Tag jaden smith horrible actor

On Friday night I watched Another Earth, my latest Netflix dvd. ALERT, this will be a spoiler but it may save you from some of the frustration I experienced.  I recalled the previews for this movie, it seemed interesting, a second version of Earth all of a sudden shows up in the sky. Neat.

So the movie starts and the plot is about a young girl and a tragedy that occurs in her life.  Ok that’s nice, why is there a second Earth?  The movie continues,  the girl plot continues, which is fine, but still I am waiting for why there is a second Earth?

They show a live broadcast where a scientist establishes communication with the other Earth.  Not only does she communicate, she communicates with HERSELF, the version that lives on the second Earth! Cool, finally we are going to get into why the fck there is a second Earth!

Here come the movie credits, I still have no idea why there was a second Earth.  It’s like that was just a secondary part of the movie.  Are you kidding me?  Sure the story and plot wasn’t bad but it was 180 degrees from what I went into the movie looking for, which pisses me off.  No it isn’t a bad movie but don’t go into it thinking you are going to find out much about Earth 2.  I can only give it a B because of the bait and switch.

On Saturday I picked up the girls since I had another day of mostly outdoor labor planned.  The fence received the most attention.  First I went around the entire perimeter and hammered in new staples in a few spots where they popped out and tapped in the others to make sure they were snugged up.  Then I put a fresh spool of line on the weed whacker and knocked down the crap around the entire fence line, inside and out.  I also mowed the area OUTSIDE the fence line just for fun, something that gets done very infrequently.

On Saturday night I saw another movie with Earth in the title,  After Earth, the latest father/son effort from Will and Jaden Smith.  The premise seemed mildly interesting despite Jaden Smith being involved.  I still was stinging from watching Jaden in the New Karate Kid a couple years back.  I thought his acting at the time was basically awful.  I thought since he was older now that he surely couldn’t be quite so bad.  I was wrong.

Jaden is fine running around and doing physical things on screen.  However any time he has to actually speak, it is painful.  It is some of the worst acting I have ever seen.  Maybe I am being too tough on the kid but I have seen plenty of movies featuring child actors that are great.  I don’t think Jaden should get a pass because his dad is Will Smith. Jaden sucks as an actor IMO.

Adding to Jaden’s poor acting was a plot that was predictable and ridiculous at times. (spoiler ahead) In a nutshell, Jaden spends the entire movie being a pussy, and then for 3 minutes becomes Superman and then returns to pussytude.  It is just stupid.

It all made sense when the credits started to roll, the movie was directed by M Night Shyamalan. M had a couple big hits early in his directing career but has become more famous for directing one stinker after another for the past half decade or more.  They used to use his name as a promo for the movie, now they don’t bother to even mention it.  Well it was nice to see M Night hasn’t lost his touch.  I’d give the movie a B or maybe even a B-, fine for Netflix, dumb to pay for otherwise.

On Sunday I was up super early, 3:45 am, to head out to the Naples Fitness Challenge, a long running triathlon that I did once in 2011.  I wasn’t participating this year but I was getting there early to help Bill, our GCR equipment guy set up stuff.  Even though this isn’t an official GCR event it utilizes a ton of our stuff.

Setup before the race went fine, we had a lot of hands on deck helping out.  Once the race started I went into spectator mode for awhile, cheering on the participants and snapping some pictures. See my photo album here.

After the race I again jumped in to the clean up process which seemed more grueling due to the hot sun beating down on us along with the escalating humidity levels.

During clean up I managed to gash my big toe pretty well when a piece of fencing fell over.  I had a pool of blood in my flip flop.  Of course if I was smart and wore sneakers instead of flip flops I would have avoided injury.  Thankfully the truck had a med kit.  I slapped a band aid on the bloody/sandy wound to stop the bleeding.

Even though I didn’t actually do the race, I felt sleepy like I did.  Sunday afternoon I had a two hour plus nap instead of doing the ancillary exercise I was thinking about earlier.