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Reviews
Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Feng Shui/Bottled Water (2003)
Bullsh!t's Bullsh!t - half truth and nonsense in this episode
I love P&T: Bullsh^t. I even bought it on DVD. A lot of this stuff is stuff people really need to hear. But... unfortunately, when you're WRONG about something, you fail catastrophically.
In this case, the first half of the episode is alright. They debunk the bullsh_t known as Feng Shui, and the bullsh@t artists that go around charging thousands of dollars to rearrange your furniture. Yeah, try doing that with my apartment! You'd spend most of your energy stepping through the junk... maybe I should hire the one that charges by the square foot. I'd end up back only a few bucks ;) Anyway, the bullsh!t comes in on the bottled water.
Yes, it is pathetic that companies get away with charging SOFT DRINK prices for filtered water! But that's where the bullsh#t ends: it's still filtered water! You're pretty much paying for packaging and marketing, for what really only costs a few cents a gallon - even purified. The major difference between bottled water and tap water is that bottled water is HEAVILY PURIFIED off the tap (municipal) supply, then after being purified, it's bottled and shipped instead of pumped through pipes collecting all manner of garbage.
Do you really want to drink the same water that washes your dishes, waters your lawn, cleans your car, and pulls your sh!t out of your toilet bowl? I sure as heck can never bring myself to drink tap water - and I'm legally homeless. I own a water cooler and fill my bottles at the grocery store for 25 cents a gallon (on food stamps anyway). The quality is _FAR_ better than the junk that comes out of the tap. Even when I go to someone's house and they offer me a glass of water, I can immediately tell if it's tap or bottled water. THERE IS a huge difference and it's not just marketing.
The bull$hit in bottled water is not that it exists - it fills a huge need. The bull$hit is in companies marketing it by the 20-oz bottle.
I stopped watching this episode the second they shouted "BS!" at the label saying it comes from a municipal water supply. All filtered water does. They just failed to mention that it's heavily filtered... ugh. I've lost a bit of respect for P&T after seeing this episode.
Maybe I need to go watch the Circumcision episode again to renew my faith in P&T. :P
Hyper Sonic (2002)
It's a black hole; it just sucked that bad.
(2008 edit: Try to keep in mind, while reading, that I was 16 when I wrote this.)
I don't even know where to start. They slapped an F-16 Fighting Falcon patch on the guy's jacket, and yet an F-16 was never even shown in the flick. Of course, all the fake jets they used tried to *look* like F-16s - if they didn't have two engines. The oxygen masks they used looked like gas masks. Not only is the air THIN up there... it's TOXIC too! Wow, how futuristic. It's also impossible to fly they way they were. Ugh... wow, this movie is a black hole, a straw, a pump, a jet INTAKE, or (insert name of something that sucks worse here).
That's not even talking about the horrid job they did with the audio and the "Infomercial" audience who, during one scene, mysteriously broke into astounding applause for no apparent reason. The slo-mo was there, the music was there... but why? Where's the situation?
Speaking of slo-mo... uh... mind telling me WHY there was so much slo-mo? It's like "Woow, dude, this guy's, like... flying...".
They also left the script hanging like a bunch of loose threads. During the second air refueling scene in the storm, they completely left out how the REST of the refuelings went. One went bad, they made a big deal over that, and never told us how the rest went. Last time I checked, they were running out of fuel with no other options, and...uh... so how did the rest get fuel? *sigh*
I just can't stop thinking about why they bought that F-16 patch off eBay and yet never even used an F-16. Heck, they never even MENTIONED F-16s to give them credit in this movie. Also, there was another real-life fighter (what, an F-15 or F-18?) on the front cover... yet... not in the movie. All fake, computer-generated jets. I bet the writers went to, like, a Russian air force base, saw the "For Rent!" signs in the windows of the fighters, and said "Wow, a script idea!" :-)
Then... oh jeez... that little part with the knocked-out pilot. Somehow or another, there's a Matrix-like vitals monitor (which use PUMPS as visuals for breathing...) - as if this were VR or something, and it says "Oh Man! This Dude's Dying!". They "dock" this jet inside the refueling plane, pull out the pilot, and do all this stuff to him, including sticking him, like a sword, with a gigantic syringe or something ("HEE-YA!"). That whole scene lost me. Oh well, onward.
The ending? 4 pilots are already dead. Two are left to battle it out, and one of them goes down (not the hero of the movie, noooo). The hero of the movie thinks "oh no i couldn't possibly win this because my only competition's engine blew up! NOOO! I have GOT to eject a perfectly good plane, forfeit 25 MILLION bucks, and save one of the 5 pilots who went down! WOO!".... What were these writers thinking?! *sigh*
This movie is my new official "Bad" benchmark.
Well, gotta give the writers and director kudos for effort... *heh*