The three week standoff between Comcast and the many people who work at home in our neighborhood has (maybe) been resolved. It was hours of fun and made Husband and I glad we don’t also have Comcast’s phone service. At one point I heard one of my neighbors pleading into her cellphone, “I’m calling because the phone isn’t working. No, I can’t call you from my home number because it isn’t working. What do you mean you can only log service calls from the home number? The number is not working. (pause) Hello? (pause) Hello?” And so on. For three weeks.

The Verizon/DSL customers were laughing, until all phone service went out for a while. Not that it mattered, by then the power was going off and on, although the outages didn’t seem to coincide with the storms in any way anyone could determine.

The Wrath of the Utilities reached it’s apex when, on the morning of the 4th of July, we all awoke to silty-brown water. So tasty looking. Fortunately, one of our neighbors makes a mean bourbon/pineapple/orange slushy, so pretty soon none of it mattered.

But all of that is, hopefully, over and done and we may now move on to more important things, such as a discussion of the film Ultraviolet. We figured it would either be delightfully Bad or a blandly disappointing and confusing mess. It was actually a little of both. Not rewatchably Exorcist 2 Bad, but just Bad enough that we watched the whole damned thing.
Let me just say right up front: Writer/Director Kurt Wimmer already made this movie. It was called Equilibrium and starred the truly divine Christian Bale and the fairly divine Taye Diggs, Sean Bean, and Emily Watson. People who can, in addition to looking fab, act. Plus, it made sense. And it looked really good. It’s his career and he can make the same movie over and over for all of eternity if he wants, but I just felt like pointing out that the problem here isn’t that he has no talent. Or even that his ideas are bad.

Ultraviolet stars Milla Jovovich as an infected vampire-like mutant in a dystopian future. For an hour and a half she drags a little kid around while the Government Bad Guys periodically surround her and get themselves killed. That’s pretty much the movie, and yet they manage to screw it up. In this unending series of set pieces wherein Milla is surrounded by Bad Guys and then they die it’s never really terribly clear why all the Bad Guys die. We aren’t even treated to particularly cool fight scenes. The Bad Guys show up. They form a circle around her. Then there’s some of the techno music and some of the fancy editing and and some swords swinging around and then…they’re dead. Is it because she’s super fast or super strong or she heals really fast or because her hair and skin tight wardrobe keep changing colors like a chameleon? And what was up with that?

The very first shootout sent poor Husband into an extended tirade about the idiocy of the circular firing squad formation that kept him amused throughout the movie.

To make matters worse, right at the point in the middle of the movie where you think to yourself, “It’s dumb but at least it’s zipping right along” there’s an exceptionally long, awkward, pace-killing scene where Milla and her, um, boy, have a long awkward conversation full of awkward dialogue that really doesn’t advance the story along. I was able to excuse it by pretending that Milla doesn’t speak English and learns all of her dialogue phonetically. Look at it that way and it’s really a tour de force performance.

Husband and I couldn’t decide which was more poorly executed, Ultraviolet or Aeon Flux. I vote for Aeon Flux because it had so much failed promise. I feel they had to work hard to overcome the great designers, actors and source material and still produce such terrible crap. Plus, there was the incredible idiocy of Frances McDormand apparently living in poor Charlize Theron’s stomach. On the basis of the sheer nuttiness of it all, I contend that Ultraviolet doesn’t hold a candle to Aeon Flux.

And yet, Ultraviolet provided a welcome respite from the feature we’ve been watching in fits and starts because we fear watching it straight through could lead to internal bleeding.

That’s right – we’ve hauled out The Devil’s Rain – the 1975 opus that brought together William Shatner, Ida Lupino, Ernest Borgnine, John Travolta, Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, and Anton LeVay.

But that, my friends, is a topic for another day.