#5 - Gerald's Game (2017)

Did you guys know Stephen King's "Christine" was the first horror novel I ever read?  Did I ever tell you that?  I saw my sister reading "The Stand" when I was 7 years old, and being a general lover of books at the time, I asked her if I could read it.  She said she wasn't done with it yet, but handed me "Christine," and suggested I start with that one.  "It's scary." she warned me.  I nodded, dismissively.  Even at 7 years old, I knew the words in the book couldn't hurt me.  I devoured Christine, and The Stand, as soon as my sister had finished it.  I was hooked on horror from that day onward (though to be fair, I may have been hooked on monsters before even that).  Ever since then, I've had a soft spot for Stephen King's works.

Gerald's Game (2017) isn't one of my favorite Stephen King works.  I never read the book, if it was a book, or even the short story.  Gerald and his wife haven't been getting along terribly well lately, and for some reason, they settle on a quiet weekend full of sex games at a remote summer home to "spice things up."  Gerald thinks a nice set of handcuffs will do the trick, and his wife seems to go along with it, at first.  Then she gets cold feet, and they get into a fight, and well, things just go downhill from there.

Gerald is played by Bruce Greenwood, his wife is Carla Gugino.  There's a lot of dialogue in this movie, and a movie full of dialogue won't make it without some decent actors, so I guess Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood did an okay job, but maybe there was too much dialogue.  More action probably would have been better.  So, how to classify this movie?  I'm not even sure I could call it a horror movie.  I don't really recall any parts that were even that scary.  Not much happens during this movie.  I would have gotten bored and turned it off at a couple points, but the dog had me curious.  Not that anything actually happened with the dog, but I like dogs.  I kept hoping that the wife's attempts at befriending the dog would pan out at some point, but things didn't seem to work out that way.  This certainly wasn't a monster movie, or anything close to my usual kind of horror movie.  Meh.  I wouldn't watch it again, but it's on Netflix if you want to check it out.  Hey, I can't like all of the movies I watch, can I?  This is one of the crappier ones.

Okay, so I'm watching The Orville, and they just went through a "Dark Matter storm."  Is it just me or are we taking this dark matter thing a little too far?  I know, the Dark Matter/Energy theory is the darling of the physics geeks nowadays, but let's recap, shall we?  Tens of thousands of years ago, when primitive man looked up at the storm clouds and blamed the thunder on an angry, invisible sky god, I'm pretty sure we were just making things up.  As far as I know, we've never had any proof of any gods that we have ever worshipped, and we've worshipped a whopping shit-ton of them.  I mean, I don't want to upset any religious fanatics out there, but gods really don't have any place in our pursuit of knowledge.  I certainly don't understand why the gods would grant us the curiosity to seek out knowledge, and then suggest that we shouldn't, as in the "Apple in the garden of eden" story.  Just seems like a stupid contradiction that religion doesn't adequately explain, and makes me even more curious to seek out additional knowledge.

So, nowadays, physics geeks looked at the math, and went "There's not enough matter and energy in the universe, according to our best guess.  It must be something invisible that we can't see, can't detect by any means, and that is having some influence on our universe."  Gee, does that sound familiar?  Hey, I'm no expert, but do you think, maybe, we got the math wrong?  It is a best guess, after all.  There's no way we know enough to be sure of most of the values we attribute to the huge complicated mathematical equations we use to figure this shit out.  Back in college physics, the professor would give us a single equation to work out for homework.  Each of us would do the equation, and the next day in class, every single one of us would have a different result.  And according to the professor, we were all correct, no matter how much our answers differed from each other.  How is that even possible?

Let's just take the speed of light, which is supposed to be the most reliable constant that we can base all our physics on.  According to all the theories, light had to move faster than the actual speed of light in order to illuminate the universe as we know it, and at the same, time, we've discovered through scientific experimentation that we can actually slow or even "freeze" light in a medium of frozen gas.  So if the speed of light isn't a constant, then what can we possibly base all our math on?  Look, maybe I'm wrong on this, maybe there are chunks of dark matter flying all over the place, and maybe I am sitting on one right now.  I know in this day and age, committing suicide is often preferable to admitting you made a mistake, but let's think about this.  If there is one single thing we can absolutely, positively be sure of, it's that humans make mistakes.  All the time.  Without fail.

Didn't we estimate the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years old?  And didn't we just discover a star that was 14.6 billion years old?  I think we did.  So, is the star older than the universe, or did we get the age of the star wrong?  Come on people.  We don't know enough about much of anything to get it all correct.  Hey, maybe we got the math wrong, maybe we didn't, but isn't it time we stopped blaming invisble things we couldn't see on the things that happen in our lives, and just went looking to see wtf was going on?  Aren't we evolved enough to just set aside the need to postulate answers that sound good to our fellow man, and just investigate the truth?  Wouldn't that make more sense?  Meh, what do I know, right?  I sit around and watch crappy horror movies all day.  Please ignore me, and return to your regularly scheduled sacrifice to the flying spaghetti monster.

That's all for tonight.  Catch you guys tomorrow with another review.