When These Snakes Get Jiggy... People DIE

“You can't let the animals die... just the women.”

-Billy, Seven Psychopaths

I considered calling this a For The Few post since there are going to be spoilers for Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. Of course then I realized that anyone that would care about spoilers has probably already watched the movie. In fact, I think I need to start this post by justifying why exactly I was watching Anacondas in the first place.

It was a typical afternoon at my apartment. I was done with work for the day, and had about an hour or two until jazzercise. This is a very hard time of day for me. I don’t want to get involved in anything too exciting, because it makes it harder for me to stop what I’m doing and go to jazzercise. I don’t want to eat anything, because I’ve finally learned that it’s a bad idea to snack on things like icecream, cookie dough, and frozen pepperoni right before working out. So my solution during this time frame is to read a bit while watching tv. That way I’m not totally invested in either activity. I was browsing the listings trying to find something I’d watched before, but nothing really jumped out. That is, until I saw Anacondas was about to start.

Ta da! Perfect solution. I’ve watched Anaconda before and figured Anacondas would be similarly cheesy and not too distracting. And indeed, at first I was barely paying attention. Scientists, sexual tension, giant snakes, blah blah blah. And then there was Kong. Kong is the pet monkey that lives on the boat, and he is adorable! Near the beginning of the movie it looks like he gets eaten. I was horribly offended. You can’t kill off the animals! But luckily shortly thereafter it’s revealed that he’s still alive. Well now I was intrigued, I had to make sure Kong really survived to the end. Unfortunately it was now time to jazzercise, so I ended up recording the movie when it played overnight to watch some other day.

Look how cute he is! (the monkey)

The good news is that Kong lives. I was concerned. The filmmakers clearly didn’t understand my obsessive need to make sure he’s alive, so there would be shots of the characters walking around the jungle or going over waterfalls and they’d show all the people so you knew who was still alive, but sometimes neglected to show Kong.

You may have noticed the tie to the starting quote, which by the way is from the movie Seven Psychopaths (which is awesome if you have my type of dark, twisted humor). I giggled when they said that in the movie, but it’s so true. Kill off the male and female characters in horrible ways and people may be shocked, but whatevs. Kill a puppy or kitten, and I will start sobbing hysterically. I don’t want to even talk about movies like I Am Legend.

Of course this is also true for children. And I’ve decided the similarity here is helplessness. A baby can’t save itself. A toddler can’t always waddle to safety. Depending on the circumstances, an animal can’t always save itself either. The kids and animals of the world need someone to help them.

What I find interesting about horror movies is the way female characters are treated. And some of that is tied to the idea of helplessness. Just recently I was reading a novel about survivors of the Titantic disaster, and it was talking about how women were protesting the fact that far more men died because they gave their places in the lifeboats to women. Chivalry is all well and good, but as I’ve actually discussed before I don’t want somebody to die to save me. 

I also don’t think that just because somebody is a female we should assume she’s helpless. I mean yes, if there’s a spider attacking me I’m going to scream and run away and not be particularly useful. But giant snakes? Totally cool with that. Or zombies? Well assuming they’re slow and I have a gun or a machete or something useful I can deal with that too.

You can get into a whole debate over how horror movies treat female characters. There is the fact that they are prone to killing them off (at least the slutty ones). Also, that they tend to just run around screaming instead of doing anything productive.

But luckily this is not true of every horror movie! Anacondas has some nice diversity in helplessness. Some of the characters that start out shrill and useless (Gail, I’m looking at you) end up a bit more BAMF by the end.

Which is why I discovered that when I actually sat down and watched Anacondas all the way through, I quite enjoyed it! Is it a good movie? Well, no. But it was fun for me to watch. Since I’m not overly afraid of snakes I could watch it without getting scared (unlike Eight Legged Freaks which was also playing this week, ick). If I happened upon it in a $5 movie bin I’d totally buy it. So while I felt I had to start this post by justifying why I watched Anacondas, I’m finishing it with some of the awesomeness of the movie!

• The whole premise is that there are some flowers in Borneo that can make you live a really, really, really long time. Right.
• Female cattiness is at its best in Gail. I’m still not entirely sure why she survives the movie.
• “I had this friend, who had this friend who shot documentaries, and he and his whole crew went down to the Amazon, and they were all eaten by snakes, and that’s a true story.”
• I actually really like Sam. She’s pretty spunky, and she has a great Neville Longbottom moment. Even when she starts getting a little hysterical by the end – it’s cool. It’s been a bad few days, everyone’s got a breaking point.
• Oh and let’s not forget to talk about our main Alpha male character, Bill. Could they make him any more macho? He wrestles a crocodile/alligator at one point for Pete’s sake! And the voice? This came out before Batman Begins otherwise I’d suspect him of trying to copy Christian Bale. Nonetheless, I enjoy him. He makes me giggle.
• The dialogue and delivery is hysterical. After Bill assures them they’re not going to run into any other anacondas, and then they do, he takes a deep dramatic breath and says “unless…. it’s mating season.” The true fear of people all over the world, anaconda mating season! In fact I’ve just created the new movie tagline – “when these snakes get jiggy with it, people DIE.”

A Reader's Rant

There are many things in life that irritate me – airport delays, people that tell me what to do, people that tell me what not to do, people that wear peach lotion – just to name a few. If you’re noticing the pattern (typically it involves people and their actions), yeah I’ve noticed that too. I have very low tolerance for stupid mistakes that could easily be corrected. This is why I go absolutely BONKERS over the fact that almost all written articles these days contain typos.

Seriously, it’s getting to be ridiculous. Especially considering that technology will now even catch some of our errors, and the rest could be caught with a quick edit.

I'm allowed to laugh, I'm an English Major

For the most part it’s not even grammatical errors, or if it is, it’s one that looks like it was just overlooked, not that the author lacks a basic understanding of grammar. Despite assumptions from friends, I’m really not that much of a grammar nazi. Some grammar and writing conventions are outdated or restrict the sentence flow. Especially the rule about ending with a preposition.

I had a teacher in high school that actually started trying to follow this rule, and would reword his sentences to make sure they didn’t end with a preposition. We thought it was funny, because half the time the sentence ends up weird.

Personally, I prefer writing to flow the same way a person talks. I still think there are different levels of writing, just like there are different levels of talking. I don’t use the exact same phrases with friends as I do with clients. But I don’t completely change my style of talking either.

If it sounds like I’m being hypocritical, complaining about writing errors and then excusing ungrammatical writing, I understand. Actually I have a few areas where I totally admit my hypocrisy, but this is not one of them. You see, what annoys me with writing errors are the stupid mistakes that could have been fixed if somebody had just checked for them. It’s not even the writing I’m mad at, it’s the laziness of not having someone proofread.

I’m talking about obvious errors here. I’m not even too hung up on things like “to” instead of “too.” Those sort of things are actually easy to overlook if you’re rushing (although why someone is rushing through instead of taking the time to properly look over their work is a good question).

When you write, you get in a certain mind frame. It’s quite simple to misread your writing so that you don’t catch errors. In fanfiction, most writers have what they call a “beta.” It’s basically an editor. Somebody to read through your work and check for those types of errors before you post.

Now sometimes a writer will post a new story, or a new chapter, without their beta checking through it. Some writers never use a beta (which actually includes me, I’ve never had a beta for my fanfiction). Typically they will include an acknowledgement or apology for any errors that do come up.

But that’s fanfiction, it’s not published, it’s just people screwing around for fun.

I’m more concerned with accredited media. I check Yahoo and MSN articles fairly often. It is becoming ridiculous how often I find simple errors in the articles. Seriously isn’t somebody getting paid for this writing? How can they push out news stories without doing a simple check of the article??

Again, I’m not even talking about little things like whether or not the Oxford comma is being used (although while we’re on the subject – if you do not support usage of the Oxford comma we should no longer be friends. Just saying). This is an example from earlier this week on yahoo. 

Somehow a random stream of words ended up in the middle of an article. Twice. Was this supposed to be a link? HOW DID THEY MISS THIS!?

Granted, with an online article I suppose they figure they can always edit it later. You have no idea how furious I get when this happens in printed materials.

Last month I borrowed a book from my friend Kevin called Armor. It was pretty fabulous. I think of it as a nice mix of Starship Troopers, the book, and Starship Troopers, the movie. But the typos. OMG. Every time I talked to Kevin about it (he actually hasn’t read it yet) that’s all I could talk about. There was a bajillion of them! All over the place! Like huge, glaringly obvious errors. More than once it actually duplicated an entire section of text further down the page, in the middle of a different paragraph. You can just guess how disconcerting that made the reading experience.

I’m currently in the middle of an excellent zombie book. It may be my new favorite zombie book ever (although actually I don’t have a current favorite zombie book, as I get halfway through reading them and then freak the heck out of myself and have to stop). It’s brilliant, as it explores the world 20 years after the zombie outbreak, and how it’s changed the way the news is reported and accessed. It’s called Feed by the way if you want to check it out. But even in this book I have caught more than once random question marks appearing in the middle of a sentence.

So if my sentence is supposed to be “people are sucking hardcore and not catching these stupid mistakes” it instead becomes “people are sucking hardcore and not? Catching these stupid mistakes.” These are not questions, just sentences, and the question mark doesn’t even appear in a logical place.

Now with fanfiction, an author can choose whether or not to use a beta. With published material, I always assumed that before investing good money in publishing a story, someone at some point would invest in a proofreader. Am I wrong? Are we sacrificing edits in order to deliver results faster?

I give you free reign to laugh at me now when my posts have little typos. It’s happened before, and I try to fix them whenever I can. I do check through my own writing at least once before putting it up, but I can’t catch everything. It would behoove me to have someone else check through as well, but this is just a blog for me to play around. I promise if at any point in life I’m going to have something published for real, it will be read over so many times that at least the informal proofreaders (me, plus friends and family I guilt trip) will have sections memorized.

After all, my momma raised me that if you’re going to do something, you don’t do it quick, you do it right.