Turning Japanese! --- AND: Psychos! Freaks! Clones! Strange Tales of An NBC Page!

No, that's not what I meant, you sick freak ...

I'm referring to my, um, interesting day at work on Saturday. Sure, work on a Saturday is inherently horrible, but hey at least this Saturday provided something a little different to make things amusing. Can you say all-Japanese, non-English-speaking tour group? Hai~! Having my words translated into comically long-winded Japanese by the group's only English speaker was pretty funny, at least from my end of things. So yeah, I spent my Saturday leading a group of fifteen giggling Japanese school girls around the corridors of NBC while speaking in extremely short sentances and wishing we had some kind of sweet-ass 4-D multimedia holographic interactive experience or something with which to rock the socks off of those techno-savvy Japanese visitors. But hey they were pretty impressed with the robotic cameras in Telemundo, and they did really seem to like pressing the buttons on the 1940's-era McKenzie sound f/x machine. Shoryuken! (aka you know you've played too many videogames when ... fill in blanks here ...). Side note: interestingly, Japanese girls seem partial to holding hands with each other while walking. Domo Orogato, Mr. Roboto.

Oh, while I'm on the subject of work, I should note that my Friday experience as ticketbox head was possibly the WORST ever - aka it was the DAY FROM HELL. Aka it was ...

INVASION OF THE SIDESHOW FREAKS FROM THE MOONS OF URANUS!!!

Seriously, the weirdos came out of the woodwork for whatever reason on Friday. It wasn't one of those days where families come in eating ice cream and enjoying a nice summer outing where you think "awww isn't that nice." No, this was one of those days where the absolute dregs of humanity show up, making you realize that it's a miracle that the human race has not yet annihilated itself. But I won't bore you with an account of each and every white-trash hick, borderline schitzofrenic, or shady character that walked in on Friday. I will tell you that we had, among other things, a woman who left the Tonight Show because she was "cold," and came into our lobby pacing back and forth talking to herself for half an hour.

But then there was this one guy - one of those guys who probably picked legs off insects as a child, a guy with a chemical imbalance, a guy who probably sits at home watching FOX News and ranting to himself about the military-industrial-liberal-Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. 100% funny-farm-certified CRAZY.

So he marches into our lobby, and right off the bat, totally unprovoked, he is shaking like a leaf and yelling about the lack of parking at NBC. He is going on and on, cutting people in line and demanding to know how is going to get on a studio tour if he can't find a place to park his car. Now what happened over the next few hours is, at this point, pretty much a blur of insanity in my mind. But I'll try to recount what happened, so excuse me if this is somewhat disjointed. Basically, I explained our policies of first-come first-serve tour sign-ups to him and he was IRATE. He then proceded to go on an insane rant about how there was more parking in Grand Central Station, how he was from the midwest, how NBC obviously didn't want customers, how he wanted to speak to a manager, etc. etc. etc. Oh yeah, inexplicably, this hulking, quivering, convulsing insane guy actually had a wife and kid, who seemed to be standing there in numbed silence, terrified of their own relation. Basically, the crux of the conflict was that this guy wanted to be put on a tour in advance, which we don't do. But he said that the parking situation was so bad that, even though he had forty minutes until the next available tour, he doubted he'd be able to park and come back in that time. So he left, came back in twenty minutes, by which time the next three tours were sold out. And yes, he was furious. And he proceeded to yell incomprehensibly at me, at other customers, and almost went at it with one of our staff, and had to be held back. Inexplicably, our store manager Christy believed at first that this guy had some sort of legitimate complaint, and actually signed him up for a tour and gave him a discount! When she heard the whole story though she quickly realized that my recommendation that his insane ass get booted out was more than reasonable. But let's just say I had to lay the verbal smackdown on this guy's psycho ass. Here's some choice, paraphrased excerpts of the whole situation, involving the Insane Guy, Anisha - who works in our NBC Store, and another customer who was in front of this guy in line at the time:

INSANE GUY: (pulling up his pant-legs) Do you see these legs?!?! These legs can walk anywhere in FIFTEEN MINUTES!

INSANE GUY: See, I'm from the Midwest! And over there we do things a certain way!
ANISHA: Well this is how we do things in the WEST COAST!

INSANE GUY: As far as I'm concerned I should get a free tour!
ME: Well as far as I'm concerned you've been a pain in the ass since you got here, so you can just leave and not come back!

CUSTOMER: See, you're being so rude and loud that you caused my whole transation to get screwed up!
INSANE GUY: You're being rude!

Ohhhhhh maannnn. So this guy of course gets on a tour where he is unable to see any of the studios, seeing as how they are all closed at the time. So he apparently threw a few more tantrums on his tour, and even one-upped his own idiocy to that point by muttering a racial slur directed at his tour guide. Wow, big surprise that our boy is a friggin' rascist. Probably a card-carrying KKK member. In any case he'd be right at home on Jerry Springer.

What a day.

THE WEEKEND:

In other news, had a good weekend. Hit up new NBC page hot-spot BJ's on Friday and then for the first time in a while made like The Dude and went bowling. Strike! Saturday I had to work, as I mentioned, but then followed that up with a hardcore viewing marathon of The Office where some friends and I plowed through the entire first season and half of the second season of the British classic.

Also, saw The Island this weekend.

DANNY'S REVIEW OF: THE ISLAND:

- A while backk I predicted that this movie would fall into the same category of I, Robot - potentially great due to a strong premise but critically flawed due to key elements of production taking a very, very wrong turn. What went wrong with I, Robot is a little more complicated than with The Island. There you had a bad casting choice with Will Smith as Will Smith in the lead role, and an excellent concept that was slightly dumbed down and turned from hardcore Isaac Asimov scifi into generic Hollywood action movie 101. With the Island, it's clear what the problem is. See, the movie has a great cast. You can't ask for better leads than Ewan McGregor, Scarlet Johanson, Sean Bean, and Steve Buscemi. The premise itself is intriguing, if not entirely novel. So here is the problem: this is Michael Bay gone wild. To borrow a metaphor, it's like taking a candy from a box of chocolates. On the outside you see this dark, creamy, enticing chocolate. But then you bite in and find some nasty purple crap. That's what this movie is - a lot of potential turned into mostly a lot of crap thanks to a bad, uneven script and a director who has no idea how to pace a movie. The plot of this movie, not to mention the characters, get totally lost amidst this movie's rapidly cut, nonsensical action sequences. Now normally a movie's action sequence are what keep you on the edge of your seat - in many ways the highlights of the movie. I think of Spielberg's amazingly choreographed set pieces from War of The Worlds, or Sam Raimi's energetic, kinetic fight scenes from the Spiderman movies, for example. But the Island's second half is basically one long chase scene that despite being non-stop action, had me literally yawning and looking at my watch. It was like "wait, how did they get on top of that building?" Or "okay, this is STILL going on?" The killer has to be theclimactic ending sequence, where the clones played by Ewan and Scarlett break back into the facility they've been running from this whole time to ...? Um .. set all of their fellow clones free? By ... doing what exactly? What all that running and chasing means is that the final confrontation between clone and creator - what should have been a big, epic, dramatic duel - is reduced to a disappointingly brief, anticlimactic cheesefest of a battle where Sean Bean's character actually says "I created you, and I can DESTROY you!" Some good dialogue there ...Every cool scene in this movie seems to be countered by an equally bad one. Ewan and Scarlett playing a real-time version of an X-Box fighting game - they are being trained to fight because .... why? Ewan meeting his the man he is cloned from, and then convincing his persuers that the original is in fact the clone is right out of some Saturday morning cartoon or something. Ugh. Basically this whole movie is a really bad kids cartoon under the pretense of being a serious, adult scifi movie. But it is rarely even cool in a fun, B-movie way. While it is not quite as bad as Bay's worst (in my opinion, the godawful Armageddon), it never reaches the adrenaline-pumping heights of his best (clearly, the pretty kickass The Rock). Overall, there is some fun to be had with this movie. It looks great, has an awesome cast, a sweet soundtrack, and a very interesting premise (even if it will remind you of about 50 other movies - Blade Runner, Dark City, Logan's Run, and that movie Clonus from the '70's which I haven't seen but it apparently directly rips off). It has enough fun moments and keeps you entertained enough to avoid it being a total waste of a few hors in the theater. But ultimately, this is a movie that, thanks to the usual annoying schtick from Michael Bay, came nowhere close to it's potential, and rightly deserved to get lost in the box office amidst a summer of far superior blockbusters.
My grade: C -

THIS WEEK:

- Chris "Christos" Agra comes to LA and chaos ensues
- Avril performs on the Tonight Show
- free screening of Broken Flowers at Universal

Alright that's all for now. Leave a comment ... if you dare.