Yammer, yammer, yammer

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There are nights when my wife turns the bedroom TV to the Lifetime channel to watch her "weepers" and from time to time the movies are so bad that I can't overcome the boredom factor and sleep through them.

Trapped: Buried Alive has proven to be one of those movies.

I'm a male chauvinist. To be male and not admit that I favor my gender over the distaff side would be rank hypocrisy. I don't contend that we're superior to women in most ways, but I can't deny that, ceteris paribus, I'm a helluva lot more comfortable with the ways in which men think and speak and act. It may be something of a cliche, but it seems plank-plain and straightforward to admit that the behavior of women is to me (as to most men) opaque as to motivation, obtuse as to manner, and infuriating as to its manifestation.

And this is glaringly obvious in the forms of entertainment created to appeal to their tastes.

I was amazed to discover that the writers of this screenplay (Tim McKay and director Doug Campbell) are not women. Learning this, I think back on some of the more objectionable moments of the film and wonder whether they were deliberately trying to "dumb down" the script in a misbegotten effort to connect emotionally with American women, particularly when they wrote in episodes where characters would pause while crawling through air ducts and beneath caved-in rubble to conduct long conversations about relationships, and especially when they picked a moment for the sensitive stepmom heroine to understandingly console her sullen and emotionally conflicted adolescent stepdaughter in a situation where the proper response would literally have been a brisk slap upside the head to replace fear and regret with the sort of rage that can "Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood" and get such an idiot child to focus on survival instead of succumbing to maudlin terminal stupidity.

A "weeper" that's so ghodawful that a married man can't sleep through it is a rarity indeed.



Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!