Is New York the natural "disaster-movie" site?

I just finished watching "I am Legend", a movie which features the total destruction of New York (and borrows heavily from 28 days later, castaway & Signs) and realized that I've seen a lot of "destroy New York" scenes in the movies and TV.

You might think that in a post-911 world, the annihilation of New York would be off-limits, but not so. The practice of destroying New York was fairly fashionable pre-911 and today it seems even more popular.

I believe that there are a few reasons for this:

1. Landmarks include times square, the empire state building and the statue of liberty, what other city can match that? (Maybe London and Paris...)
2. The city is really a symbol of man's power in the world, thus it's destruction represents man's weakness
3. Emotional resonance: you either live there, or have at least one relative/friend who does
4. The arch-rival of Los Angeles (i.e. Hollywood)... is New York.
   

Here's a list of "New York Destruction" flicks I could come up with, am I missing any?

Pre 911

• Deep Impact [Asteroid]
• The Siege [Terrorism]
  
• Independence Day [Alien Invasion]
  
• AI - Artificial Intelligence [Global Warming]
• Planet of the Apes [Smart Apes]

Post 911

• The day after tomorrow [Global Warming]
  
• An inconvenient Truth [Global Warming]
• Heroes, Season 1 [Nuclear Explosion]
  
• Heroes, Season 2 [Deadly Virus]
  
• I am Legend [Deadly Virus]
• Cloverfield [destruction method unknown] (not yet released)
• United 93 & World Trade Center [Terrorism]
• War of the Worlds [Alien Invasion] (Well... it's in New Jersey, but that's just across the river)

Honorable mentions for partial destruction:

• Godzilla, King Kong, Gangs of New York, Armageddon, Ghostbusters I & II

Movie Review : Army of Darkness

Rating: Worth my while
Reason: Army of darkness is one of those movies with a small cult following. It is the third installment of the "Evil Dead" series, and was directed and written by Sam Raimi (Same director as Spiderman and Spiderman II). I have to say, I think that Army of Darkness is a great movie. Now, it is very campy, but it does campy so well. At the start, our hero "Ash" gets his hand replaced with a chainsaw, a la Freddy Kruger claw style. Who has a chainsaw for a hand!?

I chuckle to myself just thinking about it.

Furthermore, Ash has this wicked "don't mess with me, even if you're a demon possessed she-bat" aura about him. I can't think of another movie where the hero has so much attitude. He would pretty much spit in the face of the devil himself if he had the chance (You'll understand if you see the movie). Army of darkness won an Oscar for best special effects long ago, and boy, it must have been a long time ago. But, the "oldness" of the special effects kind of adds to the alure of the movie. Technically, I suppose it is a horror movie, but is screams "don't take me seriously" so loudly that you'll certainly being doing a lot more laughing than screaming. As such, "Army of Darkness" was worth my few hours and a bag of popcorn.

Alternate Rating: Made me dumber
Reason: If you can't handle extreme intentional cheesiness, then you're not going to like this movie. It's not cheesy in the same way as say, Batman & Robin (let us never speak of that movie again), but more so in an almost Monty Python type of way. As such, there will be a lot of people who won't get this one, and that's just fine. To each their own.

Movie rating system

Rating systems for movies have long been a beef of mine. Do you use a four star system, five star system, ten point system, thumbs system, it's all over the map. And what does two stars mean anyways? The time for these ambiguous rating systems has come to an end, and so I propose a new, definitive rating system as follows.

Movies can be broken into 5 categories:

• Spectacular
• Worth my while
• Passes the time
• disappointing
• Made me dumber

There are a few rules to reviewing a movie based on this system:

1. They are not numbered, but they are ordinal.
2. A movie cannot fall between categories.
3. When presenting an opinion along with a movie rating, one must also present one alternate rating, that describes why another person may rank it differently.

To illustrate, here is a sample movie review abstract for TROY

RATING: Disappointing
REASON: Troy, plain and simple, is an avenue for the female population to drool over Brad Pitt and his 2 second naked scene. Half of the movie is spent simply holding the camera on Brad's face with his hair blowing in the wind. Brad's character "Achilles" is not well developed, which ask to fact that this movie is simply all about this pretty boy's presence. In fact, despite the fact that the movie has two love stories (one of which is Helen of Troy, a love-story that brought down a kingdom), neither of the love stories are believable or compelling. The only thing that saves this movie is that the war story and execution is actually fairly well done. This movie does not simply build up to one final battle like most movies do, but rather plays out the events of a war over the entire course of the film, working the human elements into the battles nicely.

ALTERNATE RATING: Spectacular
REASON: Girls will go googily. Visit rotten tomatoes, and you will see that the masses are divided 50/50 on this issue. Interestingly enough, fresh tomatoes were usually given by female reviewers, and rotten ones by male reviewers.