Twitch-O-Meter: If only my design could save the world

Armageddon
Open sea oil drilling is just about the most horrible job I can think of. You are put on a rig out in the middle of nowhere and are pretty much stuck there along with other burly looking men covered in muck and grime. Sounds exciting doesn’t it?
But in Michael Bay’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s world, oil drillers are cool as shit, handsome as hell and invent drills so bad ass and complex that Nasa can’t even do it themselves. So in a stroke of genius, Nasa and the government asks the booze drinking, womanizing and all around crazy (but cool) gang to go up in space for them to drill in to a meteor so they can plant an atomic bomb in to it and blow it up. But why, do you ask, didn’t Nasa send up professional astronauts to do the job instead of oil drillers? Because Bruce Willis fucking said so and nobody touches his drill but him. Of course.

Roadhouse
I’ve always wondered if the bouncer profession really did have a James Dalton to call their own. A bouncer so legendary that brawls stop dead in their tracks if he enters the room. A bouncer so cool that he can utter the lines “It’s my way or the highway” and people would actually look at him with respect and think to themselves “Damn, I wished I had thought of that”. But I seriously doubt that. The bouncers I usually encounter are the ones that either tell you to take of that baseball cap or tell you that the bar has too many guys in there and they have to let in some ladies first before you and your friends can enter. I don’t think any one of them has practiced martial arts in a hay loft, covered in oil or for that matter ripped somebody’s throat out in anger. But maybe these country bars are more extreme than us simple city folks can handle.

Twister
And speaking of extreme. What could be more extreme than being a weather man? And I don’t mean the weather man on TV, no I mean the people who actually gather the information that the people on the TV pass on to us the viewers. Bill Paxton is one such man. A man with the mission to study tornados with his new high tech gear. But to make things worse he’s competing with other evil looking weathermen dressed in black and riding expensive black cars who’s sneer and laugh at Paxton and his silly ideas. But Paxton got heart and ideals, he’s not in it for the money like the corporate weather men are. He’s also highly respected in the weathermen profession, a bit of a rouge maybe, who’s actually called “EXTREME!” by a surfer dude looking Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The best scene in the film though is the dinner scene where Helen Hunt unwittingly asks the radical meteorologists about “the tornado level that must not be mentioned” F5 and everyone falls silent like she’s just asked about the most horrible thing to happen in the history of the world…ever.  I’m sure most weathermen look at that film and wished they could have that life.

Pushing Tin
Like my job the job of an air traffic controller basically involves looking at a screen all day and tell planes where they should be (my job however does not include that). John Cusak is Nick “The Zone” Falzone, considered “the best” at what he does, which is “Pushing Tin” what ever that means. A perfectionist who’s world is shattered when the reckless rebel and laid back Billy Bob Thornton comes riding in on his Harley with Angelina Jolie on the back. Then the intense game of “who can tell planes where to go better in radical and rebellious ways” starts and Nick’s world spirals out of control. Oh No!
I knew an air traffic controller ones. He spent most of his time either in bed sleeping or on the sofa watching TV. He certainly was never out there banging hot chicks and riding a motorcycle like a wild man, challenging the establishment with his rebel yell. But it would have been cool if he had.

Dante’s Peak
I chose this one over the similar themed “Volcano” because it features a disillusioned volcanologist, turned to the drink and to stop shaving after a volcano related accident killed his wife a few years before.
He is asked to study a dormant volcano that looms over the small town of Dante’s Peak, known as the second best place to live, because it’s been dissolving tourists in ponds of acid and that’s never good for business. He does find out that the volcano is about to spurt but is ignored by the greedy property development folks and his boss who’s apparently “sold out”, how ever you do that in the watching volcanoes business.
Now aside from looking at seismographs and walking up and down a hill I don’t think the life of a volcanologist is that exciting. But ruggedly good looking Pierce Brosnan has to drive over streams of lava, sail over a lake of acid and outrun a cloud of fire while making the moves on Linda Hamilton. That’s all in a days work.
The last time I knew about a volcanologist who had to outrun an erupting volcano was the guy who was monitoring Mount St Helen the day it exploded. He died about 3 seconds later when the shockwave tore his cabin to splinters. Wouldn’t make a great movie really.