Cheer up, the barbarians haven’t taken over yet! Congrats to the cute prehistoric animals Manny the mammoth, Sid the sloth and Diego the saber-tooth tiger of the fun cartoon flick
Ice Age: The Meltdown for decisively clobbering and walloping Sharon Stone’s
Basic Instinct 2 in worldwide box-office receipts!
I am an admirer of female beauty and Sharon Stone is no doubt still sexy, but her film is just so dull aesthetically and intellectually it gave me a migraine (the producer should give me and my date a refund, and I should sue the US producer for causing mental anguish and wasting my two hours!). Pardon me, but this so-called "erotic thriller" needs Viagra and the producer should have hired me to do a script better than this hopeless disaster!
| Aesthetic Pollution Is Worse Than Pornography |
Good news for all those ultra-conservative zealots who jump with indignation at every hint of nudity or religious unorthodoxy:
Ice Age 2 has frozen out the sex-and-violence film
Basic Instinct 2 because the masses of the world still have good aesthetic taste. To me,
BI2 has committed a worse and more reprehensible sin than any alleged soft-core pornography or excessive violence – the unforgivable crime of bad taste and a lousy script.The first
Basic Instinct, which came out in 1992, was a more exciting film than this dreadful and idiotic sequel, so there’s hope for civilization because mass audiences have not been duped into theaters by slick promises of sex and nudity. US President Abraham Lincoln was correct when he said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." This should be a warning to all moviemakers and also to the many shameless politicians who think they can get away with cheating and blatant lies.
Ice Age: The Meltdown is one sequel that is better than the original, a goofy adventure cartoon film about looking for love in a time of global warming and about a bunch of animal friends struggling with their angst. Crisis indeed not only brings out the best in us humans, but also in the animals of this cartoon film. Kids and adults will be entertained by this bunch of blabbering animals running for their lives as the entire landscape of ice melts and crumbles all around them as catastrophe nears. Viewers will also be rooting for the good-natured mammoth named Manny, who lost his family in the first movie. Kids will cheer him on as he courts a cute female mammoth who grew up forgetting her identity as a mammoth and mistaking herself for a possum. This love story reminds me of that mega-hit
Titanic, with Leonardo diCaprio wooing the girl of his dreams as the giant ship hits a glacier, breaks apart and sinks to oblivion.
| Why Are Our Summers Hotter? |
Adults should accompany kids to watch this animated movie, which is a wake-up call about the horrific disaster of global warming caused by our wanton environmental degradation. I’m glad
Time magazine has good timing in its newest issue, with the cover "Special Report: Global Warming," which states: "Be worried. Be
very worried." Compared to the cute prehistoric animals of
Ice Age 2, most of us supposedly "civilized" humans have been acting like incorrigible wild beasts with our nonstop and mindless pollution. Have you ever wondered why we have fewer typhoons and why our summers are hotter than ever here and around the globe? Blame pollution, no kidding! The biggest ecological threat to earth and to all of us living things is global warming caused by too much greenhouse gas produced mostly by burning fuels for energy, like gasoline in cars or coal for electricity. God created the universe with its own fantastic order and beautiful logic. Energy from the sun is absorbed by our planet Earth, then is radiated back out as heat. However, we arrogant, hard-headed and undisciplined humans have too many cars, inefficient factories and monstrous power plants spewing atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide into our skies, which act as barriers trapping the heat and preventing this accumulation of heat from leaking out into space. Should we scratch our heads at why our climate is getting hotter and hotter?I urge all citizens of the earth to e-mail or snail-mail letters to the editors of newspapers and international magazines, US senators and congressmen or even to the Chief Texas Cowboy in the White House. Bombard those politicians with complaints about the excessive pollution causing this danger called global warming. Why? The number-one culprit in this heinous crime against nature is none other than the US, which has less than five percent of the world’s population, but produces one-fourth of all greenhouse gases. A total of 141 nations have already ratified the Kyoto Treaty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions – an imperfect agreement but better than nothing. However, President George Walker Bush has stubbornly rejected it. Bush had also broken his election campaign promises on ecological issues, like many politicians of his ilk.It is ironic because the US has all the money, resources and technology to clean up its massive, non-stop pollution, yet America has not led, but fled, on the raging issue of global warming. As the world’s only remaining military superpower and still the wealthiest industrialized economy, the US should exert strong leadership and use moral persuasion to encourage all countries to protect our environment and respect God’s creation. The multi-billion dollars being spent by American consumers annually on junk food or junk Internet porn can already set up a massive war chest to help modernize power plants and other initiatives for a decisive global cleanup. If President Bush would devote as much passion and bullheadedness to this global-warming crisis as he does to the war on terrorism or to lecturing other nations on human rights, we can still save the earth and maybe we humans wouldn’t someday have to run for our lives like the prehistoric animals Manny, Sid and Diego of
Ice Age 2.
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