But he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person, he does something more bizarre.  His name, really, is James.  Certain characters call him James.  Kirk is his last name.  Most characters on Star Trek call him “Captain”.  Because he is the captain.  Captain Kirk.  So far so good?

OK.  Now, when he meets other people, as he does quite often in many episodes, he needs to introduce himself.  So he says his name is Captain Kirk.  But when he meets old friends, people he has known for many years, or even people with whom he has grown up, he refers to himself as “Kirk”.  Like, “hey, Steve, it’s Kirk”.   Would anyone in the world do this, for real?  Phone up a friend and announce themselves by their last name?  It makes very little sense to me.  Your last name could be the name by which your friends know you, (as is often the case with me).  But even if that is the case, you don’t refer to yourself by that name, because it is a nickname.  If you do, you come across like George Costanza when he tried to give himself the nickname T-Bone on Seinfeld.

Anyway, just something I noticed.  Star Trek:  The Original Series, Season Three comes out tomorrow, and features that awesome episode where the weirdo creepy kids take over the Enterprise.  That episode, in itself, makes the third season better than the second one.

I am a moderate Star Wars nerd.  In the sense that I probably know more about the series than the average person, but that comes more as a result of being a film buff than anything else.  I have friends who can tell me the names of every character, including those who are not named in the movies themselves but rather in the credits only.  I am not one of those people.  I took the kids out to see the premiere of the new Star Wars:  Clone Wars, and I was amazed that they knew the names of more characters than I did.  It turns out that a lot of that comes from a video game called Lego Star Wars.  This is how they learn the Star Wars story.

I am, however, enough of a Star Wars nerd to realize that Star Wars:  Clone Wars is the title that should have been chosen for that dreadful second installment in the series, the sickeningly-named Attack of the Clones.  I really think the title of that movie actually made the whole film seem worse than it actually was.  And it was already pretty bad, (until Yoda threw down).  This new animated movie IS better, but that isn’t saying much.  This one takes place at the time of the Clone Wars (obviously), and gives the clones names and personalities.  In this case Rex is the leader of the clones who are working with Annakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Also new is Ahsoka, Annakin’s “padawan” learner.  She is basically his apprentice, following him around and learning the ways of the Jedi.  The stage is set for some character development, when Yoda mentions that Annakin has managed well with his padawan, it might be tough for him to let her go later.  But that, we can only assume, will be left for a future episode in this animated series.  Because nothing of that nature happens in this one.  In fact, almost nothing happens in this one.  It is merely an endless series of battles between droid armies and clone armies.  There are several cool battle scenes, including one that is vertical, up the side of a cliff, but after a while we want story.

Basically, the first 80 minutes of the movie are these battles, around a strange story.  Jabba The Hut’s son has been kidnapped by the evil Count Dooku.  The Jedi have been enlisted to bring the Hut kid back unharmed, but Dooku is really setting them up so that Jabba thinks it was in fact the Jedi who kidnapped his son.  At stake are a bunch of shipping lanes controlled by Jabba, lanes which could turn the balance of the battle in the favour of either the droids or the clones.  Dooku has his preferred assassin tracking the Jedi, a sinister female agent named Ventress.  She shows up a few times, then goes away, and proves to be a fairly useless character.

Finally, in the last 15 minutes of the film, the story begins.  Padme Amydala shows up - remember her?  Annakin’s lover and the future mother of Luke and Leia?  She attempts to broker a deal with Jabba through his uncle who lives in the city.  In doing so, she uncovers the massive conspiracy behind the Hut kidnapping, and the story resolves itself in fifteen minutes.  With more battles.  In the end, this is really a Star Wars movie made for kids, in that the story line is incredibly simplistic and the characters are completely two-dimensional.  (Ironic, for an animated 3D movie, eh?)  And because we, the Star Wars audience, are already so familiar with these characters (Annakin, Obi-Wan, Dooku, Jabba The Hut), we know them as more than two-dimensional already. 

So it becomes obnoxious when Annakin has no layers.  He’s not the young innocent Jedi, he isn’t the guy who’s going to turn into Darth Vader, he’s just the headstrong hero of an action movie.  That’s it.  For a story that is already so familiar to all of us, filling in the blanks between Episode II and Episode III ought to involve more than a silly story about Jabba The Hut and his gross young son.  And it really should be more than just a 95-minute battle.

Star Trek is one of the great phenomena in pop culture. Somehow it has managed to maintain it’s relevance over the course of five incarnations, with similar stories and similar characters and similar sets throughout all five. Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a box set tomorrow, September 16th, that highlights the similarities between all five series. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective contains episodes from The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyageur, and Enterprise. It’s a box set featuring 20 episodes of Star Trek that explore alternative realities. And by that they mean mirror universes, parallel dimensions, twisted realities, and alternate lives.

What this box set does, most of all, is highlight the similarities between the five series. For example, no matter which version of Star Trek you watch, trouble causes the flight deck to shake and shudder, and makes the lights flicker, no matter what that problem actually is. And at the end of every one of these “alternative realities” episodes, the bizarre occurrences are easily explained away as “a temporal discharge of abnormal anomalies”, or some such thing. Most of these episodes fall into one of two categories. Either they are like clip shows - there are crossovers with old episodes, sometimes even other series, and they are really easy to do with a minimum of effort. For example, the episode of Voyageur where one of the characters is able to pass from deck to deck in the spaceship, and each level exists in another time frame. So old episodes get recycled. Or, they function as a reason for the creators of the series to do something totally different for one episode. Like the episode of The Next Generation where Captain Picard is in a coma and lives another man’s life on another planet while in his coma.

Perhaps that makes this box set less than appealing for true Star Trek nerds, or maybe it’s even more appealing. I really don’t know. But as a non-Star Trek afficionado, I found it to be very interesting. There are some great episodes here. The episode of Voyageur where two of the crew members cause the destruction of the ship, and send a message from fifteen years in the future in order to avert the catastrophe. Or the episode where a hot woman appears to be constantly jumping backwards in time, from the moment she dies until the moment she is conceived.

But the best episode on this box set, the one that makes it all worthwhile, is the episode of the Original Series where there is an evil Captain Kirk and a good Captain Kirk, and William Shatner fights himself. There is, I believe, no moment in television history (outside of that Star Wars holiday special) that involved worse acting than does this one. You see, Captain Kirk’s personality has been split in two - one of them all of his evil characteristics, and one of them all his good ones. The Evil Kirk makes it known that he is evil by twitching his face like a hamster. It is absolutely hilarious! William Shatner was silly at the best of times, but here he sets some kind of record for over-the-top silliness. This episode alone is worth the price of the box set. However, for those of you who don’t want to spend the money buying this massive box set, but would still dearly love to watch William Shatner fight himself, check out the bargain-basement DVD White Comanche, in which he plays long-lost twins, one who has grown up cowboy and one who has grown up Indian. The final showdown is as bonkers and hilarious as is this episode. Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective hits stores tomorrow.

Dark City is a dark movie.  Amazing, eh?  Go figure.  But the filming is dark, the scenery is dark, and for that reason I found it very confusing when I first watched it.  It was really difficult to follow the action and to figure out what, exactly, was going on.  I still enjoyed the movie, and I realize that it was intentionally obscure and difficult to follow.  But the constant darkness ended up, by the end of the film, being oppressive.  And the action scenes don’t need to be so difficult to follow.  Which is why a movie like Dark City is one of those movies for which Blu-Ray was created. 

I recently picked up Dark City on Blu-Ray from Alliance Films, when it came out on July 29th.  It is a remarkable movie from Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and I, Robot, about a city that never sees the sun, and it’s controlled by a mysterious shadowy group of pale-faced men in trenchcoats who mess with the inhabitants in some kind of bizarre science experiment.  The story is decent, the action is decent, but it’s the setting and the atmosphere that make this movie fantastic.  Everything about this movie, even Keifer Sutherland’s over-acting as a weirdo doctor, is unsettling.  Jennifer Connelly, who plays a nightclub singer, is sultry, sexy, smoking hot, and still - unsettling. 

And everything about that atmosphere and the setting comes through twenty times clearer and freakier with Blu-Ray.  What was already a really cool, strange, creepy movie is just that much cooler, stranger and creepier.  It was already very good, but on Blu-Ray it verges on classic.  Now we just wait for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to come out on Blu-Ray as well.

Rhona Mitra is magnificent. She is gorgeous, tough, a good actress and…well…gorgeous. And yet, she has really not been the superstar many had predicted she would become. In the last few years she has had bit parts in horrible movies like The Number 23 and good ones like Shooter. And she has starred in one movie that really, really sucked, Skinwalkers. It seems to me that Doomsday is a movie designed as a star vehicle for her, so she can become the next big hot movie star. But it may never happen for her. For the first half hour watching this movie, my girlfriend kept asking - “is that the girl from Underworld?” and I had to say no, that’s Kate Beckinsale. Or, “is that the girl from Van Helsing?” And I have to say no, that is also Kate Beckinsale. You see, Rhona Mitra does indeed look a lot like Kate Beckinsale. And that actually is a problem.

It’s mostly a problem because she is basically playing Kate Beckinsale. In Underworld and Van Helsing. And even that would be fine, if Doomsday wasn’t ripping off so many movies itself. Doomsday comes out today, August 5th, from Alliance Films. It’s basically Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome crossed with The Road Warrior crossed with Mission: Impossible crossed with Children of Men. With some medieval cliches thrown in. The movie starts with a virus that is killing thousands of people in Scotland. The military shuts down basically the entire country, and builds a wall around it. Trapped inside are the people and the virus, left to die horribly on their own. Of course not everyone dies, and when the virus (the “Reaper” virus - straight out of Blade II?) re-appears, the government must send someone into the quarantine zone to find a cure.

That someone is Rhona Mitra, who takes her all-star Mission: Impossible team into the walled-off area. Very quickly, they run afoul of a gang of baddies straight out of Mad Max. There is no real reason for these bad guys to attack them, but this is where the story has to go. The spiky hair, the motorcycles, the buses, the carrs, the lunatics, the face-paint and the evil women and men create many scenes out of the Road Warrior, including some crazy high-speed chases on the abandoned highways. Now, I’m not one of those people who searches for inconsistencies in movies so that I can complain about them. So when one leaps out at me, it has to be a pretty big error on the part of the continuity people. If you’re in a high-speed chase in a luxury sports car, and a bad guy coming the other way smashes a giant hole in your windshield with a bat, and then you drive that car through a bus that then explodes as you come out the other side, your windshield should really not still be intact. This is something they really should have noticed. I mean, I did.

Civilization behind the wall has devolved, and of course half of it has devolved into Mad Max, run by a madman named Sol. The other half, run by Sol’s father Kane (Malcolm McDowell), is at war with the Mad Max crew. When Mitra escapes her capture at the hands of Sol, she ends up captured by Kane. Who lives in a medieval castle on the other side of the quarantine zone. HIS people don’t have punk haircuts and face paint and facial piercings, but they DO dress up in knight’s armour and feudal costumes. And of course, they enjoy watching gladiator combat. And of course they send in Mitra to engage in said combat. And of course, being the bad-ass that she is, she wins her fight against the crazy soldier in chain mail with a giant mace.

Doomsday is certainly not for children - there are some awfully gory scenes. And it also isn’t for animal lovers. Rabbits, cows, all kinds of animals get squished, crushed, blown up, and shredded. But the biggest problem with the movie is the blood and guts and gore. It’s the fact that nothing in the movie is original. At all. The only thing this movie has that I haven’t seen in another film before is Rhona Mitra’s ass in tight pants. And while that is a magnificent original feature of Doomsday, it doesn’t make up for the trains and buses and motorcycles from the Road Warrior, the characters from Thunderdome, the gladiator movie cliches, the blood spatter on the screen and futuristic vision from Children of Men, the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, and finally, amazingly, a scene ripped off from The Last Boyscout! Mitra at one point really, honestly, channels Bruce Willis in The Last Boyscout. “If he touches me again, I’ll kill him where he stands.” Not joking.

Then again, Doomsday is not awful. It actually takes the best parts of each movie it rips off, and Rhona Mitra is good about taking off that bulky suit and getting into her tight workout clothes right away. Mitra deserves to become a star. She is spectacularly gorgeous and a very good actress. But this isn’t the movie that will make her that star. The movies that make people stars are the ones that are original. Doomsday will not do for Mitra what Underworld did for Beckinsale. And it won’t do what Mad Max did for Mel Gibson, or Die Hard for Bruce Willis. At best, it is a solid indication of what she can do and who she can become. And at best it’s a reasonably entertaining movie for people who have seen very few other movies in their lives.

The first thing I noticed about Star Trek The Original Series: Season Two when I picked it up today, August 5th, from Paramount Home Entertainment, was the packaging. The packaging is irritating. There is a big, clumsy plastic box, and inside that there is a cardboard package with a bunch of episode cards in a little pouch. Also in the cardboard package are the DVDs themselves, in a book-shaped plastic case. There is no artwork on the DVDs themselves, and the listing of episodes and special features is on the cards in the other pouch. I guess the idea is that it looks futuristic, yet is in practice rather clunky and unnecessary. Much like the series itself.

When, after thirty-one minutes of twisting, prying, and shaking, I managed to get the DVDs out of the package, my girlfriend immediately wanted to put on Disc 5, the “Tribbles” episode. From what I understand, after listening to her Trek-nerd ramblings, this is one of the most famous episodes of Star Trek. After watching it, I still didn’t really understand what the big deal was. The tribbles are these tiny little fuzz balls that make a comforting noise. They don’t move, they don’t have eyes or feet or features. They’re just stuffed…nothing. And so they can’t really be cute, because they aren’t really anything. But the idea is that these “tribbles” just eat and reproduce, to such a massive extent that very quickly they cause a real danger to the Enterprise.

On the fifth disc, the “Tribbles” disc, there are two other Star Trek episodes - one of them is a tribbles episode from a cartoon Star Trek series that ran in 1973 and 1974. And another is an episode of Deep Space Nine that actually takes footage from that original, Shatner-led “tribbles” episode. The cast members of the new series are superimposed on the old one, in a sort of homage to the original Star Trek. This is an episode that really calls attention to the difference in production values between the modern and the classic. I had forgotten how low-budget the classic Star Trek really was compared to today’s versions. But all the same, I think I still prefer the original.

Now, although I find William Shatner’s overacting to be totally hilarious, I realized in watching Season Two of this original series that he wasn’t the only one! In fact, just about everyone in the original Star Trek was an overactor! Even Leonard Nimoy, as the emotionless, uber-logical Spock, still manages to have a scene or two where he manages to over-act. Now, I’m not sure it’s the fault of the rest of the cast - I think it’s likely that when acting next to William Shatner it’s natural that it would just come out. It seems like over-acting would be the only way you would even know you were in the scene with him.

Campy over-acting, some interesting ideas, and of course the Tribbles make Star Trek Original Series: Season Two worth checking out for nerds and non-nerds alike.

The main problem with Jumper, as it is with most Hayden Christensen movies, is Hayden Christensen.  He is so wooden, he may as well be a totem pole.  Or Steven Seagal.  In this movie his love interest is Rachel Bilson, some girl who is famous from some TV show called The OC.  She is not a great actress, but compared to him she’s Greta Garbo and Meryl Streep rolled into one.  And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who will appear in just about anything ever, phoning it in as he does in the bad ones.  And this really is a bad movie.  The story is that Christensen is a “jumper”, some kind of person who can just disappear from where he is and reappear anywhere he likes.  He robs banks with this power, builds something of a playboy lifestyle, until finally he is tracked down by Jackson.  Jackson is a “palladin”, which is an organization?  A species?  A committee?  dedicated to tracking down and killing these “jumpers”.

Christensen escapes the first time, meets another “jumper”, finds out there are others like him, and finally meets his mother, Diane Lane, who abandoned him when he was a five-year-old.  Basically, the last hour of this movie is a cross-dimensional, all-over-the-world chase and escape involving the two jumpers and Jackson and the other palladins.  Which is all well and good, but I’d like a little more story.  Where do these “jumpers” come from?  Why do they exist?  Who are the palladins?  Why do they want to kill the jumpers?  How come the jumpers don’t always know that there are others like them?  Any back story at all would be nice, but there is none.  Zip.  All of this leads to a fairly mundane, inexplicable and silly conclusion after a mundane, inexplicable and silly movie.

But I kind of like it.  In a way, Jumper is delighfully idiotic.  The scenes where buses fly through time and space to emerge in the Arabian desert are insane.  The plot twists and the ideas that characters have and the complete lack of effort from Jackson and Lane are, in a way, hilarious.  The pointless and contrived involvement of Bilson, the unecessary high-school-bully scene, the wannabe heart-rending scenes with Christensen and his father…it all adds up to enough lunacy and idiocy and stupidity to make this movie somehow watchable through it’s mercifully short hour and a half running time.  I can’t say it’s a good movie without feeling a little nauseous, but I can say that you may well enjoy it.

One of the phenomena from my own childhood, and that of my current family, that I have never fully understood, is Transformers. I kind of got it when my friends would play with their toys, and the thing would turn from a robot into a car, or a helicopter or a motorcycle or whatever it was. That was kind of neat. In a McDonalds toy-of-the-week sort of way. I never figured I could be entertained by something like that for more than a few hours. But then, some of my friends were into Transformers more than just for the toys. Transformers, for them, were a way of life. They watched the TV show, they eagerly anticipated the movie, they had all the characters, they wore “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts. They ate Transformers breakfast cereal and brought Bumblebee Snack Cakes to school in their Optimus Prime fire-truck-shaped lunch boxes.

OK, I’m making large portions of this up, and many of these products may never have existed. And I have to say that because there are some people out there for whom the childhood of the eighties is not yet over, who are still obsessively excited about the whole Transformers concept, who have become the type of collector who makes an excellent central figure in movies such as 40-Year-Old-Virgin. And if they read this, and thought there really was a line of “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts, they would spend the next three weeks online trying to find them, lose their jobs because they didn’t go to work, mortgage their houses in order to finance the T-Shirt purchase when they DID manage to find one, and then they would never find it and end up broken and destitute and living in an empty boxcar at the abandoned O-Train yard. And I don’t want that.

Alright, that was a lot of lead-up to this review, which will be far less interesting in substance. Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out is the first movie to come out of the Transformers Animated production. This is a TV series that was produced to capitalize on the revitalized market for Transformers watchers in the wake of the 2007 blockbuster movie. It’s produced by the Cartoon Network and involves the characters you would expect, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee chief among them. I think, although I’m not certain, that Transform and Roll Out is the first three episodes of the series crammed together in a 68-minute “movie”. There are three distinct portions to the film, the first being a battle in outer space between the Autobots (good guys) and the Decepticons (bad guys) over the All-Spark, a device that would give the Decepticons the ultimate power over the universe. The second involves the Autobots crashing into Earth, setting up in Detroit, and becoming heroes. And the third involves the Decepticons discovering the Autobots there and turning Detroit into a battle zone.

I am still not sure of a couple of things. The Autobots are the good guys, and they have the All-Spark, and must protect it at all costs against the bad guys, because if the Decepticons get their metallic hands on it they will control the world. So why don’t the Autobots simply use the device to defeat the Decepticons and institute their own benign rule over the universe? And why does Bumblebee have a name taken straight from an Earth creature, when these robots have never been to Earth and don’t even know what humans are? And why does he look vaguely like a cat? Frankly, I still, to this day, don’t understand the appeal of Transformers, to kids or to nerds. The series (and by extension this movie) is obnoxious. They take human expressions and cliches and update them with technological terms, as though that is supposed to be funny. “I’m not ready to go to the Well Of All Sparks yet”. Uuuuhhhh…

Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out has a couple of animated shorts in the special features. One is a bizarre scene where Optimus Prime gives a talk to a bunch of schoolchildren. Another is a two-minute scene where the motorcycle transformer crashes, and then punches Bumblebee. Just some bizarre pointless extras to a bizarre, pointless DVD. One thing of note on this volume - the voice of Optimus Prime is done by David Kaye, the same guy who does the Big Voice thing on CHEZ 106. You know that voice that does our promos and says “classic rock…CHEZ 106″? He’s Optimus Prime. And while I wouldn’t suggest that’s a reason to watch this, it isn’t a reason not to watch it…Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out comes out June 17th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The Invaders was a pretty cool series from the 1960s that existed for only two seasons. In point of fact, only a season and a half. It was kind of the antithesis of The Fugitive, in the sense that it was about a guy chasing others, rather than others chasing the guy. The guy is David Vincent (played by Roy Thinnes), an architect who is the only human alive who knows that aliens are invading the Earth. His being an architect is a pointless addition to the story, because it never comes up. He spends every episode running around, chasing the aliens (who of course have taken human form), and trying to warn the rest of the world. Thinnes is quite good, but the supporting cast around him changes so much in each episode that they are all very hit-and-miss.

But the rest of the world won’t listen. Either they think he’s just plain crazy, or they are actually aliens and try to silence him. Although, this makes little sense also. The aliens seem perfectly willing to kill anyone who is willing to expose them, and anyone who agrees with Vincent ends up dead. But somehow, they just keep leaving him alone! I guess it’s the only way the series could go on. But it didn’t go on long. In fact, it appears to have been mercifully short-lived, with the season and a half running time and all. And although it didn’t do too well, and was cancelled before it wrapped up and got resolved, it certainly was a harbinger of shows to come - V, The X-Files, and dozens of others. Maybe before it’s time, maybe not that good. Season One of The Invaders comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. I assume Season Two (the final season) will be coming out soon. I am curious to see how it ends, or if it does end at all.

The 4400 was a series with a lot of promise.  It was out there, on TV, but it has now been cancelled.  So the only way you’ll get to see it is on DVD, and Season 4, the final season, has just been released, May 6th, by Paramount Home Entertainment.  I say it had a lot of promise, because it really was a neat idea.  Over the past however many decades, thousands of people have mysteriously vanished.  No one was able to connect these disappearances until 4400 of them are returned to Earth at the same time, obviously having been abducted by aliens.  Each of these 4400 people has a unique ability of some kind, an ability no other human has.  Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition and so forth.  But they have no recollection of their disappearance, they are disoriented and the government gets involved.

The government agency is called the National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) - not exactly a great title for such an organization, is it?  But they are the ones who keep an eye on these 4400 people.  And at the end of Season One, apparently we learned that the 4400 people were NOT abducted by aliens, but in fact by human beings from the future.  And then they were sent back to Earth to help us all avoid some kind of calamity which was to come.  But…that calamity never occurred, because the show was cancelled.  It was run on the USA network, and produced by CBS Paramount Network Television.  The reason for it’s cancellation, apparently, was twofold - the writer’s strike, and budgetary problems.  Well, threefold.  There were also “lower than expected ratings”.  Fans of this show have launched a campaign aimed at the SciFi/USA network to get it back on the air, but it doesn’t look likely.

 And the reason for that is twofold.  One, this show just came at the wrong time.  And two, it just isn’t that good.  This is basically a cross between The X-Files and Lost.  The X-Files has run it’s course, and well…there already is a “Lost”.  And after two seasons, I gave up on Lost completely.  I just couldn’t be bothered to watch each episode and work my brain around it.  You had to watch every single episode of that show to know what was going on, and yet one episode did not necessarily follow the previous one.  So it wasn’t satisfying from one show to the next.  And with the 4400, this concept was taken to an extreme.  The end was never, in any way, in sight.  In season 4, the clues come toward the end of the season, but the rest of the episodes stand almost alone.  The NTAC chases down various members of the 4400, or people influenced by them, and then the episode ends.  And it seems as though you don’t really need to watch one to understand the others.

So each episode feels like a low-budget episode of the X-Files.  Or like an episode of that old show, The Outer Limits.  With some kind of greater purpose, maybe.  And it just wasn’t good enough to get a big enough audience to keep going.  I can understand why there IS a cult following here.  Once viewers had immersed themselves in this show, they would of course be desperate to find out how it ends.  But I don’t see that there would be much profit to bring it back just for those eleven people.  In fact, until this week, I had no idea this program had ever existed.  Now that I do, I will likely forget all about it in a week.