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The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) (part 4 of 11)
We cut to an overhead shot and suddenly all the other scientists are 50 feet behind Helen. Yeah, let’s let her make friends with the hippogriff! She’s walking toward the figure, and everyone else is screaming at her and at the figure to stop advancing. Apparently they’re all too chickenshit to run up and yank her out of harm’s way (though you can hear people yelling at other people to pull her out, while still other people scream, “Do we engage??”). The upshot is everyone just watches helplessly as she approaches the sphere.
A hand, barely visible in the streaming white light, reaches out toward her, and she starts to reach toward it. Suddenly, someone spits cranberry sauce on her visor. Wait, no, some idiot shot the alien. We never find out who. You’d expect a shot of some corporal feverishly psyching himself up to fire and then shooting prematurely, but nope.
“UPS, I have this arm upgrade for Lindsay Lohan?”
Now the soldiers are yelling at each other to cease fire, so evidently the shot fired was against orders. But then, there’s nobody there giving orders, and a minute ago they were frantically asking each other whether they should fire, so who knows?
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Mark "Scooter" Wilson
Mark is a history guy, a graphics guy, a guy for whom wryly cynical assessments of popular culture are the scallion cream cheese on the toasted everything bagel of life. He spends his time teaching modern history at Brooklyn College, pondering the ancient Romans at the CUNY Graduate Center, and conjuring maps and illustrations for ungrateful bankers at various Manhattan monoliths. Readers are welcome to guess at reasons why he's nicknamed Scooter, with the proviso that all such submissions are guaranteed to be rather more interesting than the truth. Mark lives in the Midwood section of Brooklyn with a happy-go-lucky, flop-eared dog named Chiyo who is probably, at this very moment, waiting patiently for her walkies.
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