fandomhighdorms | Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

Joker and Eleanor were not on a date. Dates were lovely, but dates were private affairs, not ones where they set up in the common room and tried to lure other people into joining the activity. (Which would be a little odd, since most date-related activities involved kissing, anyway.)

This was, rather, a Bad Movie Night. Joker had discovered Eleanor's dearth of knowledge about horrible movies, and was seeking rectify matters. There was popcorn, there were fizzy drinks, and there was a miniseries that Joker had promised was going to be nothing short of abominable on all possible fronts: ludicrous science, half-hearted acting, wooden characterization, paper-thin plot. Super-earthquakes were coming, from super-secret faults! And only nuclear bombs could save the day!!!

"Okay," Eleanor said, frowning at the TV as she waited for the miniseries to start. "I'm still not following you. If it's so awful, why are we watching this instead of something good?"

(Joker modded with permission. But this is emphatically not a date, and this room could not be more open; if you so much as stroll by, you can be dragged in and made to experience fake science at its worse. PLEASE, COME WATCH A TERRIBLE MINISERIES WITH JOKER AND ELEANOR.)

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"So ... it's so bad that it becomes unintentionally funny?" she asked, weighing that answer. "Which somehow is more funny than something that's funny on purpose."

She supposed it was possible. This was an experiment. If the movie proved to be intolerable, she'd convince him to try something else.

"I don't see how bad science could be funny," she added. "You said the show pretends there are super-deep fault lines somewhere in California. There aren't, but there are worse premises from which to start."

No one had told her about the nuclear bombs, no.

"Okay, just watch the opening sequence, and you'll see what I mean. This is baaaaaad. It's funny because it tries to present itself as a real actual movie, instead of the steaming pile of crap that it is."

Said sequence involved someone riding a bike during an "earthquake" while a few rigged boards and things fell nearby in an attempt to make it look like buildings were collapsing, followed by a model of the Seattle Space Needle falling over onto a model city.

"Just for the record, if a really big tower is ever falling onto you, you turn and run to the side, mmkay? And not directly away from it."

Eleanor was staring. She had a few pieces of popcorn suspended in mid-air, because she'd forgotten to place them in her mouth.

"That was utterly preposterous," she said. "A top-heavy monument tipping over to the side like a bowling pin, without rupturing any of the smaller parts and collapsing in on itself and -- never mind that, how did the idiot stay on his bicycle if the ground was shaking so badly that entire buildings were toppling? In what appeared to be very, very slow motion!?"

Edited 2014-04-21 02:34 (UTC)

"Oh, look who's beginning to understand!" Joker exclaimed with a grin. He tossed a kernel of popcorn in the air and caught it in his mouth. "You are now officially smarter than everyone involved in the production of this movie. Put together. I mean, you obviously were before, but now it's official."

"Now, we could knock the special effects -- because that was a really badly done miniature -- but not everyone can have state-of-the-art CGI. Instead, let's focus on the fact that no building, ever, would topple over like that -- especially not one as soundly put together as the Space Needle."

"I'm not familiar with it," she admitted -- Rapture wasn't very good with current events -- "but if it's that solidly built, I have to wonder that it toppled while it seemed every smaller building we were shown was perfectly fine. And biking away in the shadow of the monument ..."

She cut her eyes over to look at Joker. "Were they doing it on purpose?" she asked. "Is it some kind of joke, that you're supposed to laugh and nod along and know how bad it is?"

"No, Troma films are the advanced class," Joker told her. "Today we're dealing with the basic bad movie: someone has a terrible idea for something they think will look good on the screen, someone else ruins it, there's not enough money in the budget to do it right, and no one ever bothers to fact-check it."

He gave her a grin. "The problem you've spotted is a confluence of two major things: One, the scenes filmed on-location obviously couldn't have real buildings falling down. And two, it looks more impressive and exciting for the Space Needle to destroy buildings when it lands than for it to fall onto rubble."

"The movie does begin to smack of low-effort," Eleanor agreed. "These actors look bored. I can't say I blame them. So they're totally throwing logic out the window in favor of whatever is going to --"

She stopped abruptly, because what the stupid scientist lady had just said was far too stupid to be allowed to pass unchallenged.

"Did she just say the earthquake didn't have an epicenter?"

"Hmmm, did she?" Joker asked smugly. "No, no, that can't be right. Saying an earthquake doesn't have an epicenter would be like saying a person doesn't have mass. So she must have said something that makes actual sense, like -- YES. She did actually say that. You see? You see why this is so amazing?"

"That is ... I can't ..." Eleanor was looking over at Joker like maybe, maybe, there was something she wasn't understanding. "The epicenter is the middle. The center. The place it happened. If it happened, it happened somewhere. Where did it happen? It happened there. If it doesn't have an epicenter then it ... didn't ... happen anywhere, and if it didn't happen anywhere, then it didn't happen."

She was aware that she was babbling. But that was breathtakingly stupid. She had to be misunderstanding something here, right?

... Please?

Oh she was too precious! Joker nodded. "Congratulations, you have just completely broken an important plot point via the cunning subterfuge of knowing the definition of a word. Remember what I just said a few moments ago, vis-à-vis you, the movie makers, and 'smarter than'?"

Eleanor was rubbing her forehead. "How do you ... how do you write a movie about earthquakes and not know any of the words?" she asked. "It isn't as though the movie's about a pastry chef and they mention earthquakes incidentally. They're hoping the plot makes sense, and even the deep fault lines aren't ridiculous, on the very face of them, but this ..."

Okay, maybe her brain would stop trying to eat itself soon. Please?

"I'm overthinking this," she realized, with a sudden, blinding epiphany. "They picked the word because it sounded fancy. It's not just that they didn't know the definition. They ... didn't care."

It was somehow a relief. The world ... was making sense again.

Joker nodded. "Exactly. They put a lot of work into making a movie that they intended to be taken seriously, and never bothered fact-checking it. The idiocy is staggering."

Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

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