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Last Update: 11.06.06

The One

So I was at the movies the other day. The ticket that they gave me was perforated. Evidently, the guy who takes tickets was having a rough time with his job of tearing things in half, so they had to get things started for him. That got me to thinking: why does perforated paper suck so much? It never tears the way it's supposed to. Which really means that the perforated paper company is making a killing for not doing anything at all. It's their ONE job. They failed at the only thing they have to do. That's like being a janitor and not cleaning up the urine in the men's room. IT'S YOUR ONE JOB! JUST DO IT!

Well, the movie I saw was crap. However, all that talk about ONE thing reminds me of the movie The One, which I will review instead. The premise is that Jet Li is some kind of supercop who exists in multiple dimensions. This shouldn't be too surprising, because even a quick glance at him will tell you that he does indeed have height, width, AND depth. Crazy.

So anyway, Jackie Chan is a supercop that exists in multiple dimensions, even more than 3. There are a bunch of copies of him in other dimensions, and somehow he can travel to these dimensions and fight himself. And when he kills himself, he gets more powerful, thus making him a better supercop.

Eventually, some of his other dimensional selves decide that they won't just sit there and get the crap kicked out of them by some crazy Chow Yun-Fat supercop, so they start hunting down and killing other versions of themselves so they'll be more powerful when supercop man tries to kill them.

Before going any further, I'd just like to say that I don't get the supercop's logic. I was thinking about it, trying to decide: if there were a bunch of clones of me, would I kill them to get more powerful, or would I just hang out with them? I think I would find 5 clones or so, and we'd gang up on all of the rest and kill them, so we could be pretty powerful, but also have someone to hang out with who is funny and awesome, unlike the rest of you losers in the world. Then we'd probably conquer the Earth.

Speaking of cloning, though, I've been hearing all kinds of crap about stem cell research lately. The root of the conflict appears to be a race between Michael J. Fox and Steven Hawking to see who can turn into a robot first. Hawking, of course, is pursuing the path of complex scientific research (plus some astrophysics on the side for fun). Fox, on the other hand, is trying to take a shortcut: stem cells. I have no idea what they do, but clearly they will help him attain robot status more quickly, so he'll win the bet, and Steven Hawking will have to do his laundry for the rest of time. That shouldn't be hard, though, because once he becomes a robot he'll cease to sweat. You'd think that Hawking would have known that and come up with a better bet.

Apparently a lot of normal people are getting embroiled in the debate too, though. Medical biologists, for example, are saying "We may not have any idea how to stop cancer from killing old people, but at least with stem cell research, we'll be able to kill babies too!" Opposing them, of course, is Planned Parenthood: "Why kill babies needlessly for research when they're SO DELICIOUS?" And on the third corner of the bitter hate triangle is the Pro Life camp, whose goal, evidently, is to not die.

Speaking of people who don't die, the movie concludes with the final showdown between Bruce Lee and Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee wins, making him the strongest interdimensional supercop ever. If you like sissy girly movies, you can imagine that he then realizes how lonely it is without versions of himself to kill, and after a montage of searching, he finds one more copy of himself and they hug each other and go walking in the park. In actuality, though, he just goes and jump-kicks some more people. Awesome.

Anyway, I give this movie 4 out of 4 martial arts actors who are basically the same person.