Tales from On Demand 1

So I don't know if you know this or not, but I have suffered from insomnia on and off throughout my life. It comes and goes depending on several factors, such as stress, food, caffeine and drug use*. My high-school and college years I hardly slept more than 3-4 hours a night, and that was when I was trying to go to sleep. If I wasn't too concerned, I'd just forget to go to bed, and it would magically be time for work all of a sudden. Well lately I have been in one of those cycles. In the past, I would draw comics and read and watch movies and listen to music and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and Dr. Pepper and get snacks from the local 7-11. I know what you are saying: All of this crap is exactly why I couldn't sleep, and to that I say: FOOLS! I didn't do all of that at the same time, and I periodically cut every last bit of all that out on similar assumptions, and it never worked. It actually made me more loopy because I was bored and hungry. Also, my insomnia started around age 12, long before all that stuff was so important to me. Well I am in a similar cycle now, and I can't blame it on junk food because of my new found respect for not being a fat-ass and wanting to live to usher my kids into adulthood. Since I now have a house full of people with relatively regular sleep schedules and not a house full of a brother with the exact same habits as me, I can't do all of the stuff I used to do to keep myself sane. If my gym was open 24 hours, I'd go there, but it isn't, so I can't. What I usually do is play computer games and read and watch TV. We all know broadcast TV sucks egg rolls late at night, and I haven't purchased the cord to hook up my computer to the TV like I keep threatening to, so I can watch whatever I want via download and hulu.
All this is a preamble to a new, hopefully short-lived series here at powerama called Tales from On Demand. Where I occasionally review a movie or show or whatever found on Cox On Demand.

Case File #1: Surrogates.
(Spoilers)
Is Bruce Willis done? I mean that in the "stick a fork in 'em" kind of way, not the "Can I get that plate out of your way, sir?" kind of way. I don't know. He's always been a little hit and miss, and I still love him, but he seems to be making really poor decisions lately(The notable exception being the Stylo video for the Gorillaz).
Or maybe I just notice when he's bad more than I notice when he's good, because he's supposed to be good, that's what they pay him for.
I can see why the movie was green-lit. A comic book movie starring Bruce Willis? With robots? I'm in. Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate ("Avatar" was taken. Twice.) robots the film follows Tom Greer(Willis), a cop investigating the death of the son of the inventor of the surrogates, who had been ousted by the company he founded to make these things. In this world, everybody stays home and their robot counter-parts live their lives for them. The benefit being that everybody is safe, free from bodily harm or disease. There hasn't been homicide or an accidental death in years. But someone has figured out a way to kill the user by destroying the robot, something that should be impossible. It takes the weird fascination we have with the Sims and Farmville out of virtual and into reality. But here is where the movie makes a few false assumptions. The most important being that people like me, and a good chunk of the world can't fucking stand the sims, and see it as a complete waste of time. They do address this, by way of a fringe element of society living without surrogates, relegated to reservations where they can sit and think about why they haven't kept up with technology. It would be like sending everybody who still uses Internet Explorer 6 to live in Canada. Naturally, these folks are the main suspects in the murders because they are all uppity. So the plot becomes very predictable here. After Greer's surrogate is destroyed, he has to venture out into the real world himself, uncovering a conspiracy to take down the surrogates. Guess who's behind the conspiracy? Yep. The guy who invented them, and who now thinks they are bad and is, ironically, leading the anti-surrogate movement by use of a surrogate. His idea is to destroy them all, along with their stupid users, and wipe the slate clean. Not if Bruce Willis has anything to say about it. He just wants to destroy the robots themselves. Which is what happens. Completely predictably. Everybody then ventures out in their house pants and woobies and see the sun again.
The movie is shot well, and acted okay, but is just kinda dumb. I like how the surrogates look a bit 80's glam in a little nod to William Gibson, but other than that, not much going on here.

Next time: Day of the Dead.

-JP



*prescription, silly.