Waterworld 2?

There are very few things scarier in this world than watching Kevin Costner "act", especially in any movie where he's featured drinking his own filtered urine. I'm referring, of course, to Bull Durham, but I could easily have been talking about Waterworld, the 1995 flop that attempted to merge Mad Max with Ski Doos and instead ended up with a cross between Solarbabies and your family trip to Sea World. Remember Solarbabies? I believe that the tagline was "Rollerball meets Dune (without the annoying Styx soundtrack)." C'mon, I know you guys remember that movie.... The heros are a misfit gang of rollerskating enthusiasts who bust out of some institution in the apocolyptic distant future where it never rains and then go rolling through the conveniently paved desert trying to find water while that creepy dude who played Michael J. Fox's uncle in the The Secret of My Success chases them mercilessly but ends up eating it at the end (of course) and Jamie Gertz stars as the obligatory love interest who if you pay close attention never should have landed the role because she can't rollerskate to save her life and a pre-Lost Boys Jason Patric serves as the milquetoast hero who saves the day with the help of supposedly deaf-as-a post Lukas Haas who somehow regains his hearing thanks to a weird lit up snowglobe that finally makes it rain again? Yeah, good flick.

As I was saying, though, there are few things scarier than Waterworld, unless of course you happen to be living it. Scientists have discovered that an enormous ice shelf broke off an island in the Canadian Arctic last year, which should be enough to cause even the most die-hard SUV enthusiast to think twice before using her 2-ton Mall Assault Vehicle to pick up the newspaper at the end of the driveway. Al Gore may be the living cure for insomnia, but it turns out that he was spot on when he said that the ice caps would be melting at an accelerated rate (if you haven't already, please see An Inconvenient Truth). Experts postulate that if all of the ice caps at the Antarctic melt completely (admittedly unlikely to happen before this summer, but possible), sea levels could rise as much as 80 meters, which in American units of measurement is roughly the equivalent of 52.5 Danny DeVitos lying end to end.

I don't know about you guys, but when the stores open tomorrow I'm planning to invest in a couple of pairs of flippers, a case of 120 SPF sunscreen, and some oceanfront property high up in the Alps.