Thursday, The Movie

I TiVo'd The Day After Tomorrow in a thirst for a good disaster movie. Which this wasn't, but I was desperate.

All the good "disaster" takes place within the first third of the movie, and is intercut with long (!) scenes of meetings (!!!). After that the movie turns from a disaster/war pic into a survival movie. The highlight was watching mathletes holed up in the NYC public library and burning books to stay alive. I have a weird inability to watch people burn books, no matter what the reason. (The fact that the movie is written and directed by a German doesn't make the whole book-burning thing go down easier.)

While I had myriad problems with the bad science, bad adventure and geopolitical nonsense by far the most irksome part was the scene where two minor characters discuss the "fact" that Friedrich Nietzsche was the greatest living thinker of the nineteenth century. Please. Nietzsche is the pet philosopher of lonely boys in their mothers' basements and frustrated postcard painters in Vienna. Yeah, yeah, I know that what doesn't kill me makes me look into the abyss or whatever but please. I tend to think that a century which gave us Kierkegaard and Hegel does not deserve to be so maligned.

MINOR SPOILER
The only characters I cared about by the end of the movie--the bum'sstreet person's dog and the Gutenberg Bible--survived.

Bibliophile Side Note: The movie asserts that the copy of the Gutenberg Bible in the Rare Books Room at the NYPL is the "only surviving copy." There are actually 48 in existence presently , with many far south enough to have avoided the cataclysm in the movie.

And the copy in the RBR NYPL has two volumes, not one.